At the conclusion of his Washington Post column on the leaks of sensitive documents David Ignatius quotes Winston Churchill:

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

It looks like the question is whether the truth has been overwhelmed by her bodyguard.

Here’s his assessment of the trove:

We’re in Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors” here. What matters, as he observed, is that you know what’s accurate and what is a manipulated reflection. Though a few documents appear to have been doctored, an administration official told me Monday: “We’re still examining them, but at first glance, this appears to be real.”

and here’s what he thinks we’ve learned:

• Ukraine’s air defense weapons have dwindled to the point that Russia about to gain air superiority.
• Ukraine is firing faster than the West can replenish.
• The Biden Administration has been less inclined to use our own troops in the conflict more than some of our allies, e.g. the United Kingdom.
• U. S. officials think the conflict is reaching a stalemate.

I found this passage in the column wryly amusing:

This ought to be the trump card for the United States. In World War II, the United States converted manufacturing plants across the country to make tanks, planes and aircraft carriers that simply overwhelmed Japan and Germany. No similar mobilization has taken place this time. Why not? Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has met several times with defense contractors, but why hasn’t President Biden appointed the equivalent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board?

It may have escaped Mr. Ignatius’s attention but this isn’t 80 years ago. The “manufacturing plants across the country” to which he refers were dismantled decades ago and much of that manufacturing is being done in China. Surprise! China isn’t on our side in this conflict.

The reason that President Biden hasn’t appointed a “war production board” is that it would take a lot more than that to restart our manufacturing. Millions of square feet of auto manufacturing, just to cite one example, no longer exist to be converted for use building tanks. The same is true in Europe. They have been offshoring their manufacturing to China for the last 30-50 years.

We’d need to be mining more coal and iron, making more steel, building more plants. We’ve been moving in the opposite direction for 50 years. A war production board can’t change that overnight.

Let me try to summarize David Brooks’s latest New York Times column.

• Lots of people are leaving Blue States for Red States
• Red States have lower taxes, are more pro-business, and have more affordable housing
• People are moving from Blue cities in Blue States to Blue cities in Red States
• Blue cities in Red States are socially more liberal than the rest of the state
• Therefore the “winning formula” is low tax, pro-business, and socially liberal
• Neither political party espouses the “winning formula” and it doesn’t look like they’re likely to in the foreseeable future

I think that’s a superficial analysis and far too “from 50,000 feet”. IMO examining what’s actually happening tells a slightly different story.

For one thing to some extent what he’s observing is nothing new. It’s the same Mad Tea Party that’s been going on since the founding of the Republic. The main difference is now that now the frontier isn’t moving West but moving to the relatively undeveloped parts of the country in the West and the South.

For another are people actually moving from Blue cities in Blue States to Blue cities in Red States? Or are people moving from Purple suburbs in Blue States to Purple suburbs in Red States? I don’t honestly know but I suspect at least some of that is going on.

I note that the words “labor union” do not appear in his column. I suspect that unionization is a factor in the present migration. I don’t know what the situation is in other states but here in Illinois paying public employee pensions and benefits makes up nearly 30% of the state’s spending. The courts have seen to it that the only way for Illinoisans to escape that tithe is to leave the state. Ironically, about 20% of retired Illinois public employees move to other states thereby draining Illinois’s economy in two ways at the same time.

Which provides me a smoother transition to the last point I wanted to make. Ostensibly the United States has a common law system. A common law system has several features that distinguish it from a civil code system. In a common law system the law may or may not apply; if it doesn’t apply, it doesn’t apply. Also in a common law system the written law is only the tip of the legal iceberg. Most of the law has been made by judges and lawyers, precedents, some going back hundreds of years or longer. In that sense our legal system is inherently conservative.

I think there’s a quiet rebellion going on, particularly in Blue States, against our common law system because the common law gets in the way of progressives accomplishing the things they want to do. In Blue States they’re freer to ignore precedent; in Red States even people in Blue cities need to conform to the common law.

And I haven’t even touched on the degree to which the rest of the country has been subsidizing the “Sun Belt” for the last 80 years.

