Watching the Russian Economy Collapse before Our Eyes

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, February 28, 2022

 

The “swift and severe” sanctions of the U.S. and its allies took a while to arrive, not taking effect until 96 hours or so after the first steps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

 

But to give credit where its due, once those sanctions did kick in, the consequences were indeed intense:

 

·         At one point, “The ruble plunged to a record low of less than one U.S. penny” — at one point 118 rubles to a dollar, before recovering to 84 rubles to a dollar.

 

·         The Economist noted, even with the recovery, that it was “one of the largest one-day slumps in the Russian currency’s modern history, similar in scale to the one-day declines recorded during the worst moments of the country’s financial crisis in 1998, when Russia defaulted on its debt. In mid-morning in Moscow, the Russian central bank raised its key interest rate from 9.5 percent to 20 percent in an effort to stem the ruble’s slump, and the country’s finance ministry ordered companies with foreign-currency revenues to convert 80 percent of their income into rubles.”

 

·         One analyst on CNBC summarized that the Russian currency has “pretty much lost all value outside of the country. . . . To me, it doesn’t really feel like we’re looking at or at least we’re going to see the bottom in the ruble here. I think there still is plenty more room for weakness to come.”

 

·         The Moscow stock exchange initially delayed its opening this morning, then declared it would be closed for the day.

 

·         Russians no longer have faith that their banks will remain solvent: “Russians waited in long queues outside ATMs on Sunday, worried that bank cards may cease to function, or that banks would limit cash withdrawals. ‘Since Thursday, everyone has been running from ATM to ATM to get cash. Some are lucky, others not so much,’ St Petersburg resident, Pyotr, who declined to give his last name, said.”

 

·         CNN reports that, “One early casualty was the European subsidiary of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender that has been sanctioned by Western allies. The European Central Bank said Sberbank Europe, including its Austrian and Croatian branches, was failing, or likely to fail, because of ‘significant deposit outflows’ triggered by the Ukraine crisis.”

 

Using the economic-sanction equivalent of a superweapon against Russia is a double-edged sword. Yes, this will hit Putin and the oligarchs and all of Putin’s lackeys and hangers-on. But this is also going to hit the average Russian, hard. The average Russian didn’t have much say in whether to invade Ukraine; there are some signs that the average Russian didn’t even believe that Russia would invade until the attack started.

 

After witnessing the outrage of Russia’s massive-scale, intensely destructive, utterly unprovoked assault on Ukraine, there’s an understandable desire to punish Moscow, to impose such devastating consequences that for three generations, no Russian leader ever dares to try this kind of reckless stunt again. We want them humbled, defanged, and neutralized. That’s not vengeance, that’s justice.

 

But it does seem prudent to ask just how much economic devastation we want to inflict upon a country with roughly 4,500 nuclear warheads — 4,477 warheads to be precise, with “about 1,588 strategic warheads [which] are deployed on ballistic missiles and at heavy bomber bases, while an approximate additional 977 strategic warheads, along with 1,912 nonstrategic warheads, are held in reserve.”

 

For a long stretch of the post-Cold War years, the West feared some Russian military official selling off a nuclear weapon or components or radioactive materials to dangerous forces. Forcibly impoverishing the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world feels like a formula for more trouble down the road.

 

History doesn’t give us simple lessons. One lesson that is clear is that once you’re in a war, you must win the war as thoroughly and completely as possible. If Russia doesn’t suffer severe consequences for starting this war, either Putin or one of his successors will try something like it again. It is hard to envision how any of us can feel like there is a good chance for a lasting peace so long as Putin runs Russia. Sure, perhaps this particular battle halts with a ceasefire in the near future, with minimal Russian territorial gains. But what’s stopping Putin from trying again in a year, or next year, or a few years from now? And as Judson Berger fairly asks, how mentally stable is Putin these days? How long can the world live with a paranoid, delusional autocrat with the ability to launch nuclear weapons? (Right now, in his rare public appearances, Putin is so isolated and seated so far from anyone else that even CDC director Rochelle Walensky would tell him he’s being excessively cautious.)

 

But one painful lesson of World War I was that if victorious nations humiliate the defeated nations, the defeated people may simmer in resentment and suppressed rage for a decade or so and then elect some demagogue who rides those long-stewing hatreds to power, creating even bigger problems. We need to come out of this conflict with a defanged Russia that doesn’t blame the West for its suffering and that isn’t just going to look for another manipulative strongman to come along and promise them a return to past glory.

 

On the military front, the news is mixed. The Ukrainians continue to demonstrate jaw-dropping courage and gutsiness, and evidence continues to mount that Russia has bitten off way more than it can chew.

 

On Sunday, a senior U.S. defense official offered an update:

 

We do continue to see Russian momentum slowed; they continue to face a stiff resistance. We continue to observe that they have experienced fuel and logistics shortages. This is most particularly acute in their advance on Kharkiv. Although we believe that they are facing some logistics challenges as well on their advanced down north to Kyiv. We still, as of this morning, have no indication that the Russian military has taken control of any cities. . . . The airspace over Ukraine is still contested. And that means that the Ukrainians are still using both aircraft, and their own air and missile defense systems, which we believe are still intact and still viable, though they have been, as I said yesterday, there’s been some degradation by the Russians.

 

By the way, if you want an excellent analysis of why and how the Russians are not maximizing their military advantages, read this piece by Mark Antonio Wright, our executive editor and an infantry officer in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. (All views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Marine Corps or the Department of Defense.) In fact, read everything Mark writes.

 

The bad news is that Russian forces appear to be moving into position for a longer-term siege of Ukrainian cities, Belarus is now formally entering the war on the side of Russia — it was already allowing Russia to attack from its territory — and a three-mile-long convoy of tanks and military vehicles is approaching Kyiv from the north. Russia isn’t afraid to turn this into a long, ugly slugfest, with a lot of civilian casualties along the way.

 

And while Putin elevating Russia’s nuclear arsenal to a higher state of alert may just be the usual saber-rattling . . . Russia has about ten times as many smaller “battlefield nukes” as the U.S. does, and Russia’s published military doctrine allows for nuclear-weapons use “in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation.” In other words, if Russia feels like it is losing a critical battle, it can use small nuclear weapons to halt the enemy’s assault.

 

From our perspective, that’s unthinkable; setting off even the smallest nuke releases deadly amounts of radiation and makes that immediate area uninhabitable for generations. But it is hard to get a sense of what is unthinkable to Putin these days. In defiance of the historical record, Putin insists that Ukraine is not really a country and has no right to exist as an independent state. U.S. defense strategists must be contemplating whether Putin is mad enough to believe that if he cannot annex Ukraine, his best option is to nuke parts of it into oblivion.

 

Sometimes, you can just tell it’s a Monday, huh?

 

ADDENDUM: For no particular reason, I am reminded of how, when conservatives and libertarians noticed the Soviet propaganda posters on the walls of the house of White House press secretary Jay Carney, we were accused of being paranoid and humorless and reading too much into Carney’s art selection . . . and then Carney went along with Chinese censorship requests as an official at Amazon.

 

Hammer and sickle Soviet propaganda doesn’t seem quite as kitschy and cute as it used to, now does it?

The Focus on ‘Green’ Energy Has Left the West Increasingly Dependent on Russian Energy

By John Fund

Sunday, February 27, 2022

 

The U.S. is now less energy-independent than it was a year ago and thus less able to send liquified natural gas (LNG) and crude-oil exports to our European allies to make up for crippling losses in Russian exports.

