No modern Western aircraft, much less air superiority; not enough artillery; not even modern tanks...The US/NATO military would never send their own troops through 20 km of enemy defenses this way...
I can't think of a better way for the public to spend an hour, besides reading this posting, than listening to Professor Mearsheimer's YouTube video with Aaron Mate, which I featured just above in an update dated today, Aug. 21st. He really needs to have a prominent debate with Timothy Snyder on the nature of Putin's regime, which is about the only key issue he doesn't disuss, and the Russian track record in Syria, Chechnya and now in its conduct towards civilians in Ukraine. That's almost built in to the "realist" position in foreign policy, where poaching on what a major power views as its "sphere of interest" becomes never a moral issue but one of existential threats to power "prerogatives" (my term). But think through Castro's overthrow of Batista: we saw him as an existential threat before Russia placed any missiles in Cuba - and the key question of Oct. 1962 is whether Russia's missile bases were defensive or offensive...the US decided they were existential in potential and had to go out...which they did with an out of public view trade of our old missiles in Turkey. Therefore in part my answer to Mearsheimer on Russia's view of Ukraine is that the US learned to live with an ideologically hostile regime under Castro 90 miles away...and no one I know of in NATO or Ukraine advocates any Ukrainian advance into Russian territory with the exception of hitting the bases serving to kill Ukrainian civilians, which Ben Hodges says is an International right to respond when attacked. Therefor I'm with Mearsheimer about 80% of the way in his analysis, but haven't changed my view that the US and NATO will eventually have to use their airpower to salvage any semblance of a functional state in Ukrainian. Russia will leave a only a dysfunctional, crippled rump state if they are left on the battlefield where it stands now.
Let me address, along a different axis of response, those on the left who are very critical of the US and especially its "use" of NATO to threaten Russia by running NATO increasingly up to Russia's borders with "the last straw" for Putin being the alleged actions of the US inside Ukrainian politics, essentially to push the Ukranian state if not the people, to oust the Russian leaning leaders. I think a pretty fair summary of this spectrum of left criticism of the war can be found here, in a recent article by Eve Ottenberg, a novelist (26 and counting), Maryland resident, and left commentator at a number of sites, with this article at Counter Punch dated Aug. 18, '23: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/18/the-world-would-be-better-off-without-nato/
The piece has a series of amazing accusations againt the West, with nothing much to say about Putin's Russia and Putin's evolution to rebuild a twice decayed empire (Romanovs and Stalinists)....I looked into one charge which occurs right up front in the first paragraph, that there was extensive Ukrainian "ethnic cleansing" against Russian sympathizers in the Donbas (the Eastern contested provinces), the cause of the not quite Russian acknowledged invasions in 2014, there and Crimea. I went to Wikipedia for some clarification and you can read it on your own, the most illuminating comment being that Russia creates a "mirror" image of counter charges to confuse and deflect scrutiny away from its own actual conduct of ethnic cleansing against Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_genocide_in_Donbas#:~:text=Since%202014%2C%20Russia%20falsely%20accused,against%20Russian%20speakers%20of%20Ukraine.
In this article, the charge and counter charge have been escalated from ethnic cleansing to "genocide."
I was thinking this morning about the further charges, rife and ripe online, about how corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine, and Neo-nazis on the way to, if not there already there, into becoming Nazis, dominate the administration of President Zelensky. I find this another version of the counter mirror, with perhaps some truths on corruption and Ukrainian oligarchs - after all - this was part of the revolt in Maidan Square in late 2013 and early 2014 with the key question in this now open war bursting forth from the hidden one, being what the bulk of the citizens, not oligarchs in Ukraine, were thinking - and wanted. Going further, it's an amazing charge against Ukraine to level, given the nature of Russian society under Putin - both "civic life" and economic being dominated by oligarchs like Yevgeniy Prigozhin, he with his own economic empire, broadcast/online propaganda outlets, and indeed, his own army. By the way, Prigozin is quoted as saying, at Wikipedia, that Ukraine was not ethnic cleansing in Donbas thereby allegedly provoking Putin's invasion there and the ultimate step of mass invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
This all leads me back to Yanis Varoufakis, author or five or so books on the political economy, including "Adults in the Room: My Battle with European Establishment," (2017) about his brief role as Greek finance minister in 2015. It has been called the modern day equal, in style and content, of Keynes' famous work warning of looming disaster in the wake of the punitive Versailles Treaty of 1919 - "The Economic Consequences of the Peace."
Varoufakis' latest book, due out in Feb. of 2024, is called "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" and while it may be aimed at the "evolution" - or rather devolution - of Capitalism in the West, surely the "Feudal" aspects of economic oligarchy are there for all to see in Russia - as my brief note on Prigozhin indicated, reminding me, if not others, of the similar feel to the landed military Barons in England countering the absolute power of the King with some preliminary "checks and balances" at a famous field in 1205.