The editors of the Washington Post remark on the security breach:

Keeping secrets is essential to a functioning government. Breaking the laws for a psychic joyride is a despicable betrayal of trust and oaths. In the course of the investigation, it should be determined why such highly-classified materials were available to someone of a junior enlisted rank, and why they were apparently sitting on a gaming server for a month before U.S. officials realized it.

The U.S. classification system for managing secrets is overwhelmed. The Public Interest Declassification Board warned three years ago of an explosion of digital information that will further strain the system, and outlined a vision for modernization. And as the Editorial Board has argued, too much national security information is classified, and too little declassified. The classification process should be simplified into two tiers, “secret” and “top secret,” eliminating the lower “confidential” level and reducing the number of people with access to the highest levels.

If there is anything positive to come out of the Discord leaks, it should be an overhaul to better protect and manage the nation’s most valuable secrets.

That’s fine as far as it goes but IMO it’s insufficiently critical of those who put the present policies in place or those who were supposed to administer them. They didn’t and aren’t doing their jobs.

Update

The editors of the Wall Street Journal pile on:

One obvious question is why Mr. Teixeira had access to such a range of secrets. The leaked documents, assuming they are real, include intelligence on allied foreign governments and assessments of Ukraine’s progress in its war against Russia’s invasion. Did he need to know? Why did he apparently have access to an internal Pentagon computer network for top secret information? A sweeping review of classified access is needed.

It’s also fair to ask how the documents could circulate for weeks on Discord and then other platforms without U.S. counterintelligence agents finding out until the press reported it. Is this another case of misplaced priorities by the Federal Bureau of Investigation?

The Justice Department has mistakenly pursued the innocent before—think the FBI’s obsessive focus on Steven Hatfill for the 2001 anthrax attacks. But if Mr. Teixeira is charged, his motive will be important to know. Did he see himself as another Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, who were celebrated by much of the media for their classified betrayals?

The cavalier handling of classified documents by Presidents Trump and Biden has also set a bad example that could cause less respect for the obligations of secrecy. There’s much more to learn—about Mr. Teixeira, but also about the practices and culture of classification that allowed this to happen.

Again, that’s okay as far as it goes but IMO it’s still very mild.

The story of the security leaks continues to unfold. The latest development is that a 21 year old guardsman has been arrested. Evan Perez, Jeremy Herb, Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen and Kevin Liptak report at CNN:

CNN
—
A member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard was arrested by the FBI on Thursday in connection with the leaking of classified documents that have been posted online, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday.

The arrest of Jack Teixeira, 21, comes following a fast-moving search by the US government for the identity of the leaker who posted classified documents to a social media platform popular with video gamers.

Teixeira was arrested in Massachusetts without incident, Garland said, and will be arraigned in federal court there. “This investigation is ongoing. We will share more information at the appropriate time,” the attorney general said, declining to answer questions.

Teixeira will first appear in court on Friday in Boston, according to the US attorney’s office there.

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner posts in reaction to my post yesterday. After citing some of the comments here he remarks:

I’m with Dave on this one: if any idiot private with a security clearance has access to SCI, then we might as well just post it on the open Internet. I honestly don’t know how much value a junior enlisted Guardsman could possibly bring as an intelligence analyst on strategic level matters. But, in this case, he’s not even an intel guy—he’s a low level NerdsToGo tech. Obviously, he would have to be able to access the facilities and equipment but there’s zero need for him to access so much as Controlled Unclassified Information, let alone TS/SCI. The very fact that he downloaded so much as a single document should have sent up a huge red flag.

Is this the end of the story or just its beginning? I sincerely hope it’s the latter. IMO if Mr. Teixeira actually was the culprit it’s a command problem. If he did not follow the procedures that have been put in place, it’s a breach of discipline at the lower level. If the procedures that were put in place were inadequate to prevent the leak, it’s a higher level command problem.

I would add that I disagree with President Biden’s dismissal of the leak as inconsequential. At the very least information released has been embarrassing to the administration. Shrugging and moving on is an inadequate response. Furthermore, if the contents of the documents as described in the media are accurate, the administration’s characterization of the situation in Ukraine has been something between misinformation and disinformation. I don’t see how that can be described as democratic.