 

Jen Psaki, President Biden’s press secretary, told ABC News on Sunday that criticizing the reduction in America’s domestic energy production is a “misdiagnosis” of the problem. She asserted that “we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, on oil in general . . . and we need to look at other ways of having energy in our country and others.”

 

It’s clear that the Biden administration is infested with devotees of green energy who are hostile to the fossil fuels we urgently need right now. So too is the European Union, whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, has just called for the continent to “massively invest in renewables,” a dubious short-term course given the limitations of wind and solar technology.

 

Just this month, Biden appointees at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission erected regulatory barriers that essentially make it impossible for the United States to ever build another LNG export terminal. Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia called the move “reckless.”

 

Will President Biden and our European allies now reverse course? It’s unlikely, given how deeply radical green ideas have infected the West. And part of the reason for that is that Russia has spent decades on “disinformation” campaigns undermining Western fossil-fuel production. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, has been a leading supporter of using woke capitalism as a tool to undermine the West.

 

The media have focused on Russia’s attempts to subvert our elections. But H. R. McMaster, Donald Trump’s national-security adviser from 2017 to 2018, told the BBC in December 2017 that Russia has “a sophisticated campaign of subversion” to “polarize communities and pit them against each other” and that “one of the most important things is to pull the curtain back on this activity, and to expose it.”

 

Some of that activity has had the aim of making the West increasingly dependent on Russian energy. In 2021, the United States imported more gasoline and other refined petroleum products from Russia than from any other country. Russia accounted for 21 percent of all U.S. gasoline imports.

 

The Russians are also publicly celebrating the fact that Germany, after shutting down its nuclear reactors, became dependent on Russia for 50 percent of its natural gas and 41 percent of its oil. Dimitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, scoffed at Germany’s decision to finally delay certification of the unopened Nordstream 2 natural-gas pipeline.

“Welcome to the brave new world where Europeans are very soon going to pay 2.000 euros [$2,140] for 1,000 cubic meters of natural gas!” Medvedev chortled on his Twitter account.

 

“We have never seen such a huge gap between the foreign-policy needs of the West in energy and the complete refusal of U.S. policy-makers to resist the special-interest demands of environmental groups opposing energy development,” James Lucier, an energy analyst with Capital Alpha Partners in Washington, told me.

 

McMaster told CNBC last week that Russia has for years been behind a concerted “disinformation” campaign to disparage the use of natural gas and fossil fuels and encourage the West to focus on green energy. He is backed up by a 2018 report from the House Committee on Science. It found that Russia had exploited social-media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in an effort to influence the United States’ domestic energy policies. “Russian agents attempted to manipulate Americans’ opinions about pipelines, fossil fuels, fracking, and climate change,” the panel’s GOP chairman, Lamar Smith from Texas, concluded. “The American people deserve to know if what they see on social media is the creation of a foreign power seeking to undermine our domestic energy policy.”

 

Europeans have also raised the warning flag. Back in 2014, after Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of NATO and former premier of Denmark, accused Vladimir Putin’s government of trying to discredit fracking.

 

“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”

 

Russian politician and exiled dissident Konstantin Borovoy has written an entire book — Russia against USA: Russia’s Disinformation Campaign against USA and Its Citizens — that warns about the extent of Russia’s disinformation activities worldwide.

 

Western leaders shouldn’t try to negotiate with Putin, whom Borovoy called a “criminal power.” Borovoy pointed to the agreement that Russia and Western powers reached after the 2008 war in Georgia. The deal was that Russian forces would leave Georgia, but it never happened.

 

“It looks like before World War II, when everyone was trying to reach some kind of agreement with Hitler, and it wasn’t very effective, as we know,” Borovoy said. “It’s very dangerous to feed wild animals.”

 

Sadly, that is precisely what the West has done with Vladimir Putin over the past dozen years. While Putin plotted to undermine and eventually invade Ukraine, the West made his job all the easier by pursuing energy policies that transferred billions of dollars to Moscow’s coffers while pursuing misguided “Green New Deal” policies.

 

Those policies have now left our European allies dependent on Russian energy, and they’ve left the U.S. much less able to supply any energy gaps with our own domestic production.

Germany Announces It Will Rearm

By Mark Antonio Wright

Sunday, February 27, 2022

 

This morning, in an extraordinary development — unimaginable just 96 hours ago — German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that his country will rearm in the face of Russian aggression.

Germany is Europe’s richest and most powerful nation. Unfortunately, Berlin has been the weak link in the Western alliance for a generation. Since reunification, under Chancellors Kohl, Schröder, and Merkel, Germany’s once-powerful military has atrophied (Americans sometimes forget that, during the Cold War, the West German army was a formidable and important component of NATO’s plan to defend Western Europe).

 

Every American president this century has asked, begged, cajoled, and pleaded with the Germans to take more responsibility for Europe’s defense. Alas, even during the Obama/Trump/Biden “pivot to Asia,” the Germans have been content to spend a pittance on defense — last year, barely over 1.5 percent of GDP, which is billions and billions of dollars below the NATO-country target of 2 percent of GDP.

 

What kind of real-world effect has this had on Germany military readiness and hard power?

 

Just last week, Lieutenant General Alfons Mais, the German army’s chief of staff, wrote in a post on his personal LinkedIn account that “the Bundeswehr, the army which I have the honor to command, is standing there more or less empty-handed.”

 

The options we can offer the government in support of the alliance are extremely limited. We have all seen it coming but were not able to get through with our arguments to draw the consequences after [Russia’s] annexation of Crimea. This does not feel good. I am fed up with it.

 

This is not Frederick the Great’s army.

 

This morning, however, Chancellor Scholz, speaking to the Bundestag, the German parliament, called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “a turning point in the history of our continent” and vowed that Germany will now spend 2 percent of GDP on defense “from now on, every year.”

 

You can watch the key part of the chancellor’s speech here, translated into English.

 

“We are not only striving for this goal because we have promised our friends and allies that we will increase our defense spending to 2 percent of our economic output by 2024, but we do this for ourselves, too, for our own safety,” Scholz told the lawmakers.

 

Scholz also asked the Bundenstag to approve an additional one-off $110 billion infusion of funds into Germany’s military, which is on the order of twice what the country normally spends per year on defense.

 

Perhaps even more amazingly, the chancellor declared that Germany would “change course” in order to become less dependent on Russian energy imports. Germany will “quickly build” two liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals to facilitate this.

 

Vladimir Putin may yet win his war in Ukraine. But his actions have, in just four days, overturned the policy Russian leaders have pursued for 75 years: Keep Germany weak, distracted, and disarmed.

Common-Good Communism?

By Andrew T. Walker

Monday, February 28, 2022

 

Talk of the “common good” is, well, common nowadays in conservative intellectual circles. As a professor of ethics and public theology, I count this as a positive development. Such a conversation necessarily enlarges conservatism’s horizon beyond the stultifying categories of expressive individualism and collectivism. The whole conversation focuses on the idea that there is, or ought to be, some goal from which to understand our reason for existing not only as individuals, but as individuals who are part of families and communities. In that liminal and mediating space is the so-called common good, an idea with a storied history framed largely by Catholic social teaching, but one that is consistent with Protestant ideas such as “sphere sovereignty” and “subsidiarity” as well.

