The primary election for Chicago mayor is today. Nine candidates are vying for the job including the incumbent. Unfortunately, the top two finishers today will go on to the run-off.

I was reading a piece at Vox.com and one sentence jumped out at me:

The CFPB, however, is unusual in that its funding first passes through a different federal agency, the Federal Reserve.

What’s wrong with that sentence?

Answer (highlight to view)

The Federal Reserve is not a federal agency. It receives no money appropriated by Congress.

When COVID-19 first emerged all sorts of speculations were flying around, fast and furious. Was it zoonotic as had been the case for other viruses? Was it an attack by a bioweapon? Was it the result of an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Holding a view other than the one approved for your tribe was apostasy. Then the FBI decided it probably was spread by a lab accident. And now the Department of Energy has decided the same thing. At the Wall Street Journal Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel report:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

I guess I’m in the same camp as the two intelligence agencies that are undecided. Although the persistence theory would lead you to suspect that COVID-19 was zoonotic in origin, that theory is only good until it isn’t. I don’t think we know yet and may never know.

As I’ve said before I think the greatest likelihood of the Chinese government being forthcoming with their best evidence against the lab leak hypothesis is for a civil suit against the Chinese government for damages related to COVID-19 to proceed. That doesn’t require proof beyond reasonable doubt, only a preponderance of the evidence.

The RAND organization has convened a panel of 27 experts who weighed in on the war in Ukraine and provided some guidance on what to look for in the coming year.

Their expertise is various: history, economics, international relations, Russia, public policy, and so on. Most of their remarks are pretty noncommittal which I suspect is part of what makes them experts. I agreed with many of them but disagreed with some. For example, I think this is a pretty succinct encapsulation of the situation by defense analyst Clint Reach:

In a protracted fight, time tends to favor the larger side. The question going forward for Ukraine will be the extent to which its superior will to fight and Western support and can overcome the numbers challenge.

but I disagree with this observation by David Shlapak:

Continued U.S. support for Ukraine will be more contentious with a new Congress. Since Europe will only follow where the United States goes, Washington may be where the outcome largely is decided.

or, at least, I would phrase it differently. A major question is whether our notional European allies are actually committed to opposing Russia in this war. Germany, for example, has been rhetorically strong but pragmatically weak. At this point it looks unlikely to increase its own defenses to any material degree. I don’t think U. S. leadership is at issue so much as European followership. If, as we stand up, Germany, France, and Italy stand down, we will weaken ourselves without increasing actual opposition to Russia. I thought the observation that by admitting Eastern European countries to NATO we simultaneously weakened the alliance and provided evidence to Russia that we were threatening them was insightful.

The piece in the Washington Post is characterized as “seven opinions on the war in Ukraine”. In actuality it’s the same opinion expressed seven different ways: Ukraine will win its war with Russia. How could it not with the morale of the Ukrainians as high as it is and the West providing whatever weapons they need? If the views of the retired general staff as quoted by Daniel Davis at 1945 are being represented accurately, they hold the same view. Here’s a sample snippet:

Earlier this week in a Washington Post op-ed, Hertling plainly stated Ukraine “will win the war.” The reason for his declarative optimism? Russia won’t make the changes necessary to win “simply because it can’t.”

The Russian military, the former general claimed, “reflects the character and values of the society” from which it was drawn, and Russians are incapable of learning lessons. The good general seems to have forgotten that Russia, when sufficiently threatened, destroyed France’s Napoleonic armies in 1812 and Germany’s vaunted Wehrmacht in 1945.

Lt. Col. Davis disagrees:

Too many of today’s retired general officers seem to still believe they are dealing with a foreign head of state like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, or Bashar al-Assad, none of whom had or have the power to do any meaningful harm to the U.S. or NATO. Vladimir Putin, regardless of how much many in the West may detest him and blame him for the war in Ukraine, is not in that category by virtue of his nuclear arsenal.

Moreover, as has been graphically demonstrated over the past year of war in which Russia has struggled to possess even a fifth of one bordering nation, Moscow does not represent any credible conventional threat to the NATO alliance. Even with a major mobilization, Putin will be hard-pressed to capture all the Donbas; there is presently no chance for him even to capture all of Ukraine. It is concerning that our generals don’t seem to grasp this clear military reality.