I wanted to make one last point. I have read reactions from veteran journalists that I found incredibly naive, effectively deeming the possibility that anything could be given a high security classification simply because it’s embarrassing to the higher ups. Sadly, I think that’s one of the main reasons so much is classified these days. I honestly don’t know how we can assess the conduct of our leaders in an environment in which so much is concealed from us. “Just trust me” is inconsistent with the values on which the United States was founded. If that puts us at a disadvantage by comparison with more authoritarian regimes, that’s the price of democracy.

At the New York Times Aric Toler, Michael Schwirtz, Haley Willis, Riley Mellen, Christiaan Triebert, Malachy Browne, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Julian E. Barnesis report that a young National Guard member is currently a “person of interest” in the leaks of classified documents:

The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak of the government documents to the private online group. One official said Airman Teixeira might have information relevant to the investigation.

Federal investigators have been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online but have not identified Airman Teixeira or anyone else as a suspect. The F.B.I. declined to comment.

If the individual identified is actually the leaker, it would be beyond incompetent and reckless. Does every member of an intelligence wing of every National Guard unit have materially unrestricted access to such classified materials? What does secrecy mean in that event?

At France 24 Cyrielle Cabot echoes the point I have made:

But in stark contrast to this promising trend in many parts of the world, China moved against the tide, darkening the global picture. “China’s steady new coal plant additions (26.8 GW) offset coal plant retirements in the rest of the world (23.9 GW) in 2022,” said Global Energy Monitor.

China now has 365 GW of generating capacity, compared to an average of 172 GW elsewhere. More alarmingly, China alone now accounts for 68% of coal-related projects under development worldwide, and 72% of those are in the pipeline.

“Because of its size and population, China’s energy consumption is necessarily very high,” explained Thibaud Voïta, a researcher at the Center for Energy and Climate at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI). “One of the major challenges for Beijing is to meet the energy demand that has been constantly increasing for several years.”

Here’s an eye-opening observation:

This saw annual coal capacity additions for many Chinese provinces topping the capacity additions for entire countries. Citing the example of the northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, the report noted that, “Inner Mongolia (6 GW) surpassed India (3.5 GW) despite India being the country with the most coal commissioned in 2022 after China. In fact, Inner Mongolia nearly had more new capacity than the next two countries after China combined (India and Japan).”

If the objective is eliminating the use of coal for power generation by a date certain, it can’t be achieved that way. If the objective reducing the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, it can’t be achieved that way.

The only objective that might be achieved that way is to reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere relative to what might have been released if no other measures were adopted. That’s pretty weak tea.

Here’s the formula for ending the war in Ukraine proposed by Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan at Foreign Affairs:

The best path forward is a sequenced two-pronged strategy aimed at first bolstering Ukraine’s military capability and then, when the fighting season winds down late this year, ushering Moscow and Kyiv from the battlefield to the negotiating table. The West should start by immediately expediting the flow of weapons to Ukraine and increasing their quantity and quality. The goal should be to bolster Ukraine’s defenses while making its coming offensive as successful as possible, imposing heavy losses on Russia, foreclosing Moscow’s military options, and increasing its willingness to contemplate a diplomatic settlement. By the time Ukraine’s anticipated offensive is over, Kyiv may also warm up to the idea of a negotiated settlement, having given its best shot on the battlefield and facing growing constraints on both its own manpower and help from abroad.

The second prong of the West’s strategy should be to roll out later this year a plan for brokering a cease-fire and a follow-on peace process aimed at permanently ending the conflict. This diplomatic gambit may well fail. Even if Russia and Ukraine continue to take significant losses, one or both of them may prefer to keep fighting. But as the war’s costs mount and the prospect of a military stalemate looms, it is worth pressing for a durable truce, one that could prevent renewed conflict and, even better, set the stage for a lasting peace.

