Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Republicans in disarray!

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

This really is a full service blog.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

No one could have predicted…

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

The revolution will be supervised.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

T R E 4 5 O N

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War for Ukraine Update 43: Centers of Gravity

War for Ukraine Update 43: Centers of Gravity

by | 88 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

(Image by Olga Wilson; found here)

The US military defines center of gravity (COG) as:

The source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom
of action, or will to act. Also called COG. See also decisive point. (JP 5-0)

Well that certainly clears things up! So let’s go to Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Planning for clarification:

(1) One of the most important tasks confronting the JFC’s staff during planning
is identifying and analyzing the COGs of friendly, enemy, and adversary forces. The COG
is the source of power or strength that enables a military force to achieve its objective
and is what an opposing force can orient its actions against that will lead to enemy
failure. COGs are determined by their impact on the military end state. Success requires
protecting the friendly COG while defeating the enemy COG.

(a) COGs can exist at different levels. At the strategic level, a COG could
be a military force, an alliance, political or military leaders, a set of critical capabilities or
functions, or national will. At the operational level, a COG is often associated with the
threat’s military capabilities such as a powerful element of the armed forces but could
include other capabilities in the OE.

(b) COGs may change in time as the strategic environment or OE changes
due to shifts in friendly, neutral, or threat, diplomatic, information, military and/or
economic/commercial conditions or objectives. A force’s will to fight, for example, may
increase or decrease throughout the course of an operation with dramatic impact on the
joint force’s success. Similarly, victories or defeats may cause adversaries or enemies to
reassess objectives or strategies that can alter the COG.

(2) COGs exist in an adversarial context involving a clash of moral wills and/or
physical strengths. COGs do not exist in a strategic or operational vacuum; they are formed
out of the relationships between adversaries and enemies. They define COGs through their
unique view of the threats in the strategic environment and OE as well the requirements to
develop and maintain power relative to their own objectives. Commanders, therefore, must
not only consider their threat’s COGs but they must also identify and protect their own.

Everything clear and everyone tracking now? Good!

In the battle for Kyiv, as it is being referred to, Kyiv was the center of gravity that Russia needed to take. As we’ve discussed in previous posts, Putin needed to take Kyiv for two reasons. He had to take Kyiv because the alternate history and BS mythology about Russia’s origins and place in the world that he’s bought into and promotes required it. And he had to take it to install his quislings who would immediately capitulate to him on live TV. So Kyiv became the center of gravity rather than the Ukrainian military in the central part of Ukraine.

In the south and east he’s got the same problem. He’s currently got the Ukrainian military in the east, the Joint Force Operation (JFO), exposed in a salient (please see last night’s post for the map indicating this) and right now its a race between the Ukrainians and the Russians. The Ukrainians need to get their reinforcements to and resupply the JFO and get their lines fixed so they can’t be easily encircled. The Russians need to get the personnel and equipment they pulled out of Kyiv Oblast, as well as new personnel and equipment coming from Russia and other places within Russia’s sphere of influence, through Belarus and Russia to their new positions.

The JFO should be the focus of the Russian attack in the east; the center of gravity that needs to be destroyed. However, because Putin wants a land bridge and to close Ukraine off from accessing both the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, he has to take Mariupol and Odesa. He also has to take Mariupol because that’s where the Azov Battalion is and he hates those guys and needs to capture them and parade them around to prove the Ukrainians are NAZIs. He has to take Odesa in order to establish his land bridge and cut Ukraine off from both the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. And this means he also has to take Mariupol for solely geographic strategy reasons, as well as Mykolaiv. So as was the case in regard to Kyiv, he’s created two additional centers of gravity for his military to focus on. Both of which make less sense as theater strategic military targets as long as the Ukrainian JFO is still intact and operating. They are, however, of huge importance in the socio-political and socio-cultural narrative Putin’s created regarding Russia, Ukraine, their relationship to each other, and the war.

Now we wait to see who wins the race.

Here’s the British MOD’s assessment from earlier today:

And here’s the British MOD’s latest mapping based on their GEOINT:

As you can see, the Russian movement in the east is towards attacking the contested area between Luhansk and Izium. Because that’s where the JFO is exposed in a salient. At the same time, they’re also moving towards Mariupol, Melitipol, Mykolaiv, and Kherson. Rather than focusing their landpower on one center of gravity, the Russians have divided it to pursue multiple ones.

Much more after the jump.

Belarus:

Borodyanka:

Mariupol:

Ivankiv:

Bucha:

The school of realpolitik has thoughts!

I never had much use for International Relations theory. I thought it was far too normative and what it was describing quickly fell apart when it made contact with actual reality. As an experienced national security professional, I find the realists and realpolitik to be even more useless based on experience. Professor Radchenko has looked at what Russia is doing to Ukraine, which is genocide, and decided that the real tragedy of Putin’s attempting to wipe Ukraine, Ukrainians, and Ukrainianness off the map and out of existence is not any of that, but that negotiations have stopped! That the result will mean more death and destruction and that negotiations must be restarted and a deal made. Doesn’t matter what the deal is. Doesn’t matter that at this point any deal that isn’t “Russia has lost, it is out of all occupied Ukrainian land, Russia is paying to rebuild everything and paying out a whole bunch of reparations for war dead, and a whole bunch of Russian civilian and military leaders are going to The Hague ASAP” gives Putin a win. Professor Radchenko, who is also a Kissinger Fellow, is pushing the realpolitik.

Those of us paying attention to reality know something that realpolitik and Professor Radchenko don’t. That as I type this Putin, his spokesman, his Ministry of Foreign Affairs, his ambassador to the UN, and every other part of the Russian government and Russian state owned media are all claiming that none of these atrocities happened. That if they did happen they’re a hoax undertaken by actors paid by the Ukrainian government. That if it they are not a hoax, then the Ukraininan military did it to make the Russians look bad. That it is all of these things at once. Professor Radchenko is interested in negotiations for the sake of negotiation, which is just silly. Those of us paying attention to reality know that until/unless the Ukrainians are able to inflict enough pain on the Russians to both achieve a successful termination on the battlefield and do so in a way that establishes the conditions to secure/win the post war peace, there is nothing to negotiate. Because all negotiations are is a way for Putin to weaponize diplomacy, drag things out, and continue to obliterate Ukraine.

This is a far better description of reality in regard to Russian’s reinvasion of Ukraine and attempted genocide:

2/7 The big picture is Putin’s invasion. In Nuremberg, political and military leaders were tried, convicted, and hanged for planning and waging wars of aggression. While there can be debate about details, there can be no debate on whether Putin is guilty of a war of aggression.