 

There is not enough space here to give sufficient explanation to the richness of the idea. But the basic explanation for the common good is that government should strive to promote or facilitate the conditions optimal for human thriving. The common good assumes that there are natural goods to human experience that ought to be realized throughout a society. The idea of the common good is that government, whether by ensuring safe roadways, enforcing obscenity laws, or prioritizing the natural family, should secure and promote certain social objectives by protecting the rights of various institutions to live out their respective duties to the whole. All things being equal, the common good allows mediating institutions to cooperate toward the advancement of a just society by experiencing the excellencies that befit their existence. A lot of questions surround the common good: How would we realize we’re experiencing it? How robust or modest must the common good be? Most foreboding: Who gets to define it?

 

It is the last question that makes some conservatives wince, mostly because some conservatives are uncomfortable with the idea that society should or can be organized around a shared understanding of the common good. It also is this last question that is currently roiling movement conservatism. Whether one believes there can be much of a common good at all determines much of one’s underlying political philosophy. But the common good is not, as I’ve heard some libertarian-minded pundits suggest, conservatism’s own version of “social justice.” It is, in fact, necessarily reliant upon the notions of limited government, as the common good requires a pre-political commitment to human good, which the state is not sovereign in determining, only recognizing. For example, the dignity of persons is an inviolable reality. As such, the common good requires that the government acknowledge this pre-political truth and craft policy that protects it.

 

If you, like me, are a Christian weary of the West’s growing decadence who believes that God’s natural law demands everyone’s obedience to it for the sake of their own thriving, then you probably understand — or perhaps even have succumbed — to the temptation, currently in vogue among many sectors of the American Right, to see other nations and cultures as more desirable and worth imitating than our own American culture. This temptation arises out of a belief that some of these regimes supposedly demonstrate less decadence and have a more robust common good operating at their center. It is common to see intellectuals on the right offer apologias or equivocations for regimes that are seen as defending either the idea of the Christian West or the blunt notion of “tradition” as the glue that holds a society together. We see such comments about Poland, Hungary, Russia, and even China.

 

Some of these nations are not like the others. Hence I am fine with conservatives debating the merits of Viktor Orbán’s desire to take Hungary in an explicitly Christian direction. I personally have not bought into all the Orbán hysterics, from either side. But what he’s undertaking is certainly worth paying attention to. Of late, however, I have noticed a very online propensity to downplay the negative qualities of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or even of the Chinese Communist Party. Sometimes this downplaying shades into outright praise. Russia, we’re told, is seeking national glory. Russia knows who Russia is, and that degree of self-identity is worth imitating. Or take, for example, a recent essay by Arnaud Bertrand in American Affairs extolling China’s anti-poverty campaign.

 

In the article, we read that:

 

China might not see eye to eye with the West on individual freedom, but it certainly agrees with American conservative principles of personal responsibility. The differ­ence is that, for China, the government has a large role to play in creating the material and societal preconditions that allow people to exercise that responsibility.

 

Well, that’s an understatement, to say the least. Moreover, “large role to play” is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence that should give Americans, and especially conservatives, a moment’s pause. But the reason such an essay could be written in the first place is that China’s eradication of poverty is seen as one successful way in which a concern for the common good can justify expansive government planning. Let’s leave aside the considerable objection that Chinese communism represents the only way to address poverty, and that China’s record of doing so is hardly unblemished. But a common good defined by material plenty on the one hand but a denial of political rights on the other is no common good worth pursuing.

 

Lest I be seen accusing Bertrand of defending communism tout court, I do not want to signal that. But if one reads the essay, there does seem to be a convenient glossing over of human-rights abuses and government oppression. Which is why it was somewhat concerning to see Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law-school professor and author of the new book Common Good Constitutionalism, praising Bertrand’s article as consistent with his own governing ideals, in which the government is empowered to accomplish a seemingly unbounded number of projects for the sake of its population if they can be reconciled with the common good. Birds of a feather, as they say.

 

But I won’t caricature Vermeule’s book, which I have read, as a defense of communism (it is certainly not that). Rather, it argues for a constitutional order that puts immense power in the hands of the state to provide for the common good, what he calls “peace, justice, and abundance — including their updated cognates — health, safety, security, and a right relationship to the natural environment — under the conditions of a large and complex modern polity and economy.” In the abstract, that sounds delightful. But navel-gazing intellectualism must meet realpolitik. And that’s where things, as history would show, get more complicated.

 

That brings me back to the common good. This essay makes no attempt to end the debates over the common good. I’m a Christian — specifically, a Baptist — which means I hold a fervent commitment to the reality of the natural law and the necessity of the common good, but with a hearty distrust in the power of government to get too much swagger in its fulfillment thereof. The common good ought not to be a top-down bureaucratic consistory organized by those whom C. S. Lewis considered the “Conditioners.” Elite technocrats seeking to steward society toward some eschatological vision of the good never ends well. Conservatism reflects the belief that government should reflect the deep social agreements arising from its people. This should be done under the rule of law with a shared balance of power checking human avarice, not under the diktats of philosopher-kings or any other kind of absolute power, the track record of which is historically hostile to representative government or human rights.

 

I desire a robust common good, but a common good on certain terms. Those terms exclude trading the messiness of our rights-based regime for the offer of a strongman’s imagined omnicompetence. We should not exchange the offer of a “thick common good” — even with the benefits of eradicating poverty — with the pottage of communist rule or, for that matter, more statist rule. It’s not worth the trade-off for America, for conservatives, or for Christians. Call me old-fashioned, but trying to find elements of redemption in the Chinese Communist Party’s regime of oppression and terror is not the formula I’d propose conservatives or Christians move forward with. Give me a common-good conservatism defined by the rich tapestries of religion, family, and civil society — not common-good collectivism or, worse, common-good communism.

Against Judge Jackson

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, February 27, 2022

 

Joe Biden has nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Jackson shouldn’t be confirmed but probably will be. And before she is confirmed, she will be practically canonized, a process that already has begun with Senator Dick Durbin, who gushes that she is an “extraordinary nominee” with an “exceptional life story.”

 

That isn’t really true, and the fact that we are all expected to act as though it were true is a testament to the superficiality of that frank national conversation about race we’re always having.

 

Judge Jackson would be the first black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, but that is the opposite of extraordinary in a country that has had a black man serve as president and a black woman serve as secretary of state, currently has a black woman serving as vice president, and has had many other black men and women in its high offices.

 

Looked at through the prisms of race and sex, Judge Jackson seems like a great departure for the Supreme Court. Looked at straight-on, she looks precisely like what we would expect of a Supreme Court nominee.

 

An “exceptional life story”? Judge Jackson is the child of a lawyer who grew up to be a lawyer. Both her parents are college graduates, unlike three-fourths of the Americans of their generation. She didn’t grow up on the mean streets of Baltimore or Detroit — she went to the same high school as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and she was the class president. She went to Harvard for her undergraduate studies and then moved on to Harvard Law, where she was an editor of the law review. (Every sitting justice except for Amy Coney Barrett of Notre Dame went to one of two laws schools — and I don’t even have to tell you which two, do I?) She clerked for Stephen Breyer, the very man she has been nominated to replace. Justice Breyer’s father was a lawyer for a school district; Judge Jackson’s father was a lawyer for a school district.

 

Not exactly an out-of-nowhere pick. She is as ordinary a nominee as you could imagine.

 

Americans don’t like to talk about it, but we do have a ruling class, and African Americans have been in it for a while now — long enough to produce such a perfect specimen of the genre as Ketanji Brown Jackson. Hurray for the meritocracy, and all that.

 

Judge Jackson has a résumé that looks a lot like almost every other Supreme Court nominee’s résumé. Ironically, the justice whose biography looks the least like hers is the only African American currently serving on the Court, Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas has a truly exceptional life story: He was raised by his grandparents in utter poverty in a Gullah-speaking community in the Jim Crow South. He spent the first years of his life in a house with no indoor plumbing. He was a radical black nationalist in his youth, grew up to be a hero to conservatives, and may well be remembered as the most significant jurist of his generation.