I see all sorts of things wrong with that formula. First, it isn’t “the West” that is providing more weapons for Ukraine but the United States. Germany in particular has largely been issuing press releases and otherwise doing relatively little. In fairness Germany’s imports of crude oil and natural gas from Russia have declined substantially but they are still not non-existent.

The second thing I see wrong with it is that weapons are not enough. Ukraine’s greater problem is the possibility of running out of people to carry the weapons. The reports of UK and U. S. special forces operating in Ukraine is disturbing. If true, it’s an error.

Third, the costs in manpower to Russia are being exaggerated. Most of those lost are in militias. Their deaths have next to no political cost to Putin or Moscow.

Fourth, I see no indications that either Ukraine or Russia is stepping back from its maximalist goals. I would think that would be a pre-requisite for any talks.

I do agree with this observation:

For over a year, the West has allowed Ukraine to define success and set the war aims of the West. This policy, regardless of whether it made sense at the outset of the war, has now run its course. It is unwise, because Ukraine’s goals are coming into conflict with other Western interests. And it is unsustainable, because the war’s costs are mounting, and Western publics and their governments are growing weary of providing ongoing support. As a global power, the United States must acknowledge that a maximal definition of the interests at stake in the war has produced a policy that increasingly conflicts with other U.S. priorities.

I have less confidence in their notion of a “feasible path” out of the impasse:

The West should do more now to help Ukraine defend itself and advance on the battlefield, putting it in the best position possible at the negotiating table later this year. In the meantime, Washington should set a diplomatic course that ensures the security and viability of Ukraine within its de facto borders—while working to restore the country’s territorial integrity over the long term.

or, in other words, acknowledge defeat. Isn’t that what it would be if Ukraine backs away from restoring its pre-2014 borders?

Reports of declining inflation have led to a lively dispute: what should Fed policy be? Should it increase interest rates again, leave them the same, decrease them? Scott Grannis thinks it’s time for the Fed to cut rates:

There is absolutely no reason the Fed needs to raise rates further, and every reason they should begin cutting rates—beginning with the May 3rd FOMC meeting if not sooner.

Barry Ritholz seems to think they should leave them where they are:

If the FOMC were plugged in, they would realize that their work is done, there is no need to throw millions out of work because we have a shortage of houses, semiconductors, and workers of all kinds. Most goods have returned to pre-pandemic price levels. The biggest driver of apartment prices is the shortage of homes and the high price of mortgages. (Gee, whoever is responsible for that?)

Based on the Economist’s “Big Mac index”, the Fed still has some work to do (it has been suggested that the CPI systematically understates inflation).

So too hot, too cold, or just right? I don’t know. I do know that would ordinary people buy is significantly more expensive that it was in 2019.

The one thing we should be able to take away from all of this is that Modern Monetary Theory has been a siren’s song. Although what MMTers prescribe may be technically correct, it’s also politically impossible. You can always spend more but cutting spending or raising revenue is politically fraught.

Wall Street Journal journalists Byron Tau, Sadie Gurman, and Aruna Viswanatha report on the recent leak of classified documents:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. government is treating the apparent disclosure of classified material surrounding the war in Ukraine as an insider’s leak, people familiar with the matter say, but hasn’t yet homed in on key suspects for a massive intelligence breach that has exposed the challenges of safeguarding sensitive U.S. information and tested ties with some of America’s closest allies.

The bulk of the more than 60 documents, if genuine, appear to originate from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operations Center and the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Such documents are typically briefed to senior-level decision makers at the Pentagon in an environment protected from electronic surveillance and secured against leaks.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is using clues in the images that have circulated online in recent weeks to aid its criminal investigation, law-enforcement officials said. Some of the documents would be accessible to several hundred people, while others would be restricted to a much smaller group, U.S. officials said. Focusing on the access to the more-restricted documents gives investigators a way to narrow the field of potential leakers, they said.

That’s the point I have been making since the news of the leak broke. Additionally, the number of individuals who have access to all of the most highly classified documents in the cache should cause that number to decline. If that’s not the case it sounds like an even greater security problem to me.

I sincerely hope the Department of Justice is taking this matter seriously. Failing to do so would call executive branch credibility into question.