3/7 Also, civilians have been killed by the thousands in Ukrainian cities. They are buried under rubble and we cannot see them, but they are no less dead than the corpses on the streets of Bucha. Putin must be condemned for his crimes, not for making us feel bad.

4/7 Russian state-controlled media has made it explicit that Russians had planned an ethnocide and genocide in Ukraine. This is not just a war of conquest but a war of annihilation. The aim was a cultural and physical destruction of Ukrainians.

5/7 If Ukraine had surrendered, we would be looking at an industrial-scale massacre right now. This is what Russians had been planning for. I hope all appeasers and peace doves gradually understand this. Русский мир, peace with Putin, would mean more – not less – dead people.

6/7 Russia must be defeated militarily also in the east and south of Ukraine. The alternative is not something we want to live with. Ukraine needs heavy weaponry and long-range weaponry right now.

7/7 A military defeat is the only realistic way to bring Putin down in Russia. The Russian population is largely zombified and supports the war. What Russian tyrants do not survive is military defeat and humiliation.

The US sanctioned Putin’s and Lavrov’s daughters today.

WASHINGTON, April 6 (Reuters) – The United States’ latest round of sanctions on Russia includes two new targets: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s two adult daughters, Katerina and Maria, who U.S. officials believe are hiding Putin’s wealth.

Putin’s daughter Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova is a tech executive whose work supports the Russian government and its defense industry, according to details in the U.S. sanctions package announced on Wednesday.

His other daughter Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova leads government-funded programs that have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin toward genetics research, and are personally overseen by Putin, the United States said.

“We have reason to believe that Putin, and many of his cronies, and the oligarchs, hide their wealth, hide their assets, with family members that place their assets and their wealth in the U.S. financial system, and also many other parts of the world,” a senior U.S. administration official told reporters.

“We believe that many of Putin’s assets are hidden with family members, and that’s why we’re targeting them,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Reuters was not immediately able to reach Putin’s daughters, their representatives or the Kremlin for comment.

Sanctions announced Wednesday also include the daughter and wife of Russian foreign affairs minister Sergei Lavrov. The U.S. also banned Americans from investing in Russia, and targeted Russian financial institutions and Kremlin officials, in response to what President Joe Biden condemned as Russian “atrocities” in Ukraine. read more

More at the link!

And here are some very passionate words from Guy Verhofstadt a Belgian Member of the European Parliament:

The FBI has, apparently, disrupted a network of Russian hackers:

WASHINGTON, April 6 (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has wrested control of thousands of routers and firewall appliances away from Russian military hackers by hijacking the same infrastructure Moscow’s spies were using to communicate with the devices, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

An unsealed redacted affidavit described the unusual operation as a pre-emptive move to stop Russian hackers from mobilizing the compromised devices into a “botnet” – a network of hacked computers that can bombard other servers with rogue traffic.

“Fortunately, we were able to disrupt this botnet before it could be used,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said.

The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

The targeted botnet was controlled through malware called Cyclops Blink, which U.S. and UK cyberdefense agencies had publicly attributed in late February to “Sandworm,” allegedly one of the Russian military intelligence service’s hacking teams that has repeatedly been accused of carrying out cyberattacks.

Cyclops Blink was designed to hijack devices made by WatchGuard Technologies Inc (WTCHG.UL) and ASUSTeK Computer Inc (2357.TW), according to research by private cybersecurity firms. It provides Russian services with access to those compromised systems, offering the ability to remotely exfiltrate or delete data or turn the devices against a third party.

More at the link!

The Guardian has a report of Russian students recording and then turning in their teacher for speaking about what is going on in Ukraine:

When Irina Gen, a 55-year-old English and German language teacher in the Russian city of Penza, embarked on an anti-war speech in her classroom, little did she know she was being recorded by her own students.

“I just wanted to broaden my students’ worldview. I hoped to break through the propaganda that is being fed to this country. But look where it got me,” said Gen, who faces a long-term prison sentence for “discrediting” the Russian army after her message went viral.

On 18 March, Gen’s 13- and 14-year-old students asked her why Russian athletes were banned from participating in international competitions – a decision by the west that she said she tried to put in context.

“Until Russia starts to behave in a civilised manner, the non-admission of Russian athletes to competitions will continue forever … I think that is correct,” she said in the audio, which was first shared by Kremlin-linked Telegram channels. “Russia wanted to reach Kyiv and overthrow the government! Ukraine is, in fact, a sovereign state, there is a sovereign government … We are living in a totalitarian regime. Any dissent is considered a crime.”

Gen also voiced her disapproval of the way Russian state media framed the bombing of a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol as a Ukrainian-style provocation.

Five days after her anti-war remarks to students, she got a call from the local FSB branch telling her to come to their office, where she was informed security agencies had received the footage of her speaking out in class.

“I was shocked. I had no idea I was being recorded,” Gen recalled. “I told the prosecutors that I wasn’t lying. That I was merely citing respected western outlets like AP and BBC, outlets that I believe are professional and objective in their reporting,” Gen said. “But, of course, that wasn’t really an argument they would accept.”

At the end of last month, Russian prosecutors announced they had opened a criminal case against Gen under a recently introduced law that criminalises the spread of so-called fake news about the Russian army.

Prosecutors specifically took issue with the statements Gen made about the Mariupol maternity ward. She has since been banned from leaving the country, and her lawyer said she faced up to 10 years in jail if found guilty.

Russia has launched an unprecedented crackdown on anti-war sentiments and Gen’s case is one of at least four that are known about in which teachers who criticised the war were either fired or prosecuted after students complained about them to their parents and the authorities.

“I am simply being prosecuted for a viewpoint that isn’t the official one. My family already went once through a denunciation campaign in the Soviet Union,” Gen said referring to Stalin’s great purge in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens denounced their neighbours, friends and relatives as “enemies of the state”.

Much more at the link! Also, coming soon to a Florida classroom near you!

Last night, in the first comment, Martin asked me a question about fascism. I indicated I’d try to answer tonight. I’m going to beg forgiveness and push that answer to tomorrow as tonight’s update post is long enough as it is. Also, I’m not done ruminating on his excellent question.

We’ll end with a kitty:

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

88Comments

  2. 2.

    Fair Economist

    I am really disappointed in the international response to the Bucha massacre (now being revealed to be just one of many). Sanctioning 2 banks and 2 of Putin’s daughters, really?

    If Europe *really* can’t stop using Russian fossil fuels, then they should at least send Ukraine as much money as they send Russia. Although that might make them realize they *could* stop using Russian fuels.

  3. 3.

