I have seen quite a few contrasting if not conflicting opinions on Ukraine today. It reminds me of the opening of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Complaining about diffident Western support by Jamie Dettmer at Politico:

Western powers have failed Ukraine by dithering and delaying when it comes to supplying munitions and weapons systems, offering them on a just-in-time basis at best or way behind schedule at worst. And they’ve held back on state-of-the-art longer-range munitions and fighter jets that could have made a crucial difference to the counteroffensive.

Declaiming that we owe Ukraine nothing by Francis Sempa at RealClearDefense:

We can admire the courage of Ukrainians fighting for the independence of their country, but we owe them nothing.

or arguing that the most benign strategy for Ukraine is “Finlandization”, as I did twenty years ago, by Christopher Fettweis at Responsible Statecraft:

NATO expansion was a necessary condition for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It was not sufficient, since Putin has agency and made a catastrophically bad choice, but it was necessary. Those in the West who blame the United States for the war are as myopic as those who claim that Western policies had nothing to do with it. Putin remains a cold warrior at heart, and talked about NATO obsessively in the years leading up to the invasion.

Expanding NATO further would again provide the necessary conditions for tension and conflict. Russia will not stand by while Ukraine joins the enemy camp. A second invasion – perhaps before Ukraine formally joined the alliance, or perhaps afterwards – would be extremely likely. Those who suggest that deterrence would keep the Russians in check should listen to the rambling interview Putin just gave to Tucker Carlson. Ukraine simply matters more to the Russians than it does to us. Putin would calculate that no American president would be willing to sacrifice New York for Kyiv.

Another solution exists, one that might well assure Kyiv’s security without exacerbating Russian paranoia. Ukraine should be “Finlandized.”

During the Cold War, Finland was essentially a neutral country. It took no official positions on the pressing issues of the day, and was careful not to criticize the Soviet Union. Leaders in Helsinki made it clear to those in Moscow that they had no desire to join the West. They resisted pressure to join both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and discouraged their citizens from openly criticizing either side. Finland avoided the Soviet embrace by making it clear that it would avoid the West as well.

I am materially in agreement with the first two sentences of the quoted passage of Mr. Fettweis’s piece.

Complaining that we aren’t supplying the Ukrainians fast enough is facile. We aren’t able to supply the Ukrainians fast enough. We stopped being able to supply the Ukrainians fast enough when we started deindustrializing the United States which I would put more than 50 years ago. I’ll write a post on that subject at a later time.

Here’s my question. In 1942 would anyone have argued seriously that if we just supplied the Filipinos fast enough Philippines could prevail against the Japanese? That’s what we’re talking about in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Ukraine was not self-sufficient in 2014. Russia, very nearly an autarky, remains largely self-sufficient. That along with a couple of other factors are the reason that the sanctions we’ve imposed on Russia have failed.

We will not go to war directly with Russia over Ukraine. As long as that remains the case Ukraine cannot prevail. If we do go to war directly with Russia, the conflict is likely to go nuclear very quickly. How does that help Ukraine?

I don’t think that Joel Kotkin actually comprehends the enormity of the problem we are facing in education today. In his piece at UnHerd, after listing some of the shortcomings in Illinois’s public school systems (Illinois is always a good example of a bad example) he remarks:

It is no surprise, then, that the education system fails to produce the workers needed by employers. The latter, in particular, note a lack of “soft skills” in young workers, such as the ability to think critically, as well their “unrealistic” expectations about work. Even as business schools, particularly elite ones, push such themes as critical race theory, roughly half of all major corporations are now eliminating college degrees as a perquisite for hiring.

“When you hear these things,” Arizona State professor Paul Carrese tells me, “you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Yet, despite all this, he also suggests that “we are at the end of a downward spiral”, where “loss of confidence in education has become a wake-up call”.

To name just a few things the Chicago Public Schools have clearly demonstrated do not improve outcomes:

Low student to teacher ratios

The present student to teacher ratio in the CPS is 14:1. That’s the lowest it has been for years. Lowering the ratio has not resulted in improved outcomes. Note that the student to teacher ratio does not include the substantial number of administrators employed by the district.

High per pupil spending

The spending per student in the CPS is roughly $17,000. That’s considerably higher than in any adjoining state, more than Los Angeles Unified and almost twice as much as in Texas.

A union-organized labor force

The Chicago Teachers Union is basically running the City of Chicago at this point. It has been on strike twice in the last five years.

A large district

The CPS is the third-largest school district in the United States. Whatever economies there are to scale in K-12 education they are not reflected in outcomes.