If the objective is, as Ukrainian President Zelensky has averred, a restoration of control by Ukraine of its territory prior to 2014, it’s unclear to me how that can be made to happen without direct involvement by NATO. Ukraine and Russia are presently engaged in a struggle which both parties consider existential. The gravest question to my mind is what is actually existential for each side? I am convinced that Russia believes that holding Crimea is existential for it; they are not bluffing or posturing. Do they see Donetsk and Luhansk the same way? If recovering Donetsk and Luhansk existential for the Ukrainians? Crimea?

Without some change in the objectives of both combatants, I can only imagine that the war will continue for a long time.

At 1945 Andrew A. Michta seizes the opportunity of the first anniversary of Russia’ attack on Ukraine to emphasize the possibility of a Ukrainian victory in the war and the destruction of Russia itself:

If we support Ukraine with main battle tanks, long-range fires, and modern fighter aircraft, the Ukrainian military will be in a position to defeat the Russian army. In the wake of such a defeat the Russian Federation – what Lev Dobriansky described as a modern-day “prison of nations” – will likely implode.

It is high time we grasp that the disintegration of the Russian Federation – while admittedly fraught with risk – may in fact happen, for until and unless the Russians figure out how to become a “normal state,” Europe and the world will know no peace.

The war in Ukraine, which in hindsight will likely be seen as Putin’s ultimate folly, is not only a test of Western resolve and a promise of a better world for Ukraine, Belarus and Eastern Europe writ large.

Assuming Russia is unequivocally defeated in Ukraine, it may also offer Russians a chance at a brighter future.

Graham Allison, writing at Foreign Policy, offers a less rosy analysis of the prognosis:

Yet even as Putin’s war has undermined Russia on the geopolitical stage, we should not overlook the fact that Russia has succeeded in severely weakening Ukraine on the ground.

This week, the Belfer Russia-Ukraine War Task Force, which I lead, is releasing a Report Card summarizing where things stand on the battlefield at the end of the first year of Russia’s war. As the Report Card documents, when we measure key indicators including territorial gains and losses, deaths of combatants and civilians, destruction of infrastructure, and economic impact, the brute facts are hard to ignore.

At the battlefield level, if one can remember only three numbers, they are: one-fifth, one-third, and 40 percent.

Since invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Russian troops have seized an additional 11 percent of Ukraine’s territory. When combined with land seized from Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, that means Russia now controls almost one-fifth of the country. The Ukrainian economy has been crushed, its GDP declining by more than one-third. Ukraine is now dependent on the United States and Western Europe not only for weekly deliveries of weapons and ammunition but also for monthly subsidies to pay its soldiers, officials, and pensioners. Forty percent of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed or occupied.

Read the whole thing. Here is the summary:

If year two of the war were a carbon copy of the first, Russia would control almost one-third of Ukraine next February.

while at Responsible Statecraft Justin Logan is critical of our own strategic choices:

Beyond choosing out of area, the alliance also went out of its mind, expanding like wildfire across the former Warsaw Pact. Expansion was a rare twofer for U.S. statecraft in Europe: taking on small, geographically vulnerable states made the alliance both weaker (diluting its military power by admitting countries that demanded more security than they supplied) and more provocative to Russia by bringing U.S. military power ever closer to the Russian border.

With the NATO front line moving further and further east during a period of Russian decline, the largest and most important member-states felt extremely secure, cutting their defense spending to the bone. The major industrial powers of Europe relied on the American pacifier, happily spending their own resources on infrastructure, a generous social safety system, and a variety of other domestic priorities.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, it looked for a moment as though Europe may have been shaken from its slumber. French President Emmanuel Macron’s proclamation that Europe needed to “wake up” and “be able to decide and increasingly take responsibility for more of our neighborhood security policy” suddenly looked prescient. Even the free-rider par excellence, Germany, declared the invasion had produced a Zeitenwende, or change of an era in European security. As part of this new era, Germany would dedicate €100 billion to defense over the subsequent four years, bringing its defense spending to 2 percent of GDP.

It was fun while it lasted.

The Biden administration’s reaction to the invasion effectively smothered a more robust European response. When it came into office, Biden immediately reversed Donald Trump’s effort to withdraw 12,000 U.S. servicemembers from Germany. Its “global posture review” assessed the U.S. presence around the world and concluded that it was pretty close to ideal.