 

There isn’t anything wrong with being an Ivy League–educated child of privilege. (Some of my best friends . . .) But we do not live in a country where it is particularly remarkable that a woman who grew up in an educated and comfortable family — and who attended the best schools, where she met all the right people — should rise to the top of her profession. That’s what the Ivy League is there for — you can get a good education anywhere.

 

Judge Jackson is well qualified for the position, judged by her résumé and by the fact that she has spent eight years on the federal bench (though less than a year in her current position on the Court of Appeals) without exhibiting any obvious misbehavior — except in one thing: She does not believe in the rule of law.

 

And that should be — should be — disqualifying.

 

Judge Jackson isn’t any worse than the justice she is replacing and very likely would be better than whoever is next on Joe Biden’s list, but, as a matter of principle, she should be opposed.

 

Justice Thomas is often — and dishonestly — described as a conservative justice or a right-wing justice. But what Justice Thomas actually is, is a textualist justice, which is a fancy way of saying that he is someone who believes that we write our laws down for a reason and that judges — including the highest judges in the land — are obliged to follow what the law actually says, rather than what they wish it said, what they think it should say, or their own idiosyncratic sense of fairness or morality. We call them “justices,” but they are not in the justice business — they are in the law business. And if achieving justice requires a change in the law, then the people must elect new lawmakers to make that change.

 

When judges follow the law as it is written, we have the rule of law. When judges follow their own sensibilities and moral intuitions, then we have a judicial oligarchy. Justice Thomas’s supposed radicalism is his insistence that the law must be applied as it is written and that Supreme Court precedents that are not based on the law as it is written should be disregarded when challenged. That is, of course, the opposite of radicalism, but we live in upside-down times.

 

Judge Jackson is thoroughly a product of her class, and, unhappily, she embodies its biases and subscribes to its ideology — if she did not, she would not be Joe Biden’s nominee, irrespective of her ticking the desired race and sex boxes on the job application.

 

And though Republicans surely will be denounced as sexists and racists and whatnot for doing so, they should oppose her nomination, however hopelessly, on those grounds.

A Pre-Modern War Demands Pre-Modern Thinking

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 24, 2022

 

We are witnessing something that just should not be. In Europe, a nationalist autocrat has launched a war of naked aggression.

 

Vladimir Putin has not invaded Ukraine to secure its natural resources or to win Russia a better seat at the global negotiating table. He did not commit the Russian military to regime change in Ukraine because a complex web of alliances forced him to, nor did he make a thoughtful realist consideration involving the balance of power in his region. Putin is waging a war of conquest and territorial expansion to satisfy national ambition and prestige. He is prepared to subsume a whole people into a social covenant they do not accept. Moreover, if Putin’s desire to see to the “denazification” of Ukraine (a country so committed to Nazism that its elected president is Jewish) is any indication, he is prepared to liquidate those who resist. This just isn’t supposed to happen anymore. But it is.

 

In this one brazen display of hard power, all the diplomatic pieties of the modern world are dissolving like the gauzy fantasies they always were. Only a dedicated commitment to ignoring the evidence of one’s own eyes could lead observers to avoid concluding that the trappings of internationalism are a feeble veneer.

 

Take, for example, the United Nations. At the level of the General Assembly, the glittering talk-shop on Turtle Bay has been a lost cause for some time. Yet some critics of the institution still reserved judgment on the Security Council. Its five permanent members, whose status is a spoil of World War II and is therefore predicated on each state’s capacity to project force, were capable of maintaining the post-War order. That is, as long as that order was typified by a predictable power balance. It survived the end of the Cold War, when bipolarity was replaced with unipolarity, because both conditions lent themselves to predictability. But an emerging dynamic that involves a variety of poles engaged in great power competition has scuttled that bargain.

 

The world is now treated to the spectacle of Russia, the current rotating president of the Security Council, presiding over an emergency meeting in response to its own aggression. Who can still defend the value of such a useless institution?

 

What about non-treaty obligations and commitments to the supposed “norms” that govern the international order? Those have been on life support for years, and Russia has effectively pulled the plug. The United States and Russia are parties to an unratified 1994 treaty guaranteeing “the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” so long as Ukraine surrendered the nuclear stockpile it inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine lived up to its end of the bargain, but Russia and America did not.

 

Is it any wonder then that the Ukrainians lament their failure to develop a nuclear deterrent? A nuclear umbrella is quite clearly the chief guarantor of security. You can bet that Ukraine isn’t the only nation living in the shadow of an aggressive neighbor that is coming to that same conclusion. What imperiled nation would allow itself to be negotiated out of its commitment to its own survival?

 

Pity the institutionalists who banked on a future dominated by geostrategic cooperation over luxury crises like climate change, arms control, corruption, and economic development. Statements like those made by Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, expressing his “hope that President Putin will help us stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate” are laughably naïve. All of this was predicated on the fantasy that there is such a thing as “international law.” Raw, hard power was always the chief arbiter of events in the anarchic—that is to say, lawless—international environment.

 

The law is dispassionate. It is applied neutrally, and it is enforced by a constabulary empowered to preserve comity by virtue of a political consensus on its legitimacy. In the global environment, there is no consensus, no neutrality, and no constabulary. There is only force. “I thought we lived in a world that had said no to that kind of activity,” Kerry has lamented without acknowledging his terrible misapprehension.

 

We have not been thrust into a new world today because of Russia’s act of unprovoked violence. We’ve merely been reintroduced to the world as it always was. For decades, global peace was preserved by an international security architecture we all take for granted. That enterprise was underwritten by the preponderance of American military might, not some illusory matrix of diplomatic niceties, international agreements, and bureaucratic red tape.

 

If there’s any silver lining to be found in this horror show, it is that perhaps the West will wake up and recognize the delusions it has labored under for generations. A Western world resolved to check the threat posed by revisionist actors with overwhelming force—one that doesn’t put its faith in modern contrivances to do the work of compelling aggressors to abandon their perfectly rational ambitions—might emerge from this crisis with a more durable conception of how to preserve the peace. Maybe, but I doubt it.

The Fantastical World of the Pro-Putin Right

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

 

On Wednesday morning, American officials indicated that they believe Russia will launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine within the next 48 hours. Given the impressive accuracy of the intelligence that Western governments declassified in the run-up to Moscow’s recognition of the so-called “breakaway” republics in Ukraine and Russia’s subsequent incursion into Ukrainian territory, it’s a warning we should take quite seriously. The repercussions of such a seismic event for the European security architecture and the American-led post-Cold War order could be immense.

 

But not everyone is bothered or even displeased by this growing threat to Western primacy in Europe. Some well-known voices have questioned the legitimacy of the Atlantic Alliance’s efforts to make Russia suffer consequences for its revanchist attack on its neighbor. These voices, the loudest of whom are on the political right, have assumed a posture that blows right past non-interventionism or even pacifism. They’ve increasingly settled on the notion that Moscow has been provoked and its actions are justified. At the very least, the Americans who oppose Putin’s advances on neighboring European territory are somehow acting in bad faith. The sophistry in which they are engaged, however, seems tailored to appeal only to the narrowest sliver of the American political spectrum.

 

“It might be worth asking ourselves, since it is getting serious, what is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much?” Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson recently pondered. “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?” he continued. “Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?”