    Carlo Graziani

    Wow. Mil-nerd moment. I hadn’t realized that US DOD had bastardized Clausewitz’s Schwerpunkt to this extent.  “COG”, eh?  I found an article explaining the mutation history of the variant here.

  4. 4.

    Mike in DC

    @Fair Economist: 

    It does appear that public opinion in Germany is shifting strongly in the direction of cutting off Russian oil and gas purchases sooner than later. They would take a GDP hit, but it’s very survivable for an economy as robust as theirs.

  5. 5.

    West of the Rockies

    The soldier who shot the girl in the legs–and his laughing wife…  what are their names?  What sort of horrid children will they raise?  They need to be outed and made internet pariahs.

  6. 6.

    Carlo Graziani

    As to “inflict enough pain on the Russians” I agree with you. I simply disagree that this is possible on the battlefield in Ukraine. In my opinion (but I am accustomed to being wrong) the Ukrainian army should regard a military stalemate/standoff as a victory. The reason being that NATO can resupply them essentially indefinitely, whereas Russia is watching that progress bar dwindle into the red.

    Meanwhile, the real pain—far, far more than can be inflicted on any battlefield—is coming due in Russia, because of sanctions. Not so much because of revenue loss, but because of economic shocks—supply-chain shocks due to missing key industrial inputs removed by export controls, capital shocks from seized assets. Think “can’t buy toilet paper in May 2020”, except now it’s cans of cabbage, and it’s September 2022, and it’s all over Russia.

    I know how frustrating this is. And how awful for the people trapped behind the lines of the Russian Army. And how much we’d like to vanish them. I feel it too.

    But I honestly don’t think we can expect to see daylight on timescales of days, or weeks. Months is more like it.

  7. 7.

    JAFD

    Salutations, Mr. Silverman, and many thanks for four work.

    If I may make a request:  Could you add a link to the original British MoD maps ?  Am an old man, would like to be able to view them at 200%-300% of the size in your post, without the small print getting ‘fuzzy’.

    Thanks very much for considering this.

  8. 8.

    Martin

    No sweat, Adam. Take your time on that one.

    I wanted to respond to ThatLeftTurnInABQ, who I thought gave a great comment last night. I would have responded last night, but midway through my comment my internet decided it didn’t want to be.

    I thought the comments on Communism needing to be defeated economically and Fascism militarily made a lot of sense.

    I’d thought a strategy of containment a reasonable solution because it leverages the strengths of the west (economic) and being a tool we didn’t possess 80 years ago, along with military superiority we didn’t possess 80 years ago, gave us better options today. It’s not a solution to Russia, just a NK style isolation and we wait them out until they decide on their own regime change. Not a fan of overthrowing governments. Hard to preach the benefits of democracy when you do that. So, basically there is no satisfactory resolution here, which makes sense as we could never find one to NK. But where does that leave us with domestic fascist movements? I don’t know that defeating the axis powers successfully quashed those domestic movements in WWII, but it sure seems that way. Just trying to figure out how to square todays circle.

  9. 9.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Carlo Graziani: Over 2/3rds of the countries on the planet are not participating in the sanctions and economic measures. Putin has plenty of ways to evade them. But you don’t want to accept that they’re not going to work because you need them to work.

  11. 11.

    YY_Sima Qian

    I find IR theories (some more than others) can offer useful framework for thinking about strongly influential dynamics that drive complex interstate relations, but they are also limited & certainly not immutable laws that IR theorists often present them as. (Which equally applies to economics & other “dismal” social “sciences”.)

    My reading of history is that states more often than not are strongly (but not exclusively) motivated by realist self-interest. Realism pervaded even that ultimate titanic struggle between “good” & “evil” (or so perceived) & its aftermath. The whole alliance w/ Stalin against Hitler was a realist move, one can hardly argue Stalin was obviously less evil than Hitler. So was allowing the USSR to rule over Eastern Europe post-war, allowing Stalin to wantonly redraw borders & rearrange ethno-demography in Eastern Europe (& ethnic cleansing by Eastern European states of their ethnic Germany populations). Likewise the alliance w/ the ROC against Imperial Japan, as Chiang Kai-Shek’s Fascist-Leninist KMT regime was pretty comparable to Mussolini’s in domestic governance. Or the US giving amnesty to the Japanese doctors or the notorious Unit 731, so that it can access the data on biological warfare, collected from conducting experiments on Chinese POWs & civilians. Likewise the de facto alliance w/ Mao’s China (still in the throes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) against the USSR in the 70s, allying with the Islamic fundamentalists (including jihadis from the ME) in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, China/US/Thailand uniting the disparate opposition forces (from the royalists to the notorious Khmer Rouge) against the Vietnamese domination of Cambodia. It is driving policy even now, allying w/ India (w/ Modi’s illiberalism & ethno-nationalism) & Vietnam (nominally Communist, hard authoritarian regime) against China,. Allying w/ the Islamic fundamentalists against Assad in Syria, allying w/ the theocratic Gulf States against theocratic Iran.

    Of course, realism (or any IR theory) do often break down in reality, because states are also motivated by other factors, & often their realist impulses are mixed w/ and/or justified by moralistic/Messianic impulses, like Athens & Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, Chinese dynasties’ Sino-Centric system in E/SE Asia, European colonialism, the US’ & Tsarist Russia’s respective marches to the Pacific. Professor Radchenko’s pleadings are futile given the current status of the war in Ukraine, because realism is not the main motivating force behind Putin’s actions right now. (Adam have argued not since at least 2008.)

    I guess I am personally rather allergic to moralistic arguments, because I do not see state actors as viable vehicles for such enterprises. They have not demonstrated the ability to behave morally w/ any kind of consistency, & when morality conflicts w/ perceived realist self-interest, realism generally wins. Furthermore, I find states that act on self-proclaimed moral authority (be it unilaterally or “mini”-laterally) to be frightening forces for destruction, when mixed w/ militarism.

  12. 12.

    Martin

    @Fair Economist: That won’t be the whole response. These things take time.

    And in fairness, I doubt that came as a shock to any western nation. It’ll be used within the alliance to build support for sanctions, embargoes, expanding weapon deliveries, etc.

  13. 13.

    oldster

    Interesting about the FBI shutting down some hacking networks. Good news, too.

    It seems pretty clear to me that Ukraine’s success so far has had a lot to do with superior electronic warfare and remote intelligence gathering. Some of that comes from access to US/NATO Intel sources. Some of it comes from Ukraine’s domestic software community.

    But part of it, I suspect, comes from the fact that Russia can no longer profit from the huge gift that Snowden gave them in 2013, which they were then able to use in the 2014 invasion of Crimea.

