Tag Archives: foreign policy

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.

This is Just Dumb

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President Joe Biden (D) says there are only two alternatives vis-à-vis Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

You have two options. Start a Third World War, go to war with Russia physically. Or two, make sure that a country that acts so contrary to international law ends up paying a price for having done it[.]

Biden-Harris went on to admit that sanctions can have no immediate effect.

Leave aside the simple fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin is perfectly willing to “pay a price;” he’ll still have Ukraine after ponying up.

No, the problems here are two. One is that effects of sanctions that take effect (maybe) at some time in a nebulous future do Ukraine no good in the present with Ukrainian men, women, and children dying now. Ukraine—soldiers and civilians alike—is fighting for its survival against Russia as the latter’s soldiers invade and kill now. Biden knows this.

The other problem is that there is at least one additional alternative: sending serious arms, ammunition, and training in serious quantities to the Ukrainian military. So far, what Biden—and the weak European government men and women—are delivering is insultingly limited quantities: the ammunition amounts, for instance, that they deign transfer are good only for a few days.

A bonus alternative: cyber attacks against Russian government-military communications. Hacks into Russian financial facilities to completely drain (or simply to completely corrupt) the financial holdings of Putin and his oligarch cronies and of the officers and their civilian counterparts of the General Staff of the Russian Defense Ministry.

Interested readers can think of more. It’s appalling that Biden-Harris cannot. Or chooses not to.

A Two-Edged Sword, and another Thought

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Russia is a, if not the, major exporter of energy to Europe, and that helps hold Germany especially, and Europe generally, back from fully supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion of that nation.

The two-edged sword is this.

If Russian gas to Europe stops flowing entirely, “this would do severe damage to Europe’s economy and also undermine global growth,” Mr [EurasiaGroup’s Director, Energy, Climate & Resources, Henning] Gloystein said.

That damage, were it to be inflicted by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, should prod Europe, and especially Germany, decisively away from Russian gas (and oil) altogether, as it would make clear—or should make clear—just how many weapons, including economic, the men and women of Russia’s government are willing to use in order to club Europe into submission.

The disruption from such an assault on Europe would not be felt until the next fall and winter; Europe has reserves enough to finish the present winter. That should be sufficient time for Europe to find more reliable supplies of energy. It might even convince German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to reverse ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s panicky cancelation of the nation’s nuclear plant energy production (although, maybe not—Germany has gotten used to tacit subservience to Russia).

The additional thought flows from this remark by President Joe Biden (D) in the context of that Russian invasion, quoted in the article at the link:

I will do everything in my power to limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump. This is critical to me.

This is virtue-signaling dishonesty. Biden’s “everything” consists of begging OPEC and Russia(!) to pump more oil. Biden utterly refuses to open Keystone XL; to get his Cabinet and himself out of the way of exploring, drilling, and pumping lease permits on Federal land and water; to get his Executive Orders and his Cabinet rules and regulations out of the way of our oil and natural gas production and fracking for same; to get his administration out of the way of liquid natural gas production and port development so we can export LNG; to do anything at all to support and expand our domestic oil and gas production.

Biden-Harris’ determined war on our American hydrocarbon energy production industry represents a strong impediment to Europe’s ability to wean itself off Russian energy, and his war supports the Russian invasion effort by contributing heavily to the rapidly increasing price of oil (which underlies those rising “gas pump” prices), which in turn increases revenue for Putin’s Russian economy.

 

[NB: Germany has agreed a limited SWIFT sanction against “selected” Russian banks, and it has authorized shipment of some anti-tank RPGs, stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and 10 metric tons of fuel to the Ukrainian military.]