 

The non-sequitur aside (we do not know for a fact that Putin doesn’t eat dogs), the thrust of Carlson’s argument is clear: Americans should concern themselves more with their domestic political opponents and cultural conflict than with the threat posed by hostile actors abroad who aim to harm American strategic interests. That’s extraordinarily parochial and short-sighted, but it’s a point of view worthy of at least a barstool.

 

It’s not at all obvious, however, who the audience for this sort of thing is. It’s certainly not the rank-and-file Republican voter, who you would think would make up the core of this program’s viewership.

 

A CBS News/YouGov survey conducted in early February—when a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine was merely hypothetical—found that, among Republicans, most (55 percent) wanted to see the U.S. “stay out” of “negotiations around Ukraine and Russia.” That quasi-isolationist view, however, does not extend to support for Putin’s position. Among self-described GOP voters, 41 percent backed Ukraine in the current conflict while just 9 percent supported Russia. Moreover, fully 59 percent of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of Trump voters said Joe Biden was being “too friendly” toward Moscow.

 

This finding is consistent with the polling of Republicans over the course of the Biden presidency. “Do you think Russia poses a military threat to the United States, or not?” Quinnipiac University pollsters asked in a poll from last week. Sixty-three percent of Republicans said yes—roughly on par with the 60 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents who said the same.

 

A Pew Research Center survey published in late January found that a majority of Republicans see Russia’s military buildup as either a “minor” or “major threat” to U.S. interests. Thirty-nine percent of Republicans called Putin an “enemy” of the U.S. while another 50 percent describe the Russian autocrat as a “competitor.”

 

This dovetails with another CBS/YouGov survey from June 2021 showing that 62 percent of Republicans see Putin as either “unfriendly” or “an enemy.” Fifty-nine percent of those Republicans described Joe Biden as “too friendly” toward Moscow, while a whopping two-thirds of GOP voters say the president “should take a tough stand” against the Kremlin.

 

Republican voters have been consistent when it comes to Russia. So why is the conservative commentariat twisting  into knots to ingratiate themselves with such a small percentage of the Republican voting base? If you’re taking your cues from the far-too-online right, you might be convinced that the average GOP voter is invested in Putin’s adventurism.

 

The Conservative Political Action Conference feeds into that sentiment when it books someone like former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to address the confab’s attendees. The organization that hosts this conference gave the progressive lawmaker a lifetime conservative voting record of just 7.6 out of 100 points, so her conservatism is not the draw. Her primary credentials seem to be her willingness to shill for the Kremlin; a directive that led the former lawmaker to leap to Bashar al-Assad’s defense when he was engaged in war crimes and to disparage Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as a burgeoning autocrat.

 

Likewise, if you’re basing your opinions on the pronouncements of influential figures like Turning Point USA’s executive director, Charlie Kirk, you might believe, as he does, that it “feels as if Putin is going into places that want him.” After all, the conflict over Ukraine “is a family dispute that we shouldn’t get in the midst of, that’s for certain.” That’s an opinion that cannot survive first contact with a real, live Ukrainian—or, for that matter, a Russian. “Even as Russians tend to say Russians and Ukrainians are one people, a majority of Russians (54%) say they should be two countries,” read the findings of a recent CNN-sponsored poll. “Ukrainians overwhelmingly feel Russia and Ukraine should be two separate countries, with 85% saying so.” Even a cursory review of Putin’s de facto declaration of war against Ukraine suggests this is not an opinion the Kremlin shares.

 

A recent statement produced by Ohio-based U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance is illustrative of the nationalist right’s conundrum. He wrote derisively of the “obsession with Ukraine from our idiot leaders,” which “serves no function except to distract us from our actual problems.” The impetus for this statement was the fact that two of Vance’s competitors for the GOP nomination, Jane Timken and Mike Gibbons, both expressed support for Ukraine’s right to sovereignty and self-defense. If Vance’s moribund polling is any indication, it’s Vance who has misread the moment. Even Vance’s chief competitor in the populist lane, former state treasurer Josh Mandel, has advocated policies expressly designed to deter Russian aggression while casting the current crisis as a product of “weakness out of the Biden White House.”

 

Either those on the nationalist right know something about the Republican mind that polls cannot capture, or they are talking only to a small clique that is utterly unrepresentative of the American right. Most objective metrics suggest it’s the latter.

Vladimir Putin’s Gamble

National Review Online

Friday, February 25, 2022

 

Vladimir Putin has initiated a new era in European history with his brazen lightning strike against Ukraine.

 

Despite Moscow’s dishonest denials that an attack was imminent every time the Biden administration predicted it, there was little doubt that Putin would launch some sort of invasion, given his oft-expressed belief that Ukraine has no right to an independent existence and the size, composition, and positioning of his forces around Ukraine.

 

The only question was when exactly and how big. Beginning early Thursday morning Kyiv time, the answer came in the form of a land, sea, and air assault across the board that looks as though it seeks to take Kyiv and depose the elected government of Ukraine.

 

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, an outsider and former comedian whose abilities were in doubt when he took office in 2019, has risen to the occasion. He gave a moving speech on the eve of the invasion, directly making the case to Russians, in Russian, that Ukraine wanted peace but would defend its sovereignty and honor if it came to that.

 

Reports suggest that Ukrainian troops are indeed putting up a spirited resistance, but there is no way that they will be able to resist the superior capabilities of the Russian forces for long.

 

President Biden announced the supposedly crushing sanctions that he’s been warning Putin of for months. They are tougher than any previous round of sanctions against Moscow and will exact real costs on Russia’s government, military, and state-dominated financial, energy, and tech sectors. Yet Biden made a telling concession. He said the sanctions will take time to bite and never were meant to deter Putin, despite repeated statements previously from him and his officials that that was exactly what we sought to do. Notably, we aren’t excluding Russia from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the cooperative that enables international financial transactions. This would have exacted enormous, immediate economic pain on Russia, but the Europeans blanched at the idea since it would surely lead Putin to stop exporting the oil and gas they’ve made themselves so reliant on. Meanwhile, Germany’s suspension of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is less than meets the eye, since the pipeline was not yet operative. And, bizarrely, we are not yet sanctioning Putin himself.

 

The Russian leader’s calculation clearly is that he can weather any sanctions that will inevitably weaken as European countries flake off and the initial shock of his act of naked aggression fades.

 

The U.S. needs to do all it can to try to prove him wrong. It should push for stronger sanctions now and maintain them over time. It should work to make Russia a pariah state, expelling its diplomats and excluding Russia from as many international institutions and meetings as possible. It should pour assistance into Ukraine, in the hopes of stoking armed resistance after the current conventional fight is over. It should seek a military budget commensurate with the growing, dual challenge from Russia and China. It should further fortify the frontline NATO states, which are in Putin’s crosshairs. And it should think of what new programs and institutions we need to prevail in a new Cold War taking shape in Europe and Asia.

 

Additionally, the U.S. needs to take note of the way that the Europeans were held back by their reliance on Russian energy. One way of reducing that will be to expand our own production of oil and gas. Environmentalists like to make the point that we have only one planet. That is true, but they would do well to remember that Putin’s Russia is currently fighting a war over a part of that planet.

 

Putin is going to win this round. But military victories often contain the seeds of failure and ultimate defeat. It will be easier to install a puppet government in Kyiv than to maintain it atop a population that will be largely hostile. Ukraine is suffering a grievous blow, but nations that are proud and have a strong sense of identity can survive imperial impositions, or there wouldn’t be a nation of Poland or, for that matter, Ukraine.

 

The new era heralded by Putin’s invasion needn’t be one that he dominates or that even works out for him.

