April 20, 2014

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

At the end of March we posted on our Ukraine policy. Time to again look at “clueless, hapless, feckless, and hopeless.” Craig Pirrong is first.

The farce involving Ukraine continues. Today John “Charlie Brown” Kerry and Sergei “Lucy” Lavrov met in Geneva, the scene of many previous Kerry pratfalls, mostly involving Syria. (Yeah, the Euros were there. Like that matters. Well, I guess someone has to make sure the places are set properly, with the forks in the right spot and all that stuff.)

Even after having Lucy pull the ball away time and again, Charlie Brown had another go at “diplomacy,” which in Russian means “war continued by other means.” In military terms, the Russians treat diplomacy with the US as a delaying action, knowing the US won’t do anything meaningful as the “process” is “working.” In Syria, Assad has used Russian diplomatic cover to turn the tide of war decisively in his favor.

Kerry and Obama have apparently never heard Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. Maybe Kerry should hop the train to Bern and visit the Einstein museum. Maybe he’ll collect a clue. …

… To give you an idea of Putin’s mindset, and how little he cares about Obama’s incredible threats to push for some measures that could impose some costs at some ill-defined future date, the Russian president used the term Novarossiya (New Russia) to refer to parts of Ukraine. Meaning that his irredentist goals remain, undeterred. (And does anybody else notice that the only thing that Putin criticizes the leaders of the USSR for is their penchant for redrawing borders in ways that put traditional Russian territories outside of the RussianSovietSocialistFederativeRepublic?)

Russia is weak economically, demographically, and militarily. The US is none of those things. It is weak by choice, and letting Putin proceed in his irredentist and revanchist mission.

We are so screwed.

 

 

Spengler says “Putin is not a genius, we are complete idiots”.

Vladimir Putin happily allowed the Kiev authorities to shoot a few pro-Russian demonstrators while keeping his military forces on ice across the border. I predicted (and am sticking to my story) that Russia will not seize more territory in Eastern Ukraine–not for the time being, in any case. Russia will stand back and watch Ukraine implode, the way Egypt did during the two years following the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Before the Maidan coup, Putin was willing to sit on $15 billion in arrears to Gazprom and put up $18 billion in new money. Now he wants $35 billion in back gas bills, on top of Ukraine’s $15 billion a year current account deficit. The IMF wants massive cuts in subsidies, which will make the Kiev government an object of hatred without putting  a dent into the problem. Western taxpayers won’t cough up $50 billion for Ukraine, not even a small fraction of it.

Yankee Doodle went to Maidan, stuck a feather in his hat and called it democracy. Our foreign policy ideologues are like UFO cultists who are so convinced that space aliens are invading the earth that they see moon men in every glare of swamp gas. In this case, it isn’t moon men, but aspiring republicans. First Tahrir Square, then Maidan, were glorious proof of the Manifest Destiny of Western democracy. …

 

 

Jonah Goldberg says soon we will “let slip the socks of war.”

… In a sense, arguing with the Russian bear is like arguing with a real bear. No matter how eloquently you explain to the bear that it should not eat your face, it’s going to eat your face if it wants to eat your face — that is, if you do nothing tangible to stop it.

Obama seems to think that’s what he’s been doing. He told CBS, “Each time Russia takes these kinds of steps that are designed to destabilize Ukraine and violate their sovereignty, there are going to be consequences.”

Unfortunately, the credibility of Obama’s “consequences” took a big hit when he was unwilling — or unable — to make good on his vow that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would amount to a “red line” for the U.S.

And then there are the consequences Putin has already faced as a result of his annexation of Crimea. The Obama administration did impose sanctions targeted at a few of Putin’s henchmen and cronies. They publicly laughed them off, but it was worth a try.

Beyond that, though, Obama’s consequences haven’t even been inconsequential; they’ve had the opposite of their intended effect. Rather than send the Ukrainians weapons or useful intelligence, we sent them a bunch of MREs (“Meals Ready to Eat”). And even that we were unwilling to do in too provocative a way. We didn’t use Air Force cargo-planes, but rather sent the snacks in by civilian trucks. Meanwhile, pleas from allies to deploy more assets to Poland and other front-line NATO states were rebuffed by the White House.

On April 12, the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was still weighing requests from the Ukrainian government for other supplies such as “medical kits, uniforms, boots and military socks.” …

 

 

Michael Barone says the real danger is not in Ukraine.

… The real danger may lie not in Ukraine but farther west. Obama’s dismissal of his red line in Syria and his tepid actions on Ukraine may lead Putin to believe he will not back up other commitments.

Putin says he is protecting Russian minorities in Ukraine; what if he does so in the Baltic republics?

The British historian Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, warns of “the danger, in trying to avoid conflagration in Ukraine, that Western leaders fail to provide clear signals to Putin.”

The West, he says, must show “firmness and clarity in defending the real red lines established by NATO.” That means more U.S. and NATO military forces in the Baltics and Poland. And beefing up U.S. and NATO militaries.

Putin’s goal may be to dismantle NATO as he believes NATO dismantled the Soviet Union — the greatest geopolitical tragedy of 21st century. Obama must not allow that to happen.

 

 

What are we to make of a government that is so weak abroad, but flexes SWAT muscles intimidating ordinary citizens? John Fund writes on the SWAT troopers deployed by ordinary public safety goobers.

Regardless of how people feel about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management over his cattle’s grazing rights, a lot of Americans were surprised to see TV images of an armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary wing of the BLM deployed around Bundy’s ranch.

They shouldn’t have been. Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? All of these have their own SWAT units and are part of a worrying trend towards the militarization of federal agencies — not to mention local police forces.

“Law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier,” journalist Radley Balko writes in his 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop. “The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop — armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”

The proliferation of paramilitary federal SWAT teams inevitably brings abuses that have nothing to do with either drugs or terrorism. Many of the raids they conduct are against harmless, often innocent, Americans who typically are accused of non-violent civil or administrative violations. …