    Snowden’s betrayal gave the Russian Intel agencies a huge leap forward, and was a huge gut-punch to Western Intel. In my opinion, he has the blood of Bucha on his hands, as well as having facilitated the installation of Trump into the white house. For this and much more I hope he rots in hell.

    But the US Intel community seems to have regrouped, along with help from friendly Intel communities in allied countries.

    And Russia has not kept up, perhaps in part because they had a few years of easy pickings and got lazy.

    I hope that we and our friends continue to win the hacking wars.

  14. 14.

    Mallard Filmore

    DailyKos has a posting that includes this:

    the Russians may have their own solution to the “problem” of their war-crime’ing rampaging hordes:

    That link under “their own solution” is this:

    https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-5

    … an unconfirmed Ukrainian military intelligence report suggests that Moscow could soon send the 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, a unit that reportedly committed war crimes in Bucha, into the fight in eastern Ukraine in the hopes that guilty members of that brigade and witnesses of its war crimes are killed in combat with Ukrainian forces. …

    While I hope that is correct, and understand why Russia might do this, it will not help.  There are too many units involved with activities like this in every combat area.  The perversions of the soldiers is too widespread.

  15. 15.

    YY_Sima Qian

    An interesting development on Chinese social media: fairly open discussion of the war crimes committed by Russia at Bucha & other places are being allowed. Certainly there are still “key opinion leaders” that have always been in the tank for Putin arguing that these are actually Ukrainian purge of residents who collaborated w/ the Russians, but there are plenty also who are appalled & disgusted by the actions of the Russian Army (which then remind people of the Red Army’s appallingly indisciplined behavior toward the local population in Manchuria, after crushing Imperial Japan’s Kwantung Army at the end of WW II), & comments describing Russia as the unjustified aggressor are starting to appear more frequently. While state media have continued to studiously avoid the subject, it must be a conscious decision on the state censor’s part to allow such open discussion for so long. No one is sure what it means, yet, if anything.

  16. 16.

    Martin

    @Mallard Filmore: I have a hard time understanding why Russia would give a shit about war crimes. You don’t suddenly grow a conscience at this stage of the game.

  19. 19.

    oldster

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    “…when morality conflicts w/ perceived realist self-interest, realism generally wins. Furthermore, I find states that act on self-proclaimed moral authority (be it unilaterally or “mini”-laterally) to be frightening forces for destruction, when mixed w/ militarism.”

    I agree with all of this, and I would extend it to corporations as well: they sometimes make noises about ethics and responsibility, but shareholder value always wins. Corporations can act amorally or immorally; pretending they can act morally is just facilitating the plunder.

    But can I ask you to clarify — does your last paragraph say that no nation ever acts in other than self-interested ways (they may claim to be acting on moral grounds, but it’s a lie), or that some nations sometimes do act in other than self-interested ways, but when they do it often produces more harm than good?

    Either view would suggest that when a nation announces that it’s on a humanitarian crusade, everyone else should back away slowly and look for rocks to throw. But there’s a difference between liars and madmen, even if neither can be trusted.

  20. 20.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Martin: Some of the straddlers that is helping Russia to avoid total economic isolation (China, India, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, rest of the Global South) might care, at least to some degree.

  22. 22.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Martin: They just changed their laws to make war crimes legal. No one else is going to buy it, or, at least no one in the West, but they did it.

  25. 25.

    Mallard Filmore

    @Martin: I mostly agree.  If this really happens it would be a very temporary PR move that will get swamped when Ukraine liberates more cities.

  26. 26.

    John Revolta

    in response to what President Joe Biden condemned as Russian “atrocities” in Ukraine.

    Some nice mealymouthed crap there from Reuters……

  27. 27.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @oldster: It’s both, but I think cynical liars far outnumber madmen. Clearly there was nothing realistic about HItler’s mad vision, fighting a 2 front war against the UK, the US & the USSR was a obviously suicidal from a realist perspective. It’s not like there was not a recent example in WW I. I used to think Putin is a realist actor, but events of the Ukraine War & Adam’s analysis have convinced me that is not the case. I do believe the CCP regime is hardcore realist.

  28. 28.

    PJ

    @Martin: I don’t buy these arguments – we let fascism be in Spain because it wasn’t a threat to European (or American order).  We opted for containment against the Soviets post-WWII because we didn’t have the stomach for another world war right after we’d finished another, and Europe was in ruins.  The people of Central and Eastern Europe might have been better off in the long run if we’d rolled all the way to Moscow, as Patton suggested, but in the short run, there would have been probably tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more dead US soldiers, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more dead Europeans.

  30. 30.

    Mallard Filmore

    @YY_Sima Qian: 

    Some of the straddlers that is helping Russia to avoid total economic isolation (China, India, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, rest of the Global South) might care, at least to some degree.

    India is starting down that road. Google puts India’s reaction at the top of a hit list:
    https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=india+ukraine

    A sample:
    https://www.reuters.com/world/india-condemns-killings-ukraines-bucha-apparent-hardening-stance-2022-04-05/

  31. 31.

    Kent

    @YY_Sima Qian: I tend to agree with you.

    That is why Western opposition to what is happening in Ukraine will likely need to find it source in the understanding that not stopping Putin now threatens all the other border states from Finland down to Romania.  Rather than emotional reactions to atrocities.

    In effect, what Putin has done is given the west a once-in-a-generation opportunity to neuter him if not eliminate him.    What remains to be seen is if the west has the courage to make it happen.

  34. 34.

    Kattails

    deleted, I’m just sick. The shooting kids in the legs for fun… I have no response that’s civilized.

  36. 36.

    wetzel

    There is an attack today in information space on the 64th Rifle Brigade, the officer corps. All of their home addresses in Russia are mapped through passport information. I think this approach functions to historicize evidence if these officers are issued subpoenas immediately by the International Criminal Court. This way the court prevents a socially activated lynch mob which would be replied to with stochastic terrorism within the West.

    Russia has badly misjudged. How did this happen? Establishment of terror will occur in both China and Russia. Their economic and military power imbalance makes Russia the cat’s paw. Russia will be made to draw the West into reciprocal violence in order to make the West fascist. From the perspective of homeostatic terror in China, the most ideal scenario would be for the United States to commit genocide on Russia. I do not know if FSB has modeled their future properly as a Chinese tributary.

    They need to start playing Country Roads in China if they love the song so much. It just has four chords. It’s the easiest song in the world. It is a beautiful song. It has symbolic meaning for many Americans and supposedly for many Chinese people to.

  38. 38.

