Along with other links we have posted (some by the same authors) here are two more recent commentaries we have found instructive and or making points we share. Because the authors are very well informed on foreign policy and history we wish that the articles provided specific policy recommendations to decision makers. Some are inferred but the grassroots if they are to pressure politicians otherwise inclined to pursue ill-thought out policies need clarity in order to be most effective.
We set forth the articles in their entirety in order to facilitate placement of our annotations intended to strengthen, supplement or critique depending open the points made. Our annotations are off-set in red, perhaps some to follow in updates to this post.
John Daniel Davidson writing at The Federalist comments:
The U.S. Is Mindlessly Marching Toward War With Russia.
There’s been a shift in Washington. The talk is no longer about sanctions on Moscow but how best to escalate U.S. involvement in the war.
The day after Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky addressed Congress, the American press was understandably filled with paeans to his courage and leadership, his clarity of purpose and firm resolve in the face of mortal danger. As Bari Weiss noted in a thoughtful response to the speech, Zelensky knows what he’s fighting for, and he stands as an inspiring counterexample of things we hope for in our own political leaders, but do not have.
But there is something else behind this celebration of Zelensky. His speech, after all, was a rather straightforward request for the United States and our North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to intervene on behalf of Ukraine. “In the darkest time for our country, for the whole of Europe, I call on you to do more,” he said, invoking Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
He backed off, a little, from his repeated pleas for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and instead pressed for fighter jets and long-range surface-to-air missile systems — military aid of a kind that would be unprecedented, and would arguably bring the United States and NATO right up to and possibly over the line of belligerence.
This is something to evaluate but as V Davis-Hanson points out (following article) this is not necessarily the case — think of Russia and China blatantly supplying North Vietnam and our response. Putin will have to check his hold cards.
Zelensky can’t really be faulted for wanting to draw the West into this war. He is trying to save his people, who are in desperate straits. But our leaders have a responsibility not to be pulled into the conflict, however unpopular that might be in the current media environment.
When dominant liberal media agitates for anything it is cause to look closer and scrutinize their motives.
Instead, we’re seeing just the opposite: the emergence of a bipartisan, establishment consensus in Washington that the United States and NATO must ratchet up military aid to Ukraine, right now, without even trying to articulate an overarching strategy, what the off-ramps might be, or what an end-state to the conflict might look like.
Fair point, but as VDH says telegraphing what you will and won’t do guarantees Putin will go to that point. Trump policy was to imply unreserved strength of response. Problem is that Biden is not believable and our military is diminished and demoralized all in just one year.
On the same day as Zelensky’s speech, President Biden announced a new round of $800 million in antiaircraft weapons and other military equipment for Ukraine. That’s a small slice of the $14 billion in security aid to Ukraine that Congress recently passed as part of a massive spending bill. In a moment of rare bipartisanship, Congress is taking action. This is the bipartisan consensus at work. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., channeling the consensus, wants to send more of everything. “If it shoots, we should ship it,” he said.
Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., went a bit further on Thursday. During a rules committee hearing he blurted out, “We’re at war,” while talking about the need for a unified U.S. response to the conflict. Then, perhaps realizing his slip, quickly clarified that we’re not physically on the battlefield with the Ukrainians, “But we ought to do everything we possibly can to make sure they can meet this enemy and defeat this enemy.”
These lawmakers take the view that we can dance along a line of belligerence without actually becoming belligerents in the war, as if we alone get to decide where that line is and when we have or have not crossed it. They, along with their cheerleaders in the corporate press, offer no substantive arguments about why we won’t get drawn into the war. They simply declare that we have to do more, that we can’t be afraid of Moscow, without even attempting to persuade a skeptical American public that the risk inherent to doing more — getting into a shooting war with Russia — is worth it. They don’t even acknowledge the risk.
Historic analysis, the relevance of how far back you go and other matters of consistency have been so flummoxed, especially by the dominant liberal press and Democrats as to require a lot of clarity before the public can be expected to understand the issues
They need to. This isn’t a conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iranian proxies in Yemen, or a civil war in Ethiopia. Russia is a nuclear power. It has tactical nuclear weapons that can be deployed on the battlefield. Its battlefield doctrine leaves room for their use. If western politicians are worried about what might happen if Russia wins, they need to consider what might happen if Russia starts losing, what Russian President Vladimir Putin might do if he thinks his war aims are slipping out of reach or that his regime is in danger.
That Putin has been recruiting Syrians to fight Christians belies his own cultural claims. It is despicable.
That’s not to counsel appeasement, or to countenance Putin’s horrific bombardment of Ukrainian civilians. We can denounce Russian barbarism, and even continue aiding the Ukrainians, while maintaining a clear-eyed understanding of what’s possible in Ukraine, what’s not possible, and what the risks of escalation are for the United States and NATO.
Ukraine has fought valiantly, its people have done more to stymie the Russian invasion than anyone thought possible. The Ukrainians have paid a dear price for doing so, and as the war drags on, they will keep paying.
Western leaders can laude the courage of Zelensky and his people, but they also need to be honest with them. Washington should not assume that Putin will simply walk away from this war, or that he will accept a gradual defeat through the provision of NATO weapons and military aid to Ukraine. The assumption should be just the opposite: that Putin will widen the war if he thinks he’s losing it.
Seen that light, The United States is pursuing the most dangerous possible path right now by conveying confusion and irresoluteness to both Ukraine and Russia: devastating sanctions for Moscow but with no off-ramps or conditions for ending them; arms for Ukraine but not the kind or quantity that would turn the tide of war; contradictions and lack of coordination among the NATO allies, playing out in public for all the world to see.