The Woke Weapon on Campus: ‘Danger’

By Carine Hajjar

Sunday, February 27, 2022

 

College students face “danger” everywhere they turn. A comment that makes you uncomfortable, an unsavory name on a building, a mask that fell under the nose, a nonprogressive comment in class.

 

Danger to college students (the woke ones in particular) is subjective — danger to me is danger to all.

 

The most recent and obvious such danger on college campuses is Covid. Even as the less-virulent Omicron wanes, hospitalization rates plummet, and state and municipal mask advisories are lifted, college students continue to face intolerable levels of Covid precautions.

 

One Harvard student and former classmate, Julie Hartman, decided to bravely question Harvard’s overzealous Covid policing. On Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, she wrote about pandemic-related changes to Housing Day, a Harvard tradition put on hold for the past two years:

 

Sophomores, juniors and seniors storm freshman dormitories to tell first-year students which of the 12 “houses,” essentially big dorms for upperclassmen, they will live in for their remaining time on campus. Having lost two of these days during the 17 months that Harvard sent us home, I was excited to participate in one more traditional Housing Day my senior year. Instead, the student government said it would likely be a modified outdoor event.

 

According to Julie, the decision was announced by “student government representatives” after their meeting with Harvard’s Committee on Student Life.

 

I spent my last two Housing Days online after being sent home from Harvard in March of 2020. Given the realities of Covid at the time, this was a prudent decision that fell within the bounds of a reasonable risk calculation. There was a risk; we were unvaccinated and the Covid strain was more deadly.

 

But what happens when a danger is back under control again?

 

Today, 65.1 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated. In Massachusetts, 95 percent of the population of all eligible ages has at least one dose. For those five and older, 82 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. Pretty good, huh? Harvard’s stats are even better: 98 percent of students and 97 percent of employees are fully vaccinated and are now required to be boosted.

 

The Harvard student is more protected than the general population of Massachusetts. And yet, the level of danger from Covid on college campuses is amplified and distorted.

 

Julie expressed that she feels like she and her peers have been cheated by the enduring Covid protections. And it’s no wonder, especially after what she calls “a long list of Covid-related excesses”:

 

Harvard has required students to get vaccinated and boosted and test for Covid twice a week, hectored us to wear masks nearly everywhere, and banned students from several communal spaces, including dining halls at one point, and from having informal campus gatherings indoors with more than 10 people.

 

These excesses are all the more frustrating because, as Julie writes, “many of them do little to protect public health.”

 

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health stopped recommending indoor masking for fully vaccinated individuals (who are not immunocompromised) on February 15. Cambridge will be a month late to the party, not lifting its mandate until March 14. For Harvard students, who are, overall, among the most medically protected demographic — between their age and vaccination requirements — pretty much any major Covid restrictions should feel excessive.

 

Yet most students are unwilling to speak up against “Covid-related excesses.” Julie noted that her peers “acknowledge the excess” but “shrug it off.” On campus, there’s a sense of “resignation, learned helplessness and reluctance to dissent.”

 

Julie attributes the mindless obedience to Ivy Leaguers’ tendency to err on the side of conventional achievement and people-pleasing:

 

Our life’s mission has been to please those who can grant or withhold approval: parents, teachers, coaches, admissions officers and job interviewers. As a result, many of us don’t know what we believe or what matters to us.

 

Regardless of their actual feelings about Covid, students like these are willing to fall in line to maintain their reputation, their good standing. Given the distortion of the meaning of danger on campuses, these students’ behavior actually amounts to rational risk calculation. They don’t want to be labeled careless with the health of others, no matter how small the risk.

 

Julie wrote:

 

There is a smaller group at Harvard that apparently find pleasure in these restrictions. These students will chastise you for not wearing a mask correctly and called one of my brave peers who publicly denounced Harvard’s Covid restrictions a “eugenicist” because he supposedly showed insufficient sensitivity to immunocompromised people. They love Covid for the moral high ground it gives them to condescend to and control others.

 

Despite near-perfect vaccination rates, several students on campus have relayed stories about being shamed by their peers to wear their masks correctly. During my time at Harvard, there were students who operated social media on which they posted videos of their peers at gatherings, whether on or off campus, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.

 

In this way, passive compliance is wholly rational for students seeking a smooth path to success and a pleasant college experience. They want the banking job, the consulting role, the grad-school acceptance. They want to be in a social organization, admitted to an exclusive extracurricular.

 

And there’s nothing wrong with that; what’s wrong is the persecution of others for noncompliance — be it with needless Covid rules or ever-changing social protocols. By wielding the language of danger, woke administrators and students give themselves a pass to dictate on-campus regulations and social norms of speech and conduct. They are “protectors” from a new kind of danger — the danger of discomfort of any kind. And if you go against their protection, you’re a threat to the whole.

 

The control of danger — what it means and how you are to be protected from it — is their key to power. It’s often closely linked to controlling discourse itself. You don’t want to say something “dangerous” and risk making somebody uncomfortable.

 

In the Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt establish the idea of “safetyism,” noting that colleges are more and more concerned with the emotional well-being of students. This often comes at the cost of open discourse.

 

Last month, Colorado State University posted a sign offering resources to students affected by — wait for it — free speech.

 

In a statement to Fox News, CSU officials said they “recognize the power of speech to impact people deeply” and “are committed to supporting all of our students.”

 

What they’re really trying to say is that free speech can sometimes be offensive and can make people uncomfortable. And being offended or uncomfortable is simply too dangerous for college students.

 

By equating free speech with danger, woke administrations and students alike can start to control narratives. Incidentally, what is “dangerous” is usually a belief or observation that challenges a progressive agenda.

 

When I was on the Crimson’s editorial board, the board published an op-ed that advocated abolishing the university police:

 

Policing is problematic not just in its often violent and discriminatory practice, but also in theory; the issue is not a few rotten apples, but of a rotten tree.

 

This became a debate topic at Harvard and on many other campuses. Any disagreement implied sympathy with an irredeemably racist institution.

 

There are certain topics you simply cannot question on progressive campuses without risking being labeled a “racist” or “sexist” or “elitist” or (insert derogatory “-ist”/ “-phobic”). Covid restrictions have the same power — Julie’s peer was labeled a “eugenicist.” If you’re a normal, risk-averse student, inviting labels like those would be social, professional, or academic suicide.

 

The real danger is not what you say; the real danger is the consequence should you say it.

Sanctions Are Not Enough

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, February 26, 2022

 

America needs energy independence and a much larger military to deter Putin.

 

Ever since last year, when Vladimir Putin began preparing for an invasion of Ukraine, President Biden has tried to deter him. Biden tried to reason with the Russian autocrat. He released declassified intelligence to rally the world against the imminent threat. He supported French president Emmanuel Macron’s last-ditch attempt at diplomacy. He warned Russia that a war would be met with harsh economic sanctions.

 

Nothing worked. Negotiations failed. So-called “deterrence through disclosure” had no effect. The threat of punishment carried no weight. The invasion began in the early hours of February 24. The largest military action undertaken on the continent of Europe since World War II is underway. Anyone who pretends to know what will happen next is kidding themselves.

 

President Biden and America’s allies in Europe have prepared a program of sanctions to punish Putin, his inner circle, and the Russian security and military services for this unprovoked assault on an independent nation of some 40 million people. Biden is right to do so. Free societies have an obligation to demonstrate their revulsion toward despotism. Any cost imposed on Putin is worthwhile.