    Ksmiami

    @Kattails: unfortunately Russia has turned into a deranged fascist cesspool and needs a complete redo. There will be no peace until the country is defeated and then rebuilt.

  39. 39.

    PJ

    @Kattails: That’s good of you, but there are many American wives, right now, who would be totally fine if their husbands had shot children of the wrong persuasion once open season was declared.  White people turned out in droves for lynchings, and I bet most of the wives of the men who committed similar or worse acts of terror in the South thought it was absolutely the right thing to do.

  41. 41.

    Medicine Man

    @oldster: Yeah, I wonder how that schmuck Snowden is doing these days? Keeping his head down hoping not to get roped into acting as a propaganda asset – a modern day Tokyo Rose?

  42. 42.

    gene108

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    Some of the straddlers that is helping Russia to avoid total economic isolation (China, India, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, rest of the Global South) might care, at least to some degree.

    Outside of China, none of the other countries have significant trade with Russia.

    Russia’s major trading partners are China and Europe.

    The issue is will those countries try to fill the trade losses imposed by sanctions, or do they even have the ability to fill those losses.

  43. 43.

    oldster

    @Kent:

    “…Western opposition… will likely need to find it source in… all the other border states from Finland down to Romania.”

    Agreed. Poland, Finland, Sweden, Czechia, they are dead serious because they know they are next in line if Putin takes Ukraine.

    Germany and France, to their shame, are still floundering in some kumbaya dream that Russia can be sweet-talked into good behavior.

    I don’t know what it will take to sober them up. I’m afraid it will involve many more atrocities.

    Add to their naivete a fair degree of corruption and complicity — they have profited from petro-largesse, and don’t want to kick the habit.

    The UK, too, is in hock to Russian money, and has allowed Putin’s agents to infiltrate all levels of society and government. Which is why I am slightly perplexed — though pleased — that Bojo has leaned in to arming Ukraine. Given his degree of complicity with Russian money, I would have expected him to do less.

  44. 44.

    Redshift

    @Adam L Silverman:

    They just changed their laws to make war crimes legal. No one else is going to buy it, or, at least no one in the West, but they did it. 

    Well, that should smooth the path to the ICC. The offending country ordinarily is given the opportunity to prosecute war crimes by their forces first, but since they’ve openly established that they’re not going to do that, the Court can just skip that part.

  45. 45.

    wetzel

    There is no ‘knowing’ Chinese ‘intention’. There is no individual to blame. There is a bureaucratic unconsciousness. There is a bubbling up of a worldwide sacrificial crisis that has a strange attractor quality towards a crisis of degree where as a binary or three part system the world resolves to totalitarian forms of government through the eschatological formation of terror through application of genocide programmatically to create the phenomenology of the moral universe of totalitarian fascism which is pornographic atrocity. The destruction of symbolic consciousness in humanity will ensure homeostatic equilibrium under terror beneath a bureaucratic, analytical, panoptic state where fuel is the greater fuel than blood, so it is a crime to retrieve fallen comrades. This is a very dark view. I am sane. I have worked hard in philosophy, but I don’t have all the answers. I feel strongly that this view is justified. It’s not a matter of assigning blame to this or that. It’s Godzilla monster. Everybody needs to have soul about this if humanity is going to survive in a civilized order. What I mean is try to keep a humanistic perspective and try to understand the phenomenology of other people’s experience. It has a structure in unconscious they do not deserve all of the blame for.

  46. 46.

    oldster

    @PJ:

    “Nobody, not an individual, and not a state, was ever motivated by “realism.””

    I’m confused. Realism is the theory that agents are motivated by self-interest (and that alone).

    Realism is not the theory that agents are motivated by realism.

    Who thinks people are motivated by realism?

  47. 47.

    Fair Economist

    @Adam L Silverman:

    But it can be trans-shipped through them.

    Depends on the item. European car manufacturers aren’t going to be sending components to shell companies in Ghana. Many more can be trans-shipped to some extent, but the amounts Russia will need to function fully become traceable. And it all raises costs substantially – for the extra shipping, for the crooked middlemen, and for all the extra delays (good luck double shipping in the current worldwide shipping backlog).

  48. 48.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @gene108: Not even China can fill the gap, since China purchases Russian gas at lower prices than Europe, & will likely get even lower. However, I think Putin would really like to believe, & wants to convince the Russian people, that what they are facing is a Western conspiracy to keep Russia down.

  49. 49.

    Fair Economist

    @oldster:

    The UK, too, is in hock to Russian money, and has allowed Putin’s agents to infiltrate all levels of society and government. Which is why I am slightly perplexed — though pleased — that Bojo has leaned in to arming Ukraine. Given his degree of complicity with Russian money, I would have expected him to do less.

    IMO Bojo is playing a dangerous game. Supporting the Ukrainians so aggressively helps throw British voters off the stench of Russian support for his party. And, possibly, he’s hoping Putin will get tossed and so will never be able to call in what Bojo owes him.

    It’s also possible Bojo is working more for the oligarchs who subsidize him, who have markedly different interest from Putin at this point.

  50. 50.

    Medicine Man

    @Adam L Silverman: Adam, do you think there is any chance that heavier weapons, long-range weapons, or even advisers are on the way to Ukraine and we’re not hearing about it?

    Apologies if I asked the question before; been on my mind. The Russians did all their bullshit with “little green men” after all…

  51. 51.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @PJ:

    Nobody, not an individual, and not a state, was ever motivated by “realism.”

    I am not following you. I agree that no one is ever solely motivated by realist self, & their calculations of self-interest can be short-sighted, myopic & unrealistic, but are you saying no one is ever motivated by self-interest?

  52. 52.

    Fair Economist

    Another issue will be the dependence of a number of mostly Middle Eastern countries on Russian and Ukrainian food. Right now Russia is blockading Ukraine and embargoing its own shipments. Most of those countries will start running out in a few months. They may not care who wins, but they really need the war to stop soon. If an eventual Ukrainian victory looks likely – and it’s starting to – they will push Russia to stop in any way they can.

  53. 53.

    gene108

    @Adam L Silverman:

    But it can be trans-shipped through them.

    But what would be shipped through countries in the Global South for import into Russia? Or export from Russia?

    Russia’s major exports are wheat, crude oil, natural gas, and other raw materials like nickel.

    Wheat exports totaled $10 billion. Oil, and natural gas exports totaled over $100 billion.

    Wheat goes to countries in the Global South. Oil, natural gas, and other raw materials not so much.

    I’m not sure the Global South can make up the losses that would happen, if Europe stopped buying oil and natural gas from Russia.