I know of no reason why Ukraine was not suffering from some of the same problems as Russia, 1989-2022, the difference being that Ukraine is now undergoing a hopeful transformation via a defensive war solidifying a nation which was there in boundaries in 1991, but had its independence from Russia deeply contested from above and behind the scenes, economically and politically.
I hope that the realization that the trend to economic oligarchy is a powerful force in the modern world might temper some of the left's attacks on Zelensky and the Ukraine power structure, keeping in mind the state of American democracy in 2023 and the shaky oligarch from real estate who is rehearsing for another coup in 2024. And I would offer not only reading Varoufakis as an antidote, but also Thomas Ferguson's "Golden Rule: the Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems" (1995, Univ. of Chicago Press). I'm a bit late in reading it (though not his essays and he's been on my Email list for a long time) and I can't think of a better endorsement than noting the authors who praised it on the back cover: the late William Greider, Walter Dean Burnham, Theodor Lowi, and the still living and writing James Galbraith.
Professor Michael Clarke takes on the Biden Administration directly in this video: Ukraine needs squadrons of F-16's, and there are spares of them in Dennmark and Sweden (a squadron of fighters has in modern terms 18-24 aircraft and Clarke says Ukraine needs at least 4 of them), but the US is training only 6 pilots. Amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtOIU4XFh5Y&t=733s
And this insignificant number won't be available until 2024.
Because supporters of President Biden's stance on the war - his and NATO's (esp. Germany's) caution in not provoking "the nuclear Putin" give so much credence to the nuclear blustering, I thought it was worthwhile to zoom in on the three words the psychiatrist-diplomat, Dr. Kenneth Dekleva uses in his Times Radio comments from Aug. 11th. Those words to characterize Putin are as follows: ruthless, resilient, and rational. Now to me, given what I have written about Putin's historical mission to revitalize Russian from the nadir of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nadir being the late 1990's, does it make sense to risk it all, the progress he has made, in a nuclear exchange with the US via ICBM's? Hardly, if indeed he is rational. And I haven't seen the public rants that so many other infamous dictators gave us in the old "interwar years." On the other hand, if he would rather wreck the Ukraine than lose it entirely, then the use of tactical nukes is possible, but also not likely, since he has been warned by China that Russia would become an international Pariah state, and such a use would likely bring NATO in full bore with all its air power...I like to think. And the damage and decision to run these risks ought to be in good part, Ukraine's, since they will be the object and location of the tactical nuke explosions.
Just thought I ought to make my thinking clear as I can.
Thanks Bill. Super-informative. I look forward to speaking in-depth with you about the Ukraine War on Halitics at noon Thursday - www.youtube.com/@halitics
I can't think of a better way for the public to spend an hour, besides reading this posting, than listening to Professor Mearsheimer's YouTube video with Aaron Mate, which I featured just above in an update dated today, Aug. 21st. He really needs to have a prominent debate with Timothy Snyder on the nature of Putin's regime, which is about the only key issue he doesn't disuss, and the Russian track record in Syria, Chechnya and now in its conduct towards civilians in Ukraine. That's almost built in to the "realist" position in foreign policy, where poaching on what a major power views as its "sphere of interest" becomes never a moral issue but one of existential threats to power "prerogatives" (my term). But think through Castro's overthrow of Batista: we saw him as an existential threat before Russia placed any missiles in Cuba - and the key question of Oct. 1962 is whether Russia's missile bases were defensive or offensive...the US decided they were existential in potential and had to go out...which they did with an out of public view trade of our old missiles in Turkey. Therefore in part my answer to Mearsheimer on Russia's view of Ukraine is that the US learned to live with an ideologically hostile regime under Castro 90 miles away...and no one I know of in NATO or Ukraine advocates any Ukrainian advance into Russian territory with the exception of hitting the bases serving to kill Ukrainian civilians, which Ben Hodges says is an International right to respond when attacked. Therefor I'm with Mearsheimer about 80% of the way in his analysis, but haven't changed my view that the US and NATO will eventually have to use their airpower to salvage any semblance of a functional state in Ukrainian. Russia will leave a only a dysfunctional, crippled rump state if they are left on the battlefield where it stands now.
Let me address, along a different axis of response, those on the left who are very critical of the US and especially its "use" of NATO to threaten Russia by running NATO increasingly up to Russia's borders with "the last straw" for Putin being the alleged actions of the US inside Ukrainian politics, essentially to push the Ukranian state if not the people, to oust the Russian leaning leaders. I think a pretty fair summary of this spectrum of left criticism of the war can be found here, in a recent article by Eve Ottenberg, a novelist (26 and counting), Maryland resident, and left commentator at a number of sites, with this article at Counter Punch dated Aug. 18, '23: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/18/the-world-would-be-better-off-without-nato/
The piece has a series of amazing accusations againt the West, with nothing much to say about Putin's Russia and Putin's evolution to rebuild a twice decayed empire (Romanovs and Stalinists)....I looked into one charge which occurs right up front in the first paragraph, that there was extensive Ukrainian "ethnic cleansing" against Russian sympathizers in the Donbas (the Eastern contested provinces), the cause of the not quite Russian acknowledged invasions in 2014, there and Crimea. I went to Wikipedia for some clarification and you can read it on your own, the most illuminating comment being that Russia creates a "mirror" image of counter charges to confuse and deflect scrutiny away from its own actual conduct of ethnic cleansing against Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_genocide_in_Donbas#:~:text=Since%202014%2C%20Russia%20falsely%20accused,against%20Russian%20speakers%20of%20Ukraine.