 

Yet sanctions aren’t enough. The record is clear: Sanctions make a point, but they rarely achieve their goals. The American president can no longer pretend that economic coercion alone will do the trick. A grand strategy is required to make Putin’s invasion and possible occupation of Ukraine as painful for him as possible, to stop him from expanding the war, and to reestablish deterrence.

 

America’s economic, military, technological, and cultural power must be aligned toward shielding democracy in Europe and undermining the Russian war machine. Limiting ourselves to sanctions and diplomacy won’t make Putin think twice before demanding more of the West. Quite the opposite: He will brush his shoulder off. He will look for another target.

 

The first task is to assist Ukraine in its existential conflict. The flip side of sanctioning Russia ought to be providing additional financial aid to the elected government of Ukraine. Weapons should follow the money.

 

The president can declare that America will not recognize, nor will international organizations seat, a Russian-backed Ukrainian regime. He can prepare to support a Ukrainian government in exile and to supply anti-Russian partisans in occupied territory. Abandoning Ukraine to fight unassisted would be worse than a betrayal. It would make Putin’s life easier. It would enhance his personal rule. That is exactly what we do not want.

 

Second, Biden must abandon his energy strategy. Nothing less than a total reversal of his approach is necessary. Certain times require a reevaluation of priorities and a reorganization of values. The global crisis that Putin has set in motion is such a moment.

 

Putin tends to lash out when gas prices are high. Lowering these costs will not be easy. It will take time. And the only effective means of lowering the price of energy is increasing its supply.

 

Biden must embrace oil and gas exploration. America was energy independent just a few years ago. The American president must do everything he can to make us independent again. While he’s at it, he needs to blanket Europe with liquid natural gas (LNG) facilities, call on the German government to reevaluate its attitude toward nuclear power, and ask the U.S. Congress to subsidize new nuclear plants here at home.

 

Soliciting OPEC is a crutch. The green-energy transition must wait. Turn on the spigot of American oil and gas to drown out Putin’s energy weapon. Failure to do so would be another self-inflicted wound.

 

Third, Biden needs to ask Congress not only to pass the authorized defense budget, but to send him an emergency supplemental appropriations bill that dramatically ramps up military spending. Biden’s idea that he could minimize the role of the Defense Department and conduct foreign policy through the State Department and — God help us — John Kerry was always delusional. Now it’s dangerous.

 

Congress authorized, but hasn’t passed, a defense budget greater than the one Biden requested. Even this increase, however, amounts to a net cut thanks to inflation. America needs to spend more on defense — much more. This additional spending ought to include enhanced research and development as well as updating and expanding America’s nuclear arsenal.

 

America needs more of everything — more troops, more tanks, more planes, more ships, more drones, more UAVs and USVs, more ABM systems, more chips, and more connectivity. And we need it soon. Ronald Reagan grabbed the Kremlin’s attention with his defense budgets. Biden has not. He needs to mimic Reagan, not Barack Obama, if he wants to stop his presidency from sliding entirely into chaos.

 

Finally, Biden has an opportunity to reassert himself as leader of the Free World. Biden has sounded the right notes on democracy, but his actions have not supported his rhetoric. He is responsible for the extinction of democracy in Afghanistan. He could not stop Putin from attacking Ukraine. If he does not change his approach, he probably will watch China take Taiwan before his term is over.

 

Supplementing economic sanctions against Russia with military aid to Ukraine, a liberalized energy policy, and massive defense spending will help anchor Biden amid the authoritarian riptide. To press forward, however, he needs to make a robust case for democracy in multiple venues. He needs to rush reinforcements to NATO members such as Poland and Romania, the Baltic States, and Croatia, Albania, and Montenegro. And he needs to live up to his rhetoric of national unity by nominating a Supreme Court justice who will attract GOP votes and inviting national-security officials who have worked for Republicans to join his team.

 

One of the reasons that the West misjudged Putin was our minimization of ideology in world affairs. We tend to believe that everyone is, in the end, like us — they think like us, they want the same things as us. But we are wrong. Putin and Xi Jinping have different belief systems, different values. And these divergent ideas motivate them to pursue horrific ends.

 

Every American president has a responsibility to stand for, speak for, and support the values of political and religious liberty at the heart of our experiment in self-government. The most recent occupants of the Oval Office have not quite lived up to the job. The egregious acts of Vladimir Putin offer President Biden a chance to turn things around. Pray that he seizes this opportunity.

Why the Russians Are Struggling

By Mark Antonio Wright

Saturday, February 26, 2022

 

As the sun goes down in Kyiv, the city has not yet fallen to the Russians. This is unquestionably a defeat for Vladimir Putin.

 

It’s important to not get carried away here: The Kremlin is still favored to win this fight. But the last three days of combat should put a serious dent in the reputation of this new Russian army. We should, however, try to understand why the Russians are struggling. First, the Russian army’s recent structural reforms do not appear to have been sufficient to the task at hand. Second, at the tactical and operational level, the Russians are failing to get the most out of their manpower and materiel advantage.

 

There has been much talk over the last ten years about the Russian army’s modernization and professionalization. After suffering severe neglect in the ’90s, during Russia’s post-Soviet financial crisis, the army began to reorganize and modernize with the strengthening of the Russian economy under Putin. First the army got smaller, at least compared to the Soviet Red Army, which allowed a higher per-soldier funding ratio than in previous eras. The Russians spent vast sums of money to modernize and improve their equipment and kit — everything from new models of main battle tanks to, in 2013, ordering Russian troopers to finally retire the traditional portyanki foot wraps and switch to socks.

 

But the Russians have also gone the wrong direction in some areas. In 2008, the Russian government cut the conscription term from 24 to twelve months. As Gil Barndollar, a former U.S. Marine infantry officer, wrote in 2020:

 

Russia currently fields an active-duty military of just under 1 million men. Of this force, approximately 260,000 are conscripts and 410,000 are contract soldiers (kontraktniki). The shortened 12-month conscript term provides at most five months of utilization time for these servicemen. Conscripts remain about a quarter of the force even in elite commando (spetsnaz) units.

 

As anyone who has served in the military will tell you, twelve months is barely enough time to become proficient at simply being a rifleman. It’s nowhere near enough time for the average soldier to learn the skills required to be an effective small-unit leader.

 

Yes, the Russians have indeed made efforts to professionalize the officer and the NCO corps. Of course, non-commissioned officers (NCOs) have historically been a weakness of the Russian system. In the West, NCOs are the professional, experienced backbone of an army. They are expected to be experts in their military specialty (armor, mortars, infantry, logistics, etc.) and can thus be effective small-unit commanders at the squad and section level, as well as advisers to the commanders at the platoon and company level. In short, a Western army pairs a young infantry lieutenant with a grizzled staff sergeant; a U.S. Marine Corps company commander, usually a captain, will be paired with a gunnery sergeant and a first sergeant. The officer still holds the moral and legal authority and responsibility for his command — but he would be foolish to not listen to the advice and opinion of the unit’s senior NCOs.

 

The Russian army, in practice, does not operate like this. A high proportion of the soldiers wearing NCO stripes in the modern Russian army are little more than senior conscripts near the end of their term of service. In recent years, the Russians have established a dedicated NCO academy and cut the number of officers in the army in an effort to put more resources into improving the NCO corps, but the changes have not been enough to solve the army’s leadership deficit.

 

Now, let’s talk about the Russian failures at the operational and tactical level.

 

It should be emphasized again that the Russian army, through sheer weight of men and materiel, is still likely to win this war. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that the Russians’ operational and tactical choices have not made that task easy on themselves.