After the Russian invasion, Biden sent an additional 20,000 U.S. troops to Europe to reassure the Europeans. It was exactly the opposite of what he should have done. The return of major war to Europe was a thunderbolt that provided the perfect opportunity to hand off European security to the Europeans. Biden squandered it.

Since then, the “New Era” in Germany has been revealed as little more than an accounting gimmick. Under the Zeitenwende plan, by 2026 Germany will be spending less on defense than it did in 2022. Meanwhile in the first year of war, the United States contributed more than $110 billion to Ukraine — by far the most of any state or institution.

However, that’s completely consistent with something I’ve pointed out as the objective held by some here in the United States for the U. S. not merely to be the preeminent military power but to be the only military power.

A key point that should not be ignored is that there are three broad outcomes:

1. Ukraine prevails on the battlefield, driving Russia completely out of the territory that Ukraine held in 2014.
2. Russia prevails on the battlefield, either incorporating the entirety of Ukraine into Greater Russia or neutralizing Ukraine
3. Some negotiated settlement with neither party fully achieving its goals

There is no realistic prospect for the first outcome, at least not without involving NATO directly. Russia will not surrender Crimea. It’s hard to imagine the second outcome transpiring, either.

That leaves the third which begins to appear more like the conclusion such as it was of the Korean War than the conclusions of either World War I or World War II.

This post is not a reaction to any particular article but to any number of articles. I’m not surprised that the economic sanctions imposed on Russia were not as effective as their advocates had claimed. They certainly haven’t brought Russia to its knees or ended the war.

I’m actually surprised that anyone thought that. Russia was already the next thing to an autarky—it is far less dependent on imports or exports than we are. And the only way that sanctions might have had the effects their advocates wanted would have been to apply them to Russia’s trading partners including China and India as well. It should be obvious we were not going to do that.

Consequently, I think that the real objective of the sanctions was performative, symbolic, a show of opposition to the war.

At the Chicago Sun-Times Fran Spielman reports that Democratic perennial David Axelrod is saying that incumbent Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot may not even make the run-off:

Paul Vallas appears sure to make the April 4 mayoral runoff and Brandon Johnson “has the momentum” to be the opponent, setting up a battle between the “candidate of the Fraternal Order of Police” and the “candidate of the Chicago Teachers Union,” a veteran political strategist said Thursday.

David Axelrod, who has helped elect mayors, senators and the nation’s first Black president, stressed he is not prepared to “write the epitaph” of incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot. But he called the “degree to which she has struggled” to even make it into the runoff one of the biggest surprises of the mayoral campaign.

“She definitely has a very, very steep uphill climb,” said Axelrod, a CNN analyst and founder of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

“She spent a fair amount of her money trying to take Chuy Garcia down — I think, on the theory that Vallas would be an easier candidate to beat” in the runoff. “If she doesn’t make the runoff … that [wasn’t] money well-spent.”

Most of her TV spots lately have been attack ads directed mostly against Chuy Garcia with sideswipes on Brandon Johnson.

In one sense Vallas vs. Johnson in the run-off is a dream outcome—we won’t need to worry about Lori Lightfoot, objectively the worst mayor in Chicago history, being re-elected. On the other both Vallas and Johnson are lightweights. Although he’s served in a number of appointive positions, Vallas has never won an election before. Basically, he’s an apparatchik. Johnson’s experience in elective office is only slightly greater. They’re both placeholders. To add insult to injury it’s shaping up as a purely racialized election.

Axelrod is right to this extent: Vallas is a proxy for the FOP and Johnson for the CTU. If that’s not a grim prospect, I don’t know what is.

Can someone explain to me why there is such an ongoing argument about using facemasks to prevent the transmission of COVID-19. My own view is that they were probably marginally useful and, importantly, among the few things you could do on your own to reduce the likelihood of contracting the disease. Another was self-quarantine.

I suspect the argument is more about the mandates than the masks. My own gripe is the vitriol.

Actually, I have another gripe which I mentioned at the time. On a multiple times daily basis I saw police officers standing tightly clustered without wearing facemasks. You can’t have it both ways. The mayor can’t be advocating the wearing of facemasks but giving a pass to police officers. They weren’t immune; they were exempt. That places things in an entirely different light.