In this article, the charge and counter charge have been escalated from ethnic cleansing to "genocide."
I was thinking this morning about the further charges, rife and ripe online, about how corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine, and Neo-nazis on the way to, if not there already there, into becoming Nazis, dominate the administration of President Zelensky. I find this another version of the counter mirror, with perhaps some truths on corruption and Ukrainian oligarchs - after all - this was part of the revolt in Maidan Square in late 2013 and early 2014 with the key question in this now open war bursting forth from the hidden one, being what the bulk of the citizens, not oligarchs in Ukraine, were thinking - and wanted. Going further, it's an amazing charge against Ukraine to level, given the nature of Russian society under Putin - both "civic life" and economic being dominated by oligarchs like Yevgeniy Prigozhin, he with his own economic empire, broadcast/online propaganda outlets, and indeed, his own army. By the way, Prigozin is quoted as saying, at Wikipedia, that Ukraine was not ethnic cleansing in Donbas thereby allegedly provoking Putin's invasion there and the ultimate step of mass invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
This all leads me back to Yanis Varoufakis, author or five or so books on the political economy, including "Adults in the Room: My Battle with European Establishment," (2017) about his brief role as Greek finance minister in 2015. It has been called the modern day equal, in style and content, of Keynes' famous work warning of looming disaster in the wake of the punitive Versailles Treaty of 1919 - "The Economic Consequences of the Peace."
Varoufakis' latest book, due out in Feb. of 2024, is called "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" and while it may be aimed at the "evolution" - or rather devolution - of Capitalism in the West, surely the "Feudal" aspects of economic oligarchy are there for all to see in Russia - as my brief note on Prigozhin indicated, reminding me, if not others, of the similar feel to the landed military Barons in England countering the absolute power of the King with some preliminary "checks and balances" at a famous field in 1205.
I know of no reason why Ukraine was not suffering from some of the same problems as Russia, 1989-2022, the difference being that Ukraine is now undergoing a hopeful transformation via a defensive war solidifying a nation which was there in boundaries in 1991, but had its independence from Russia deeply contested from above and behind the scenes, economically and politically.
I hope that the realization that the trend to economic oligarchy is a powerful force in the modern world might temper some of the left's attacks on Zelensky and the Ukraine power structure, keeping in mind the state of American democracy in 2023 and the shaky oligarch from real estate who is rehearsing for another coup in 2024. And I would offer not only reading Varoufakis as an antidote, but also Thomas Ferguson's "Golden Rule: the Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems" (1995, Univ. of Chicago Press). I'm a bit late in reading it (though not his essays and he's been on my Email list for a long time) and I can't think of a better endorsement than noting the authors who praised it on the back cover: the late William Greider, Walter Dean Burnham, Theodor Lowi, and the still living and writing James Galbraith.
Professor Michael Clarke takes on the Biden Administration directly in this video: Ukraine needs squadrons of F-16's, and there are spares of them in Dennmark and Sweden (a squadron of fighters has in modern terms 18-24 aircraft and Clarke says Ukraine needs at least 4 of them), but the US is training only 6 pilots. Amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtOIU4XFh5Y&t=733s
And this insignificant number won't be available until 2024.
Because supporters of President Biden's stance on the war - his and NATO's (esp. Germany's) caution in not provoking "the nuclear Putin" give so much credence to the nuclear blustering, I thought it was worthwhile to zoom in on the three words the psychiatrist-diplomat, Dr. Kenneth Dekleva uses in his Times Radio comments from Aug. 11th. Those words to characterize Putin are as follows: ruthless, resilient, and rational. Now to me, given what I have written about Putin's historical mission to revitalize Russian from the nadir of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nadir being the late 1990's, does it make sense to risk it all, the progress he has made, in a nuclear exchange with the US via ICBM's? Hardly, if indeed he is rational. And I haven't seen the public rants that so many other infamous dictators gave us in the old "interwar years." On the other hand, if he would rather wreck the Ukraine than lose it entirely, then the use of tactical nukes is possible, but also not likely, since he has been warned by China that Russia would become an international Pariah state, and such a use would likely bring NATO in full bore with all its air power...I like to think. And the damage and decision to run these risks ought to be in good part, Ukraine's, since they will be the object and location of the tactical nuke explosions.
Just thought I ought to make my thinking clear as I can.
Thanks Bill. Super-informative. I look forward to speaking in-depth with you about the Ukraine War on Halitics at noon Thursday - www.youtube.com/@halitics