 

First, to many observers, it’s simply shocking that the Russians have not been able to establish complete air superiority over Ukrainian air space. After three days of hostilities, Ukrainian pilots are still taking to the skies and Ukrainian anti-air batteries are still exacting a toll on Russian aircraft. The fact that the Russians have not been able to mount a dominant Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) campaign and yet are insistent on attempting contested air-assault operations is, simply put, astounding. It’s also been extremely costly for the Russians.

 

To compound that problem, the Russians have undertaken operations on multiple avenues of advance, which, at least in the early stages of this campaign, are not able to mutually support each other. Until they get much closer to the capital, the Russian units moving north out of Crimea are not able to help the Russian armored columns advancing on Kyiv. The troops pushing towards Kyiv from Belarus aren’t able to affect the Ukrainians defending the Donbas in the east. As the Russians move deeper into Ukraine, this can and will change, but it unquestionably made the opening stages of their operations more difficult.

 

Third, the Russians — possibly out of hubris — do not appear to have prepared the logistical train necessary to keep some of their units in action for an extended period of time. Multiple videos have emerged of Russian columns out of gas and stuck on Ukrainian roads.

 

In the Russians’ defense, everything is hard in war. It’s extremely difficult to keep an army supplied in the field while on the move. What Karl von Clausewitz called “friction” envelops the battlefield. Friction, Clausewitz wrote, is “the concept that differentiates actual war from war on paper.” In combat, friction is what makes “even the simplest thing difficult.” So we shouldn’t be surprised that some Russian units are running low on supplies. What’s surprising is the scale of the Russians’ apparent logistical problems.

 

Finally, and in my opinion, most glaringly, there is the tactical level. There is a strange, counterintuitive law of modern war that says for men to win in a fight against steel and heavy weapons, you must close with the enemy. A corollary to this law is that, if both sides are equipped in a similar manner — in this case, mechanized infantry and tanks — the side that is willing to dismount, get out of its infantry fighting vehicles, and serve as a relatively exposed infantry screen to the armor, is going to have a tremendous tactical advantage. Tanks and armored vehicles are incredibly vulnerable to modern anti-tank missiles. As the Ukrainians have proved, a two- or three-man team armed with a Javelin or NLAW anti-tank-missile system can wreak havoc on a mechanized column if it is allowed to get close enough to make kill shots.

 

This video shows a Ukrainian soldier carrying a British-made NLAW after an engagement with Russian mechanized assets.

 

You can see how light and portable the missile system is. These are deadly serious anti-tank weapons.

 

The key to countering such weapons is to operate as a combined-arms team: Mechanized infantry must be willing to, on a moments notice, receive the order to dismount, leave the perceived safety of an infantry-fighting vehicle, and serve as a screen for the armor. The infantry can neutralize the anti-tank missile teams. The armor can then provide covering fire, supporting the infantry as they move up, while knocking out any heavy weapons a defender might emplace. The point is that the infantry and the armor must work as a team. And this takes trust. And a hell of a lot of training. Because it’s counterintuitive to leave the safety of the vehicle to close with the enemy, you must drill and drill and drill what the U.S. military calls “immediate actions.”

 

Marine Lieutenant Colonel B. P. McCoy described this dynamic in his book The Passion of Command, which documents his battalion’s march to Baghdad in 2003. When 3rd Battalion 4th Marines was ambushed by elements of the Republican Guard on Iraq’s Highway 6, this is how McCoy describes the Marines’ response: “The enemy has initiated contact from as close as 30 meters, peppering the column with small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades” but “Bravo’s infantry platoon comes roaring up in three Armored Amphibious Vehicles (AAVs), slamming to a halt at the edge of the kill zone.”

 

The colonel continues:

 

Their heavy M2 .50 caliber machineguns and Mk-19 40 millimeter automatic grenade launchers open up to cover the Marine infantry rushing down the back ramps of the 26-ton vehicles, as a volley of RPGs is unleashed by the enemy, some sailing high while another ricochets off the hull and spins and hisses on the ground without detonating.

 

What happens next is pure violence, yet elegant in its harmony. Thirty-five US Marines of Kilo Company’s 3rd Platoon rush out of the gloomy confines of their AAVs and into the teeth of the enemy fire. They know nothing of the enemy’s strength or disposition. All they know is that this is a “contact right” battle drill, and this is what we do in “contact right.” Private First Class Dusty Ladendorf, one of the platoon’s riflemen, is less than a year out of high school. In an after-action review he makes this comment on the firefight: “You come out of the back of the track and just do it like you were trained. Execute your battle drill, take cover and fire, cover your buddy’s move, and move yourself when he covers you. Find the enemy, close in on him, and kill him. Keep moving and keep killing, until it’s over.”

 

Allow me to quote a little more from McCoy’s description of the fight:

 

The platoon rushes straight into the teeth of the fire and gains a foothold in the palm grove, taking advantage of the protection provided by every subtle fold in the ground and clod of dirt.

 

An untrained observer may look at this scene and think it no more organized than a riot. Actually, to us it is ferocious poetry. Every weapon system joins the fight, each supporting the other: machineguns, rifles, grenade launchers, and rocket launchers systematically suppress and then kill the enemy. We are now gaining fire superiority. Soon it is for the enemy to question the prospect of survival.

 

To survive and win, this is what mechanized infantry must do in a force-on-force fight. But by all accounts, the Russians appear to be “noticeably reluctant” to dismount and close with the Ukrainian defenders. We should be careful to not paint with too broad of a brush here. There are examples of Russian troops performing well in the fierce combat of the last three days. But there is clearly a pattern developing.

 

This is a morale problem, a training problem, a leadership problem, and a will-to-fight problem. None of these are factors that can be easily or quickly fixed. It takes months of training and trust both across the ranks and up and down the command structure to work effectively. The private must believe that, if he gets out of his vehicle and pushes forward, his mates in the tracks will have his back. Hanging back in perceived safety leads to defeat. Counterintuitively, it makes you more vulnerable to enemy fires.

 

None of this is easy or simple. There’s a reason that every Marine infantryman learns from day one of boot camp that the mission of the rifle squad is to “locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or repel the enemy assault by fire and close combat.”

 

Unfortunately for the Russians as they advance into Kyiv, every part of what I described above becomes immeasurably more important when the terrain transitions from woods, fields, and roads to urban combat in a major city.

 

As I have written before, urban combat is hell. And as the Russians are learning, fire can come from all sides. The fog of war becomes all-enveloping. As nerves are frayed and exhaustion sets in, trigger fingers get touchy. Every window, doorway, and sewer drain is an “aperture” that can house a rifle or a medium machine gun. Streets and buildings constrict the lateral movement of an attacking force. In urban combat, units tend to drift towards the path of least resistance and “easy” avenues of approach such as major roadways — which can play right into the defenders’ hands by funneling the attackers into overlapping fields of fire.

 

It takes tremendous courage and discipline to initiate a “movement to contact” operation in an urban setting. It takes effective communication both within a unit and with the units on your left and right. There can be no shortcuts. Each time a unit crosses a road or moves to a new building, it must set up its movements in the correct sequence: First, an element must possess local security. Then, once local security is achieved, the next element can provide covering fires, achieve fire superiority, and suppress the enemy. Only then can the assault element cross the street without being gunned down. Get the order of operations wrong — and a unit’s flanks will be exposed or the assaulting element will reenact “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

 

As the Marines say, “Movement without suppression is suicide.”

 

The Russians do not appear to be good at the details, and their failures at the operational and tactical levels have made an inherently difficult task much, much harder. This is why they are struggling. It’s why they will now turn to brute force to try to smash their way into the capital.