Category Archives: defense policy

Wrong Question

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And it leads into a false premise. These errors are William Galston’s, writing for The Wall Street Journal last Tuesday. His subheadline lays out the false premise:

Kyiv will have to make concessions to Russia, but it will also need security guarantees.

No. Kyiv can make almost no concessions to the barbarian without rewarding him for his invasion and giving tacit encouragement (reminiscent of ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) permission to Putin that a small incursion into Ukraine would be OK) for a renewed, expanded, and better prepared invasion a year or two later. “Almost no:” perhaps—a weak maybe—an agreement might consist of a non-exclusive lease to the barbarian of the narrow confines of the port at Sebastopol. Note: that’s the port, not a naval base, and that’s the port, not the surrounding city.

The wrong question Galston posed in his lede:

Where does Europe end and Russia begin? This centuries-old question underlies the meeting between President Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and European leaders in Washington on Monday. The resolution of Russia’s war against Ukraine will settle this question, at least for now.

Again, no. The “centuries-old question” was answered centuries ago: the Ural mountain range is the demarcation (however blurry) between Europe and Asia. Russia west of that range is in Europe, and Russia east of it is in Asia. It really is that simple.

The real question is where does Russia end and the individual nations of the rest of Europe begin. The barbarian chieftain in the Kremlin insists that the boundary of his immediate interest lies between Russia on the one side and Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia on the other side. The barbarian already is making early, mostly political interference, moves against Moldova, and he’s already engaging in cyberwars against those three Baltic States.

Any “settlement” between Ukraine and Russia that involves land concessions to the barbarian only puts those other nations in nearby, if not immediate, peril: the barbarian has said many times, and unequivocally, that he intends to reconstitute the Russian empire, and that means absorbing into the Rodina those other nations (as oblasts, they’d be permitted to keep their current names), and results in the Russian border being pushed even farther west. It’s imperative for the safety of those other European nations and that of our own, that we all support Ukraine materially as well as politically, and enforce the eastern border between Ukraine and Russia along with the northern border between Ukraine and the barbarian principality of Belarus.

Beyond this, the barbarian’s behavior is putting a premium on expanding NATO to include Ukraine, or alternatively, the standing up of a new mutual defense arrangement that includes the Three Seas Initiative nations, Sweden, Finland, the UK, and the United States.

There are broader implications to this struggle. The fate of the Republic of China hangs in the balance, along with the subsequent fates of Japan, the Republic of Korea, and all of the nations rimming the South China Sea. As does our own fate.

“Security” and “Guarantee”

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US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff says that in return for an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine Russia would accept a US-led security guarantee.

Witkoff suggested the guarantees could be modeled on NATO’s principle of collective defense, which is codified in Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which says that an enemy attack against one member would be viewed as an attack against all.

But then the question becomes, what is the response to this attack against all? This is the text of that Article 5 [emphasis added]:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

Such action does not mandate use of armed force; it easily could be simply firm finger-wagging, stern speeches, and strong letters. All while the barbarian rolls on.

Keep in mind, too, that in the present invasion, the invader sits on the UN’s Security Council and so can block entirely any meaningful UN (leaving aside the contradiction internal to that phrase) response.

This is a guarantee without teeth. It seems Russian President Vladimir Putin has a better understanding of Article 5 than anyone in the West. That’s a mismatch as dangerous as the mismatch of wills between the barbarian and the West.

Blinken Misunderstands

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Ex-Secretary of State Antony Blinken wants a Palestinian state to be recognized, but his way and on his schedule, not those of France, UK, and Canada. I won’t go into those latter three’s offers, which individually and together amount to nothing more than Israel’s abject surrender.

Blinken, on the other hand, has centered his view on the idea that an Israeli occupation of Gaza

would perpetuate the misery of innocent Palestinians and be a recipe for an enduring insurgency that bleeds Israel militarily and morally.

Blinken’s position here, though, proceeds from a false premise, and given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s publicly stated position on the matter, I have a hard time believing Blinken is unaware of the falsity of his premise. It’s either that, or he thinks Netanyahu is lying.

The fact of the matter is that Netanyahu does not want to occupy Gaza. He has said—and he’s right about this—that it’s necessary for Israel to control by its physical presence all of Gaza in order to finish destroying Hamas and driving the remnants out of the strip. Following that, Israel would withdraw completely in favor of Arab governance of Gaza via a body assembled and operated by a collection of Arab states. That’s an Israeli occupation in name only, with a clearly stated and publicly measurable milestone for Israel leaving. That’s not occupation in the sense that Russia wants for Ukraine or that the People’s Republic of China wants for the Republic of China.