This weak and desultory response to the war is partly why the United States is now marching mindlessly toward escalation, even if it’s not what President Biden intends. In many ways, Biden is being led by the nose. Top lawmakers in both parties, along with much of the corporate press, are talking themselves into going to war, and Biden is being carried along.
Even over the past 48 hours, there’s been a shift. The talk in Washington is no longer about sanctions on Russia or making Putin pay a price for Moscow’s aggression, but about how best to escalate our involvement and ensure a total and humiliating defeat of Russia, as if that’s a realistic end-state to this conflict.
But with apologies to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, this war isn’t going to end with Russia’s total defeat and complete withdrawal from Ukraine, or with Ukraine retaining its full independence and territorial integrity. It will not end with regime change in Moscow and Putin hauled before the Hague on war crimes charges. That is a fantasy.
Right now we need our leaders to be realistic, which means recognizing that at this point there really are only two courses of action available to the United States: we can urge Ukrainian leaders to negotiate and agree to some version of Moscow’s terms to end the war, as Israel has been trying to do, or we can continue down a slippery slope that eventually leads to war with Russia.
Without any deliberation or reflection, Washington is choosing the latter.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
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From Victor Davis Hanson writing at American Greatness. March 16, 2022
10 Realities of Ukraine.
We should not rehash the past but learn from it—and thereby ensure Vladimir Putin is defeated now and deterred in the future.
One. Reassuring an enemy what one will not do ensures that the enemy will do just that and more. Unpredictability and occasional enigmatic silence bolster deterrence. But Joe Biden’s predictable reassurance to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will show restraint means Putin likely will not.
Two. No-fly zones don’t work in a big-power, symmetrical standoff. In a cost-benefit analysis, they are not worth the risk of shooting down the planes of a nuclear power. They usually do little to stop planes outside of such zones shooting missiles into them. Sending long-range, high-altitude anti-aircraft batteries to Ukraine to deny Russian air superiority is a far better way of regaining air parity.
Three. Europe, NATO members, and Germany in particular have de facto admitted that their past decades of shutting down nuclear plants, coal mines, and oil and gas fields have left Europe at the mercy of Russia. They are promising to rearm and meet their promised military contributions. By their actions, they are admitting that their critics, the United States in particular, were right, and they were dangerously wrong in empowering Putin.
Four. China is now pro-Russian. Beijing wants Russian natural resources at a discount. Russia will pay for overpriced access to Chinese finance, commerce, and markets. Yet if Russia loses the Ukraine war, goes broke, and as an international pariah is ostracized, then China will likely cut the smelly Russian albatross from its neck—in fear of new Western financial, cultural, and commercial clout.
Five. Americans are finally digesting just how destructive the humiliating flight from Afghanistan was. The catastrophe signaled to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that Western deterrence had died.
No surprise that Russia sent missiles into a Ukrainian base near the Polish-NATO border. North Korea in January launched more missiles than in any month in its history. Iran sent missiles into Kurdistan. China daily announces it is just a matter of time until it absorbs Taiwan. The tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry sent to Ukraine by the West are still far less than what the U.S. military handed over to the terrorist Taliban.
Six. The Ukraine war did not cause inflation and record gas prices. Both were already spiking by early February 2022.
The cause was the Biden Administration’s year-long radical expansion of the money supply at a time of post-COVID, pent-up consumer demand. It foolishly continued de facto zero-interest rates. Its generous COVID subsidies for the unemployed discouraged a return to work, while slashing U.S. oil and gas production and pipelines.
Prior to Putin’s invasion, Joe Biden was quite publicly blaming greedy corporations, oil companies, COVID, and Donald Trump for the inflation he had birthed in 2021. And he was claiming undeniable high prices were only temporary or mostly an obsession of the elite.
Seven. Putin did not invade during the Trump tenure—although he had been more aggressive under previous American leadership with his prior attacks on Georgia, Ukraine, and Crimea. Russia stayed still when oil prices were low, fuel supplies in the West were plentiful, and the United States was confident. When the United States was neither bogged down in optional military interventions nor led by a president predictably accommodating to Russian aggressions, Russia stayed quiet.
Putin took note of increased NATO and U.S. defense spending. He feared low global oil prices and record American oil and gas production. He was wary after unpredictable American strikes against enemies like ISIS, Abu al-Baghdadi, and the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.
Eight. It is not “escalation” to send arms to Ukraine. The Russians far more aggressively supplied the North Koreans and North Vietnamese in their wars against America, without spreading the war globally. Pakistan, Syria, and Iran sent deadly weapons—many in turn supplied to them by Russia, North Korea, and China—to kill thousands of Americans during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Nine. Putin may never fully absorb Ukraine as long as it can easily be supplied across its borders by four NATO countries. The United States deadlocked in the Korean War, lost the Vietnam War, was stalled in Iraq, and fled Afghanistan in part because its enemies were easily supplied by nearby border friends on the assumption the United States could not strike such abettors.
Ten. It is not “un-American” to point out that prior American appeasement under the Obama and the Biden Administrations explains not why Putin wished to go into Ukraine, but why he felt he could. It is not “treasonous” to say Ukraine and the United States previously should have stayed out of each other’s domestic affairs and politics—but still do not excuse Putin’s savage aggression. It is not traitorous to admit that Russia for centuries relied on buffer states between Europe—lost when its Warsaw Pact satellite members joined NATO after its defeat in the Cold War. But that reality also does not justify Putin’s savage attack.
We should not rehash the past but learn from it—and thereby ensure Putin is defeated now and deterred in the future
