Three quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is doing great, but she’d like the daily/multi-times a day thunder monsoons would stop. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.
Second, why is it still not Friday?
Third, I want to make an additional point above the fold. The strategic incoherence, inconsistency, and malpractice we’ve spent the past 31 months watching Biden’s senior natsec appointees demonstrate in regard to Ukraine and the past 11 months in regard to Israel, Hamas, and Gaza is because this natsec team was not put together to deal with any of this. They were put together to repair the foreign policy and national security damage created by Trump and his team of misfits, oddballs, amateurs, and weirdos. A lot of them were people that President Biden had worked with for decades, in some cases their whole careers were the result of working for and/or with him when he was in the Senate and/or the vice president. Others had been the junior to mid-level Obama appointees and their next stop were the senior level appointments in the next Democratic administration regardless of which Democrat was elected. There’s a club. They’re all in on that the major, ongoing threat to the US is a form of great power competition with the PRC. Which is why all of the US’s strategic documents give the PRC pride of place as an ever emerging threat despite the actual reality of the ongoing, enduring threats from Russia and the never ending, and unlikely to end in my lifetime, destructive volatility of the entire Middle East. A fair amount of which we’re responsible for because of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s stupid idea to invade Iraq in 2003.
What this team was not put together to do was serve as the senior natsec staff for a major, and frankly genocidal, interstate war in Europe, which is part of Russia’s ongoing world war against the US, the EU, and NATO, as well as Bibi Netanyahu’s megalomaniacal narcissism, his extremist coalition, Yahya Sinwar’s nihilism, and Hamas. Personnel is policy and these personnel were put into place to do something else. They are the wrong makes, models, and types to manage what the US and our allies and partners are currently facing and will continue to face for years to come. The result is that Putin and Russia, Bibi and his extremist partners, and Sinwar continually wrong foot the US. President Biden’s failure was not in appointing these people, they are all eminently qualified. His failure was not replacing them with the right makes, models, and types to handle the crises the US is currently and will continue to face.
President Zelenskyy and First Lady Zelenska both addressed the Fourth Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen today. Video of First Lady Zelenska’s address is below followed after the jump by the video and English transcript of President Zelenskyy’s address.
