The View from Right Field

Tanks for Ukraine. A Day Late and a Dollar Short Again? But It Could be Worse.

Ukraine is, at last, getting some tanks.  But consider how long it took for everybody to agree, and it’s going to what even longer for them to finally get delivered.  How much more could Ukraine have accomplished if they had gotten the tanks earlier.  But then, that seems to have been the story all along.  We’re always giving Ukraine weapons three or four months (or longer) after we should have.  We seem to be giving enough weapons to Ukraine so they can stop Russia from winning, but we never give them enough to actually get this war over with. 

There are lots of reasons people give for not giving Ukraine more weapons (and capabilities).  I’ll address two of them.  The first is that Vladimir Putin might escalate to nuclear weapons.  If that is the determining factor, then maybe we ought to stop giving any weapons to Ukraine, because otherwise we are just fighting to the last Ukrainian, without ever giving them a chance to win.  Is that fair?

The Holocaust and “Never Again”. I Wish It Were So, But It Isn’t.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, except people don’t.  After the Holocaust, the pledge was “Never Again” – except it happens again and again.  

Last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal had an article on “The Communities That Risked Everything to Rescue Jews.”  It was a moving article about countries (Denmark, Albania), islands (Zakynthos, a Greek isle), and communities  (the Frenchtown of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon) who protected their Jews. 

But how many people are risking much of anything to protect others today.  Consider Rwanda in 1994.  Think of the “bug out” of Kabul in 2021.  And why did it take the U.S. and Germany so long to finally send tanks to Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin has been deliberately attacking civilians with rockets for months?  Some of those are not genocides (“genocide” is a word too easily thrown around today), but there are still innocent lives being lost that we could be doing something about.

But perhaps the most depressing thing on this Holocaust Remembrance Day may be the fact that the one thing uniting more and more of the far right and far left is hatred of Jews.

Tanks for Ukraine and a “Conversation” Between Biden and Scholz

We have a problem in Ukraine.  Things were going great, but now they’re getting tougher for Ukraine.  There is only so much that Ukrainian grit and Russian incompetence can accomplish.  Also, while we can continue to rely on Ukrainian skill and bravery, we cannot assume Russia will always be stupid.

To shift the odds back in Ukraine’s favor, we need to ship more weapons to Ukraine, especially offensive weapons.  And even more especially tanks.  Nobody (except, of  course, countries like Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, who understand what Russia can do, because it has done it to them) has wanted to send tanks to Ukraine.  But that is changing.  The UK is sending some Challenger tanks.  The United States says Abrams tanks are too complicated for the Ukrainians to use and maintain, etc.  Germany doesn’t want to send its Leopard 2 tanks either.  While Germany has never wanted to send tanks (they claim they don’t want to escalate the war.  Huh?  Russia invaded eleven months ago and is now sending mass rocket attacks at Ukrainian civilians,  And it would be the Germans who would be escalating?), they are now using the argument that they won’t send tanks unless the United States will, too.

Thoughts of One and a Half Dozen of the Other*

It’s getting hard to write longer posts these days, so here are some short thoughts that I wish I could develop further but haven’t been able to get to:

• Re Ukraine: Joe Biden is doing a pretty good job, certainly better than either of his predecessors (especially Barack Obama, who wouldn’t even sell antitank weapons to Ukraine after Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Donbas in 2014).  But President Biden could be doing better.  We need to sell/give the Ukrainians more weapons and more powerful weapons.  The best, and quickest, way to end the war is for Ukraine to win.  Let’s help them do it – now.

• Given all the weapons we are shipping to Ukraine, we need to replenish, and build up, our own inventories.  That means spending more money on defense – and committing to do it for an extended period of time.

Are the Sanctions Against Russia Working?

The Economist asked this question in its August 27 issue.  The answer was equivocal:

“On a three- to five-year horizon isolation from Western markets will cause havoc in Russia. …

The trouble is that the knockout blow has not materialised. Russia’s GDP will shrink by 6% in 2022, reckons the IMF, much less than the 15% drop many expected in March, or the slump in Venezuela. Energy sales will generate a current-account surplus of $265bn this year, the world’s second-largest after China. After a crunch, Russia’s financial system has stabilised ….

It turns out the sanctions weapon has flaws.” 