You can’t even urge a “back to basics” approach to education because there is no consensus on what the basics are anymore. When John Dewey laid the foundation for today’s public schools more than a century ago he had a very clear objective for the public schools: acculturation. Detach the students from the cultures of their parents’ countries of origin and inculcate in them the ideas and values of the United States. Such a strategy would be castigated as racist, genderist, and ableist today.

At this point about 25% of students in K-12 public schools do not speak English at home. I don’t have good statistics on this but many of their parents are functionally illiterate in English and, probably, in their native languages. That itself is an impediment to learning.

Finally, as I have been pointing out for some time, in our post-literate society the “soft skills” to which Mr. Kotkin refers are practically impossible to teach. They are the products of a literate society not a visual one our present society.

I found this interesting. At the Washington Post Christian Shepherd, Cate Cadell, Ellen Nakashima, Joseph Menn and Aaron Schaffer report on the release of a sizeable cache of emails, chat logs, images, etc. documenting the Chinese government’s massive cyber-spying program against foreign governments, companies, etc.:

A trove of leaked documents from a Chinese state-linked hacking group shows that Beijing’s intelligence and military groups are attempting large-scale, systematic cyber intrusions against foreign governments, companies and infrastructure — with hackers of one company claiming to be able to target users of Microsoft, Apple and Google.

The cache — containing more than 570 files, images and chat logs — offers an unprecedented look inside the operations of one of the firms that Chinese government agencies hire for on-demand, mass data-collecting operations.

The files — posted to GitHub last week and deemed credible by cybersecurity experts, although the source remains unknown — detail contracts to extract foreign data over eight years and describe targets within at least 20 foreign governments and territories, including India, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Taiwan and Malaysia. Indian publication BNN earlier reported on the documents.

“We rarely get such unfettered access to the inner workings of any intelligence operation,” said John Hultquist, chief analyst of Mandiant Intelligence, a cybersecurity firm owned by Google Cloud. “We have every reason to believe this is the authentic data of a contractor supporting global and domestic cyberespionage operations out of China,” he said.

In one sense none of this is surprising at all. It has been widely believed that the Chinese government has been engaging in cyberattacks against foreign governments, companies, and individuals for years. In my own case I eliminated almost all of my unwanted traffic and intrusions into this blog by the simple expedient of blocking China-based IP addresses.

I’ll make a very clumsy analogy. The shocking part of Germany’s official murders of certain segments of its population in the 1930s and 1940s—Jews, homosexuals, communists, etc.—was not the fact of it. There had been massacres and pogroms for millennia. It was the sheer industrial scale of it and systematic approach to it.

Similarly with Chinese hacking. Countries have spied on each other for as long as there have been countries. We do it. The Brits do it. The Canadians probably do it for goodness sake. The scale and scope of Chinese cyberattacks is something else again. I see no way of having an even semi-secure Internet as long as that’s the case. I only see two alternatives. One of them is to prohibit by law access to the public Internet by any organization you want to avoid being hacked. That includes government offices, utilities, hospitals (as we in Chicago have learned lately) and many others. The other is to block Chinese access to the Internet.

Since both of those are deeply unpalatable, I suspect we’ll just accept an insecure Internet with periodic attacks and takedowns of government offices, utilities, hospitals, etc.

Russia’s war with Ukraine began in earnest two years ago. Arguably, it began almost ten years ago but technically it began two years ago when Russian regulars invaded Ukraine. Since then the media coverage, much of it of dubious credibility, has driven us from outrage to exaltation to determination to despair and back again. At RealClearDefense retired colonel Joe Buccino characterizes the first two years of the war like this:

In the first year after the full-scale Russian invasion – February 2022 to February 2023 – Ukrainian troops overcame massive disadvantages in technology and mass. They did so mainly with American Javelins, Stingers, and Multiple Launch Rocket Systems. During that period, Ukraine had largely bipartisan support in D.C. Throughout the following year – February 2023 to today – American aid – including dozens of tanks, more than a hundred Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and more than a hundred Strykers – kept Ukraine in the fight. During this period, support among Republicans in Congress began to wane. Even if the House approves the current proposed aid package, the flow of weapons is coming to a close. Without a continuing stream of those weapons, Ukraine will ultimately fall. Even the F-16 fighter jets the U.S. will ship to Ukraine in the coming months will not turn the tide. F-16s require long, smooth runways; the fighter aircraft will struggle to land and take off on Ukraine’s bombed-out runway.