  54. 54.

    gene108

    @Adam L Silverman:

    But it can be trans-shipped through them.

    But what would be shipped through countries in the Global South for import into Russia? Or export from Russia?

    Russia’s major exports are wheat, crude oil, natural gas, and other raw materials like nickel.

    Wheat exports totaled $10 billion. Oil, and natural gas exports totaled over $100 billion.

    Wheat goes to countries in the Global South. Oil, natural gas, and other raw materials not so much.

    I’m not sure the Global South can make up the losses that would happen, if Europe stopped buying oil and natural gas from Russia.

  55. 55.

    gene108

    @Adam L Silverman:

    But it can be trans-shipped through them.

    But what would be shipped through countries in the Global South for import into Russia? Or export from Russia?

    Russia’s major exports are wheat, crude oil, natural gas, and other raw materials like nickel.

    Wheat exports totaled $10 billion. Oil, and natural gas exports totaled over $100 billion.

    Wheat goes to countries in the Global South. Oil, natural gas, and other raw materials not so much.

    I’m not sure the Global South can make up the losses that would happen, if Europe stopped buying oil and natural gas from Russia.

  56. 56.

    gene108

    <a href=”#comment-8480868″>@Adam L Silverman</a>:

    <blockquote> But it can be trans-shipped through them.</blockquote>

    But what would be shipped through countries in the Global South for import into Russia? Or export from Russia?

    Russia’s major exports are wheat, crude oil, natural gas, and other raw materials like nickel.

    Wheat exports totaled $10 billion. Oil, and natural gas exports totaled over $100 billion.

    Wheat goes to countries in the Global South. Oil, natural gas, and other raw materials not so much.

    I’m not sure the Global South can make up the losses that would happen, if Europe stopped buying oil and natural gas from Russia.

  57. 57.

    oldster

    @Fair Economist: 
    “IMO Bojo is playing a dangerous game. Supporting the Ukrainians so aggressively helps throw British voters off the stench of Russian support for his party. And, possibly, he’s hoping Putin will get tossed and so will never be able to call in what Bojo owes him.”
    Very interesting, and compatible with what little I know — Bojo would happily betray anyone if he thinks he can get away with it.
    In that case, I hope that Bojo will succeed in bringing Putin down, and as a dying gasp, Putin will release all of his dirt on Johnson, bringing him down. I’m rooting for injuries, but only fatal ones.

  58. 58.

    gene108

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    I think Putin would really like to believe, & wants to convince the Russian people, that what they are facing is a Westernconspiracy to keep Russia down.

    Putin definitely wants Russians to blame the West for any problems.

  59. 59.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Medicine Man: I don’t know. My informed speculation is that anything that would require US personnel as trainers or advisors is not going to happen.

  60. 60.

    Steeplejack

    @Carlo Graziani:

    How about a warning on links to PDFs? Some devices automatically download them without giving the reader a chance to decline or to see the whole URL.

  61. 61.

    oldster

    @Adam L Silverman:

    “My informed speculation is that anything that would require US personnel as trainers or advisors is not going to happen.”

    I trust your sources of information more than my sources of conjecture (which cannot be named without recourse to obscenity).

    But I assume this means, “no US personnel training Ukrainians in Ukraine,” not, “no US personnel training Ukrainians in the US, or on NATO bases in Germany, Poland, etc..”

    So, we could be training UA folks on high-tech stuff, in places where our people cannot be captured and paraded.

    Or do your sources say “no” to that, too?

  63. 63.

    Martin

    @Ishiyama: I don’t see why it should. It’s not like they can undo what happened, and it’s not like those soldiers dying won’t absolve Putin.

  65. 65.

    Sloane Ranger

    @oldster:

     

    The UK, too, is in hock to Russian money, and has allowed Putin’s agents to infiltrate all levels of society and government. Which is why I am slightly perplexed — though pleased — that Bojo has leaned in to arming Ukraine. Given his degree of complicity with Russian money, I would have expected him to do less.

    Fair Economist’s theory might be right,but it may also be that BoJo sees the Russian invasion as a diversion from Partygate and general government corruption and incompetence. His popularity was in free fall for a time but has significantly improved since he started sanctioning Russia and sending weapons to Ukraine. Boris loves being cheered on. Plus, it gives him an opportunity to pretend he’s the 2nd coming of Churchill.

    On a different note, while the Russian Troll farms and their fellow travellers might have been silent during the initial stages of the invasion, they seem yo have regrouped and are back in force. I follow a number of YouTube channels and I’ve noticed that, where the video title has any reference to Russia or Ukraine, the comments sections are sure to have posts from people justifying the invasion, some in extremely poor English.

  66. 66.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Yeah, but the oligarchs and the 20-something year old tarts that like to follow them around LIKE the lifestyle, the beaches and amenities of the places where they’re sanctioned. Not so easy to be publicly topless and hang your ass out of a thong in India.

  67. 67.

    debbie

    I picked a bad morning to oversleep. I was following this on Twitter and I’m wondering if there’s a Russian connection?

    The FBI activity was connected to two arrests made this evening in a pretty wild case. The two men are accused of posing as DHS agents & giving actual Secret Service agents and officers – including one on the first lady’s detail – gifts & free apartments. https://t.co/42YiBLCRX7 https://t.co/INQ4rlyQ5A
    — Mike Balsamo (@MikeBalsamo1) April 7, 2022

    and

    Absolutely wild story. “In one instance, Taherzadeh offered to purchase a $2,000 assault rifle for a Secret Service agent who is assigned to protect the first lady. Prosecutors said four Secret Service employees were placed on leave this week as part of the investigation.” https://t.co/8T24AnI900
    — Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 7, 2022

  68. 68.

    wetzel

    Another bottomless night fishing. Adam, thank you so much for this forum.

    I’ve been up most of the night. The visit to the emergency room Monday night (was it monday?) discombobulated. I’ve got no sleep cycle. I took a couple of benadryl to try to sleep, but it just seemed to encourage hypnogogia.

    Got through to Emory yesterday. Thank goodness I was able to submit an online form to medical records. Hopefully next week sometime I’ll be able to find out if I had a heart attack. My primary care doctor can look at my troponins and tell me ‘no, wetzel, you are not joining the community of cardiology patients’   ‘but I’m lonely!’. I want to put you in the panic community where I am also a member! We all have agoraphobia, so it is the worst club. No matter how long you stay in an ER without a doctor or nurse coming to your aid, don’t leave. It will just make it worse for yourself.