Helping Europe Stand Up to Putin’s Blackmail – Is Helping Us, Too

Chris Giles wrote in the Financial Times last Wednesday on how Europe could withstand a Russian cutoff of natural gas deliveries this winter.¹  Basically, it requires product substitution (products requiring lots of natural gas in their production should be made elsewhere), more coal needs to be used for power in the short run, Germany needs to not shut down their three remaining nuclear power plants, etc.  Starting in January, ships that can liquify liquid natural gas (LNG) for Germany will go online. 

Which got me thinking: What are we doing to help out in this situation?  If LNG can help, what are we doing to increase our exports of LNG?  Obviously, we should have already been doing things like this, but it’s not too late to start now.  We just need to hurry.  We need to not get caught up in permitting delays and environmentalist objections.  This is a war.  We need to do what is necessary to win it.  It won’t take that long.  Maybe a year or two.  We can still meet our environmental goals.  But right now, we need to not let Vladimir Putin get away with blackmail and intimidation – and war.²
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¹ Chris Giles. “Europe can withstand a winter recession,” Financial Times, August 10, 2022.  (Behind the FT paywall.)
² In any case, anybody who thinks Vladimir Putin cares about climate change is silly.

Gaffes, Red Lines, and Credibility

[This is a follow up and elaboration on my post of March 26, 2022.¹ ]

In the 2020 presidential election, I didn’t vote for Joe Biden even though I wanted Donald Trump to lose.  I couldn’t bring myself to vote for President Biden because, as Robert Gates said in 2014, “I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”^2,3  Fortunately, I live in Illinois, so my vote was not necessary for President Biden to win Illinois’s electoral votes. 

Which brings me to President Biden’s recent “gaffe tour” of Europe.  Michel Kinsley famously defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."  President Biden gave us two great examples of this on his trip.  First, he said, apparently unscripted, that Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal.”  That is probably true, but how is it helpful?  We need to get the war in Ukraine over.  How does making Vladimir Putin think he might be prosecuted as a war criminal help do that?⁴

In 2013, John Kerry Said Assad “Has to Go.” In 2022, Joe Biden Said Putin “Cannot Remain in Power.”

On February 25, 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ‘has to go.”  Nine years later, John Kerry is gone, but President Assad is still in power.  Today, President Biden said, “For God’s sake, this man [i.e., Vladimir Putin] cannot remain in power.” 

Since President Biden said President Putin “cannot remain in power,” I hope he means it, and I hope he knows how he is going to get it done.  Because this is not something you say, unless you both mean it and know how you are going to accomplish it.

Covid-19. Ukraine. Do We Ever Learn Anything?

When Covid-19, then known as the coronavirus, hit in early 2020, we weren’t ready.  We didn’t have enough personal protective equipment, our medical systems were inadequate, the plans we had for pandemics didn’t work, etc.  Things were a mess.  On April 26, 2020, I wrote a long post entitled “Preparing for the ‘Next’ Coronavirus – Whatever It Is. But Will We?”  But the post was not talking about just the next virus.  It was asking about the next emergency, the next disaster, the next big problem, whatever it was.  In the conclusion of my post, I said this:

“Robustness.  Resiliency.  Nimbleness.  These are what we need if we are to be ready for the emergencies and disasters that will happen, though we don’t know which ones or when.  Most of all, however, we need leaders who understand the importance of these qualities and who can provide the leadership to help us secure them and maintain them.”

“I Need Ammunition, Not a Ride.” And Other Comments on America and Ukraine

If there is a contest for quote of the year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has already won it with his response to America’s offer to fly him out of the country (or maybe to Lviv, in far western Ukraine, I’m not sure) after the Russian invasion started.  Maybe we thought he would want to leave, like Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani did when we abandoned Afghanistan.  But President Zelensky didn’t.  Which leads to my first comment:

1. Just like in Afghanistan, our intelligence in Ukraine was really bad.  In Afghanistan, we thought the government could last for months after we left.  Instead, it collapsed before we were even gone.  It was a total intelligence failure.

     It was much the same in Ukraine, except in the opposite direction.  While we got it right that Russia was going to invade, we were totally wrong about how well the Russian army would do and we were totally wrong about how well the Ukrainian army would defend its country.  We saw the Russian army as experienced and well-equipped, and we thought they would roll over the Ukrainians.  We saw the Ukrainian army as weak and unprepared, and we thought they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the Russians.  Both of these were wrong, and that was important because those intelligence failures may have affected our policy choices.