Arriving at this conclusion:

The reality two years in is that there is no path to victory for Ukraine – not in the sense of pushing Russian troops back to the pre-February 2022 lines of control. After the Ukrainian troops abandoned Avdiivka – the most significant loss or gain by either side in nine months – following some of the war’s heaviest fighting, almost all advantages accrue to Russia. The seizure of Avdiivka does not materially change the war, but it does change the momentum. Moscow can throw mass in terms of bodies, tanks, artillery, and drones at the exhausted Ukrainian forces until they crack. Ukraine is exhausted and outnumbered and struggling to recruit new troops. The best Ukraine can do now is fight Russia to a negotiated settlement that allows sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security from another Russian invasion. Even these provisions now seem unrealistic.

After initial setbacks at the onset of the invasion, the Russian military now displays the resolute determination initially witnessed by the other side. Russian generals have adapted to Ukraine’s offenses after initial setbacks. Russian commanders are now building the kinds of defenses in depth that Ukrainian forces struggle to fight through. Russian ground forces now routinely defeat Ukraine’s drones. Russia’s formidable arsenals of attack helicopters, drones, and mines pound Ukraine while the Ukrainian troops resort to rationing artillery shells and long-range rockets.

Castigating that as Putin apologism or pro-Russian is fatuous. It is realistic, merciful even.

The only thing I would change from Col. Buccino’s post is that I do not believe that victory has ever been been possible for the Ukrainians as they are defining victory. Nonetheless I continue to believe we must support the Ukrainians’ war effort. However, its objective must change to gaining the best achievable terms for the Ukrainians for the conclusion of an armistice.

I have seen multiple claims that Putin’s objective in Ukraine is to conquer and occupy the country and incorporate it into Russia. Putin himself has repeatedly said that his objectives in Ukraine are to demilitarize it and “de-Nazify” it whatever that means.

I tend to agree with John Mearsheimer: Putin’s objectives are to in Dr. Mearsheimer’s words “wreck” Ukraine.

What are Putin’s objectives in Ukraine? Please provide evidence for your claims.

I’d be interested in my readers’ explanations for this. I doubt that it can be explained by their paying too much attention to the media.

For my own part I’m satisfied but I’m upper income, married, religious, a college graduate, a Democrat, and over 55 which fits the pattern.

For this post I have placed all references at the end of the post.

When President Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act in 1980, its intent was to align U. S. law and international treaty obligations. It remains the law of the land. It was passed unanimously by the Senate. It has been enforced by Democratic presidents and Republican presidents. It has been workable for 43 years.

It provided a clear definition of what constituted refugee status:

“The term ‘refugee’ means (A) any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unwilling or unable to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, or (B) in such special
circumstances as the President after appropriate consultation (as Post, p. 103. defined in section 207(e) of this Act) may specify, any person who is within the country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, within the country in which such person is habitually residing, £md who is persecuted or who has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. The term ‘refugee’ does not include any person who ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”.

defined the legal standards of proof to be used in the assessment of applications for asylum: the applicant must have a “well-founded fear of persecution”, and raised the number of refugees to be accepted by the United States to 50,000.

Our present situation has two aspects: stock and flow. There is presently a backlog of 3 million asylum applications. That is the “stock”. These cases are being adjudicated by roughly 1,000 election judges with each election judge able to hear roughly 700 cases per year. If the “flow”, new asylum applications received, were to slow to zero, it would take four years to adjudicate all of those cases. That is obviously unacceptable.

The AIC summarizes the problem succinctly:

The changes proposed to border and asylum policy in this bill can be over-simplified into two principles.

• Making it harder for people to be allowed to start the asylum process upon entering the U.S.; and
• Making that process itself faster.

The bill that failed to proceed in the Senate included (in the portions relevant to refugees and applications for asylum):

• Appropriated $2.3 billion in refugee assistance inside the U.S.
• Appropriated $20.2 billion for improvements to U.S. border security
• Rather than being heard by immigration judges, asylum officers would review both the applications for asylum and their appeal; asylum applicants would not be allowed representation
• The standard would be changed from “clear and convincing” to “significant possibility”
• Additional criteria would be added (asylum claims can be rejected if the person has a disqualifying criminal history, if they were living safely in a third country before seeking asylum, or if they could safely relocate in their original home country)
• The process will be changed:
  

  Under the bill, this system is to be in place and operational 91 days after the bill is signed into law. This is how it would work: (1) Migrants receive an initial screening within 90 days of arrival. (2) If the claim fails — a “negative protection decision” — they are immediately ordered for removal. They have 72 hours to appeal or request a hearing. (3) If the claim passes initial screening — “positive protection decision” — they will get a work authorization immediately, be released into the country and have another 90 days before a final decision is made on their case.