    I’ve been thinking about this idea I got from Bachelard about poetic and scientific kinds of meaning. Nothing squeezes poetry out like the effort of finding your price for life insurance. There is nothing fascist, totalitarian or anti-sacred for a man to let them poke and prod you. Let them find the price, and you take them up on it! They are not ghouls. The product they deliver will have poetic meaning. Young men, remember to get your new policy when that puny $45/mo term policy expires, the policy you got with the first pregnancy test. You might find yourself in your fifties trying to lose weight to make your life insurance affordable. I haven’t been in to primary care doctor in years (I’m afraid of running into an old student) because I’ve been hiding from their instruments. Losing weight to afford life insurance! I’m not worried because our ship will come in this year or next. I’m not obese. I’m overweight, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

    The hardest part is to concentrate on using words to display their meanings. I’ve been thinking about the use of the word ‘pornographic’. I’ve been using it to describe totalitarian violence. Imagine an event to occur in the world. A child was hit by a car. The event possesses facticity within sense certainty, which is existentielle. This is how Heidegger would say it is a real event that has a prosaic side to itself as something happening. We ourselves (Dasein) know this implicitly, which is why it is existentielle.

    Is the event pornographic. Ask if it were actually intended in order to produce an effect in bystanders as a spectacle. Genocide in totalitarian societies isn’t performed to exterminate this or that people. It is spectacular violence. It only pretends to hide. Genocide is being performed by Russia/China as a pornographic spectacle to institute terror whether or not their leadership fully grasps what is happening.

    We are used to the word ‘pornography’ in the context of sexual pornography. A work of sexual pornography isn’t even pornography a priori by membership in the category type because there is no analytical way to assign a work to the category. You cannot tell analytically whether or not symbolic meaning is present, even though the category of sexual pornography does exist in truth, where factitious events occur solely for their spectacle by dead eyed performers.

    Pornographic violence is pornographic by deduction, however, unless the ‘work’ is to perform the role of victim, then it can be art. Then it can have symbolic value. I don’t see any possibility of factitious violence as art. Symbolic value has disappeared, because it is premised in inhumanity.

  69. 69.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Mallard Filmore: IDK, but I am surprised  in Putin “Everything is Bullshit” Russia  the surviving members of the 64th Mech aren’t dressed as members of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, marched threw Moscow and then shot. Retconing inconvenient Russian soldiers as Ukrainian soldiers seems constant with the rest of the Russian BS.

  70. 70.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @YY_Sima Qian: The problem with moralism at the national level is many people insist on applying personal morality to national morality.  For example The State doesn’t just have the right to voilance it has the moral duty to voilance to protect it’s citizens.

  71. 71.

    wetzel

    A folk death mechanism like the noose can pass its symbolism to the victim and become the cross. Nonviolence will not work with fascism because the folk death mechanism lacks a ‘folk’ becoming scientific and programmatic. Genocide, terror and disappearance are the thesis, antithesis and synthesis of totalitarian phenomenology. I don’t feel I’m grounded here because it’s Hegelian. It’s not existential philosophy. I mean disappearance as the loss of symbolic human value, firstly, but also the disappearance of the subject themselves. If our human value is in how we are a metaphor for ourselves, then they are the same thing. Living under terror is spiritual genocide.

    Belief in reincarnation can help a person to get through anything. If I die I want to come back as a better husband and country music songwriter. Christian repentance works like this. You can find your symbolic value again in repentance. An existential moment of repentance is the same as living forever because you exist. I could explain this better if Heidegger would get around to explaining the meaning of Being.

  72. 72.

    wetzel

    Her husband, Sergey, a forty-seven-year-old private security guard, decided to stay. The couple owned two dogs and six cats, which Sergey refused to abandon.

  73. 73.

    Feathers

    @gene108: I would recommend following @SarahTaber_bww on Twitter for this. She is a PhD crop scientist, with a working class ag background, who does a lot of work in agriculture sector corruption.

    What she points out is that the possibility of this war was known last fall and the rest of the world overplanted wheat in anticipation of higher prices. There is actually a coming glut in global wheat supply, with the main issue becoming the logistics of shipping it from where it is (largely India) to where it is needed. Another fact hidden by the hair on fire crowd is that wheat is grown around the world, and mostly for domestic consumption. 20% of global exports is less than 1% of global wheat production.

    As she frequently highlights, these articles in the press are largely serving the financiers who sell wheat futures and others who are trying to justify using this situation to artificially boost their profits. Debunk their scaremongering, don’t spread it

  74. 74.

    wetzel

    In Methodism we do not dunk all the way. Unitarianism came out of Methodism. As a plain spoken secular humanist who is well educated in science to say the least, I believe that the Ukraine War is going to take the whole world through the stations of the cross. It helps to understand that the underlying neuroendocrine processes with emotional pain and trauma is the same as physical trauma. At times a martyr may grow weary of whips and goads and burning and the lake may send its flowers up to you. I can survive this if I understand there is a totalitarian unconscious taking form through genocide that is trying to instill terror and make us docile bodies. The world is confronting totalitarian eschatology that is constituting itself in genocide. Hillary said it is an existential moment! I think artistic experience can keep symbolism.

  75. 75.

    wetzel

    I just figured out my mistake with Emory!

    I told the girl who did my EKG my pain was a four!

    I once had a beetle crawl into my ear while I was sleeping. It went looking for phloem. It thought I was home, and it wound up chewing my incus. That’s a 10! I remember his dead body on the gauze after they syringed in some EAR-RAID. So I said it was a four!

    If she’d asked instead, just exactly where is Old Scratch tickling you, I would have said in my existential being, and so maybe she could have had a way to know to fetch the doctor. As a 55 year man, I am not going to call a 4 a 10, but there is a special sense in your metabolome. A sinking towards it. So there is a lot that is interesting to articulate out of an experience like that where you really can see the condition your condition is in.

    The answer is that I don’t need my ashes to be scattered somewhere beautiful. The can go into a Maxwell House can and my family can play Mississippi John Hurt Coffee Blues at my funeral. I’m always seeing money all over the place and telling people where to strike it rich, but they never believe me! Nobody believes in unsinkable vacuum dirigibiles because they can’t imagine a material stronger than diamond. If you decide to open a Maxwell House funeral parlor you can have that very idea creative commons sharealike, though if you use the song, you need to sync your funeral parlor because it’s still his song.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZWqhrR5tPc

  76. 76.