An extension of that offer from Netanyahu is this: he’s saying it’s time for the Arab nations of the Middle East to put up or shut up. Those nations’ leaderships must accept and honor their own responsibilities and do the things, with their own resources, necessary to govern Gaza and restore the residents to safety, prosperity, and the liberty of determining their futures themselves. With this, there would be no need for a “Palestinian state,” which is an idea that failed with the collapse of the Oslo Accords decades ago and has continued to fail ever since.

I claim that a good start to this process would be for the Arab members of the Abraham Accords to put up.

Land Swapping

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President Donald Trump (R) is upset with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the latter’s pointing out that he cannot, under the Ukrainian constitution, agree to any land swap with Russia, as a condition to a ceasefire or for any other reason.

On this matter, though, Trump is badly mistaken on two grounds. The first is that Zelenskyy must follow his nation’s most basic law (as well as all of its legislatively generated laws), and that forbids him from agreeing any land swap.

The other ground is at least as big an obstacle. Russia is not offering any land to swap for Ukrainian land. The barbarian is only offering—and only may be offering here—to swap some barbarian occupied land in return for being allowed to retain other barbarian occupied land. This is akin to the burglar offering to return some of the jewelry and other valuables he stole if, in return, he’s allowed to keep the rest of the jewelry and valuables he stole.

Trump should know better than this.

He’s anxious to force this deal, though, because he’s chary of all the killing that’s going on in the barbarian’s war, and he wants it to stop. Trump needs, however, to recognize that he’s dealing with a barbarian chieftain, not a civilized leader of a civilized polity. The killing won’t stop in the wake of this sort of sham deal.

The fastest way—if only because it’s the only way—for the killing to stop is for Ukraine to win this war outright and decisively, the only way that can happen is for Ukraine to succeed in driving the barbarian wholly and completely back out of Ukraine, and the only way that can happen—and it’s virtually guaranteed to happen if this criterion is met—is for the US, which is to say Trump, to stop slow-walking and instead to transfer arms and logistics of the kind the Ukrainian military say they need, in the amounts and at the pace they need them and without limits on targeting, to Ukraine. Additionally, Europe (with or without pressure from Trump to do so) needs to execute the same arms and logistics support.

The faster Ukraine wins this war, the faster the killing about which Trump is so worried will end.

Sophie’s Choice, Is It?

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That’s the choice with which Ukraine is faced, at least according to Jillian Kay Melchior in her Wall Street Journal editorial. She summarized her view of the matter near the end of her piece.

That’s the temptation Ukraine faces as it considers sacrificing some territories ostensibly to save others. Many Ukrainians have loved ones in occupied regions, notes Yulia Marushevska, a Defense Ministry official: “Giving it up is not giving it up to keep it quiet there. It’s giving them up for destruction. It’s giving up your friend or brother.”

But that’s not the choice Ukraine presently faces. As the Russian state-owned and run outlet, RIA Novosti, put it in a headline as recently as 30 July,

There is no other option: no one should remain alive in Ukraine[.]

(It would help if Melchior had actually read the article in the original Russian or as translated into English. The headline she so carefully singled out is the outlet’s sarcastic summarization of its distortionate view of Ukrainian and Western persistence: Ukrainians must fight to the last soul. The article, though, does tout the Russian intent on encouraging that outcome if it’s what’s necessary for the barbarian to occupy the terrain.)

Nor is the article just editorial hype. The barbarian is bent on extermination of Ukraine as a polity and as a culture.

  • Putin is working to “eliminate Ukraine as a language and ethnicity, as an identity and culture, and as an independent state”
  • in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, retreating Russians left behind mass graves and civilian bodies bearing signs of torture, sexual violence and summary executions
  • Ukrainian authorities say they have information about nearly 20,000 cases in which Ukrainian children have been kidnapped to Russia

There is no Sophie’s choice for Ukraine here. Sophie had a choice: pick one of two children for the Nazis to murder. Ukraine has only national and cultural suicide on offer from the barbarian. Not some fraction of the nation to be murdered, but all of it.

It is the West—the Trump administration and Europe’s NATO member nations—which are faced with Sophie’s choice: pick one of several (so far, only Eastern European) nations for the Russian barbarian to murder in exchange for a phantom peace that would be nothing more than a small period of relative quietude.

There is, though, an actual choice. This one begins with changing the rhetoric from “Ukraine must be helped to fight on” and the more recent “cease fire right damn now” to “Ukraine must win.” That must be supported by overt and rapid transfers of arms and logistic support to Ukraine in the numbers and types the UA—with its superior and more current battlefield experience—says it needs and at the pace it says it needs them. Further, those transfers must come with no restrictions on the types and locations of targets against which the UA might employ them.