• Establishes “emergency border authority”: when the number of encounters per day reaches 5,000 DHS is obligated to reject additional applications for asylum and remove the applicants from the U. S. Exclusions to this include unaccompanied minors and 1,400 applicants processed per day
• Establishes “humanitarian parole” for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.
• Appropriates funding for an additional 4,300 asylum officers

The bill has a number of shortcomings. Among its defects are that it:

• Makes bad assumptions
• Is unrealistic
• Is unnecessary

AIC’s reaction to the bill was:

Notably, this bill would not stop anyone from being allowed to set foot on U.S. soil. It would not, therefore, do anything to bring down “the numbers” on its own. The bill’s proponents hope instead that it will reduce the number of people who are allowed to stay in the U.S. outside of immigration custody, and therefore, through word of mouth, reduce the number of people trying to come to begin with.

What we have seen, time and time again, is that adding additional penalties or complications to the process for asylum seekers once they arrive in the U.S. immiserates those asylum seekers without having a lasting impact on overall border arrivals. This is especially true when the process is made longer and less certain, contributing to bottlenecks throughout the system including dangerous border overcrowding.

The supporters of the bill assume that word of mouth will be sufficient to reduce the “flow”. They are wrong. New asylum-seekers will be coached to provide the answers that will gain them admission under the new rules.

There is presently a shortfall of 25% in the number of asylum officers hired for whom funds have already been appropriated. That strongly implies that there will be a lag between the appropriation for the additional asylum officers and when those asylum officers will be hired, trained, and prepared to review applications. During that lag the backlog of unprocessed applications will continue to mount. How quickly do they expect the hypothetical 5,000 asylum officers to address the backlog of millions of applications?

Assume it’s twice as fast as asylum judges are clearing them. That would just about clear the backlog in a year.

I think there’s good reason to believe that will not happen: the provision for lack of representation is a deal-killer, practically guaranteed to cause the provisions of the bill to be enjoined from taking force until fully adjudicated. How long will that take? While the injunction is in force, the processing of asylum applications will be in limbo with neither immigration judges nor asylum officers processing them. If representation is allowed, that will slow the processing of applications, probably to the present clearance rate or fewer.

If anything the exceptions provided for unaccompanied minors institutionalizes present practice and the way we are dealing with unaccompanied minors is criminal. It is legally-approved kidnapping. The correct way of addressing it is by returning unaccompanied minors to their countries of origin and turning them over to designated authorities there.

The provisions for “humanitarian parole” invite abuse. Every Mexican, Guatemalan, or Salvadoran will magically become Nicaraguans or Venezuelans. Sub-Saharan Africans will become Haitians.

The trigger level of 5,000 asylum-seekers per day before compelling action institutionalizes the present flow and that at 2 million per year is already unmanageable. As a gauge of how unmanageable it is, the $2 billion in refugee assistance the bill called for is far below the mark. Illinois alone’s spending on migrants is in excess of a half billion per year. I can only guess what the total state and local government spending might be.

Furthermore, we aren’t adding housing units nationally at the level required for this mass migration and the migrants will never be able to afford the units we are adding.

What is actually needed is a return to the conditions and standards of the Refugee Act of 1980 which is completely legal and workable with a reasonable limit on applications for asylum at, say, 1,000 per day which is consistent with the admission of 50,000 legitimate refugees per year which is what that act calls for. Claims that we are required by treaty to accept an unlimited number of asylum applications are false for two reasons. The first is that acts of Congress take precedence over international treaties. There is already a law in place. The second is that anything that is unworkable is ipso facto unconstitutional and the status quo is unworkable.

What is lacking is will on the part of the Biden Administration. The effect of the Senate’s bill which failed to proceed was to give political cover to the Biden Administration for its fecklessness in managing the border.

The Refugee Act of 1980
Emergency National Security Supplemental Bill
American Immigration Council analysis of the Senate border bill
PBS News Hour analysis of the Senate border bill
FRED: total housing units
USCIS Asylum Quarterly Engagement Fiscal Year 2023

I’m going to admit that I do not understand George Friedman’s reaction to Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny’s death.

My own reaction is that I deplore his death which seems so unnecessary and offer sympathies to his widow and the Russian people. It illustrates the sorry state of Russian politics.

The graphic above is from Visual Capitalist.

I sincerely wish they had gone all the way back to 1970—the trend is even more pronounced.

This development concerns me because I don’t think it is consistent with an egalitarian society. Basically, we’re increasingly becoming a plutocracy with hereditary plutocrats, a large portion of the society largely dependent on government handouts, and a struggling middle class.