    O. Felix Culpa

    Several interesting articles/twitter threads I came across this morning:

    • From Spiegel International, a piece on the intercepted radio traffic from Russian military discussing the murder of civilians in Bucha (spoiler alert: the atrocities were neither accidental nor condemned);
    • From Philip Bump at Univ. of St. Andrews, a twitter thread about Russian options in the east/south and timelines (spoiler alert: he doesn’t think Russian forces are in adequate shape to achieve their goals in the east and south);
    • Last but not least, a CNN interview with Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.) (included in Bump’s twitter thread) on Russia’s strategic shift and how Ukraine can block them, complete with maps! Omnes alert, he talks about the importance of beefing up artillery and logistics.
  77. 77.

    Adam L Silverman

    @oldster: My sources are the same legit reporters everyone else is reading. From what I understand from that reporting, we have a group of Ukrainian soldiers in the US right now receiving previously – as in before the reinvasion – scheduled professional military education that includes training on one of our weapons systems. Saw reporting on that yesterday.

  80. 80.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Apparently Putin is being outflanked on the Right in Russia with the “Soviet Union back, what a surrender monkey sissy boi; we want the empire of the Tsars back!” group, which makes way to much sense in a dystopian police state run on utter bullshit. But there is a charming thought; Putin falls and is replaced by the Russian version of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

  82. 82.

    VOR

    @YY_Sima Qian: Very much not my area of expertise, but I suspect there are limits on how much Russian oil and gas China can actually buy. Are pipelines in place for sending oil and gas to China? Is there enough capacity for additional shipments? Infrastructure like this needs time to build, it’s not just turning a flow valve.

  83. 83.

    terry chay

    @YY_Sima Qian: Onthink your assessment on Putin is fine. The issue with it (and your one on China being hardcore realists) is that it is a static assessment.

    Putin has been in power over 20’tears and his control has only grown over that period. That had distorted his “reality”’from which he makes assessments and now we are here.

    Similarly China’s control of the media (great firewall, it’s weaponizing of nationalism etc.) should not be seen as separate from the way they make assessments. Eventually that too will be distorted by it.

    The US similarly had such a situation in the lead up yo the Iraq War. It took only two years of power to corrupt it to the point that “hard realism” basically started a completely unnecessary war and distracted from goals in Afghanistan.

    Here I am looking at decades.

  84. 84.

    terry chay

    @Sloane Ranger: It’s important to note that YouTube is not blocked in Russia. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and effectively TikYok are.

    Also, while YouTube trolling/astroturfing is at a much higher level than other platforms, it is nowhere close to its prewar levels. At least according to my eye.

  85. 85.

    Wetzel

    @terry chay:  That’s right. Instability shifts in the most likely direction. game it out over decades and we are also within totalitarianism. People picture Putin moving his pieces on the board. It is a spectacle. The phenomenology of catastrophe. Genocide will pull us into its moral universe. We will institute the terror on ourselves

    Maybe we can endure this. Maybe prevail. Biden is a good President.

  86. 86.

    Bill Arnold

    @Carlo Graziani:

    I hadn’t realized that US DOD had bastardized Clausewitz’s Schwerpunkt to this extent. “COG”, eh?

    Imagine what a guy (Adam) who teaches Aikido is not saying about what he thinks of the term.

  87. 87.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @VOR: You are correct wrt natural gas, which Russia main exports via pipelines. The gas being sold to China are coming from fields in eastern Siberia, while the gas being sold to Europe are coming from field in the Arctic. There is no pipeline infrastructure connecting the Arctic gas fields to the Chinese market, & I am not entirely sure whether Russia has the LNG terminals up north to ship gas via the maritime route. In theory, Russia could build a pipeline from the Arctic fields down to Kazakhstan, & connect to the network of pipelines between Central Asia & China, but that will still be an undertaking requiring years & billions. Russia is probably not in the financial shape to undertake such a venture, at least not in the near term.

    Coal can be shipped by rail (& is being shipped by rail to China). So can oil (which has been shipped to China, though a pipeline is under construction), just not very efficiently.

  88. 88.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @terry chay: You have a good point that assessments need to be constantly updated. However, I would say the CCP regime since the death of Mao has been hardcore realist in foreign policy, & remains so under Xi, & I think most China scholars agree. Even domestic policy has been hardcore realist, there is a very strong instrumentalist logic to the regime’s oppression of Uyghurs & Tibetans, & suppression of the anti-establishment opposition in Hong Kong. It is the generalists who are the go to sources for MSM that sometimes raise the specter of Xi’s China returning to Maoist trends, but these people tend to have superficial reading of China, & some are very eager to kick off a new Cold War, so are purposely casting the great power competition as an ideological death match.

    How the CCP regime avoid being caught in its own echo chamber (a key lesson from the disastrous Mao decades) in a high censored information environment is having more unvarnished publications (that often pull articles from foreign media) for the internal consumptions of the bureaucracy, most of which are not accessible to the general public. It also conducts frequent (but unpublicized) surveys of the population to gauge popular sentiments. The system is not fool proof, & as w/ any system it carries the risk of sclerosis & being gamed. There is indeed some suggestion that the blow back in the West against China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy has not filter up to Xi, but I think it is more likely that the CCP regime finds the pugnacious responses to any US/Western criticism play well w/ the domestic audience as well as the that in the Global South. The regime has also calculated that no amount of concessions China can currently make (outside of compromising what it sees as core Chinese national interests) will change the hardline bi-partisan anti-China consensus in the US (which they are probably right about), or mitigate the more confrontational turn from Europe (more debatable). The CCP regime is not interested in rupture of relations w/ the US & the EU, but it does not believe the “Wolf Warrior” rhetoric will lead to rupture. It could be miscalculating, but I do not believe the line of thinking is detached from reality.

    The single greatest exception to the CCP regime’s hardcore realism is Taiwan. From a realist perspective, controlling TW is helpful, but not required for China to achieve the “Chinese Dream” of power & wealth, whereas a ruinous war over Taiwan (and/or subsequent economic sanctions) will derail the entire “rejuvenation” project for quite some time. If/when Mainland China is powerful & wealthy enough, even a Taiwan that is independent (de jure or de facto) has no choice but to chart an accommodating path, much as Mexico has to accommodate the US, or risk becoming the Cuba of the Asia Pacific. Nonetheless, recovering Taiwan has a become a touchstone issue for the Chinese  nationalist cause since Qing Empire had to cede the island to Imperial Japan in 1895, & a focus of Chinese regimes from Sun Yan-sen to Chiang Kai-Shek to successive CCP leaders. It will not likely to change even if Mainland China becomes democratic. Indeed, an elected government in Beijing might feel more compelled by populist pressure to take a hardline on Taiwan, or to exploit the Taiwan issue for domestic political gain, much as the DDP government in Taiwan has historically skillfully fanned anti-Mainlander nativism to help win at the ballot box against the KMT.

Comments are closed.