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.

One any given day I will frequently spend some time on five different computers: my main system, an upstairs PC, my notebook computer (mostly used for work), an iPad, and a smartphone. This morning I read a post on gun control laws in California and other states which, according to the author, were based on scientific facts that hadn’t been proven yet. I wish I could include the link for you but for the life of me I can’t find it again.

Think about the statement “things that hadn’t been proven yet”. Isn’t it terribly convenient? Try as I might I can’t think of anything that couldn’t be justified on that basis.

The irony of it all is that I’m in favor of some gun control laws. I think bigger greater problem is that we’re not enforcing the laws we have particularly well. Take Bobby Primo, the nutcase who’s being tried for the mass shooting in Highland Park on the 4th of July. If the laws we already have on the books were actually enforced in sensible manner, I doubt he would have been able to obtain a firearm legally.

I’ve even stated my support for repealing the 2nd Amendment with one requirement: we disarm the police at the same time. Does anyone actually think that would turn out well? Obviously, we’re not going to do that. We have so many firearms in the U. S. at this point that control is impossible. The most you would achieve by making private ownership of firearms illegal, something that is politically impossible, is to turn police officers into targets. No laws will prevent criminals for obtaining and using firearms. Think about it.

However, I think that laws against “assault weapons” are a waste of breath, paper, and bits for three reasons. The first is that it’s vague. The second is that the beauty of Kalashnikovs is that they’re easy to make—they can be made in just about any machine shop. And the third is that laws banning them will never be enforced.

There’s another tremendous irony. In many cases those advocating for banning firearms in some fashion are the same people who argue that “prohibition doesn’t work”.

William Galston devotes his Wall Street Journal column to arguing that there is an urgent need for the federal government to avoid a “debt spiral”:

When Bill Clinton took office in January 1993, government debt held by individuals and private institutions, foreign and domestic, amounted to 46.8% of U.S. gross domestic product. After four consecutive budget surpluses in his second term, it had fallen to 32.7% by the end of 2000, and it remained at roughly this level for the next seven years, until the onset of the Great Recession.

By the time the recession ended in the third quarter of 2009, a combination of higher spending and lower revenues had raised the debt-to-GDP ratio by nearly 20 percentage points, to 52.3%. During the next decade, it continued to rise under presidents of both parties, reaching 79.2% by the fourth quarter of 2019.

Then came the second giant fiscal shock—the Covid-19 pandemic—to which the federal government under both Presidents Trump and Biden responded with record levels of spending on individuals, families, businesses, public institutions, hospitals and state governments. As these policies wound down at the end of 2022, debt held by the public had surged to 97%.

Enter the Congressional Budget Office. In its latest 10-year budget analysis released last week, CBO projected large and rising budget deficits as far as the eye can see. Debt held by the public will increase by an eye-popping $22 trillion, from $24.3 trillion in 2022 to $46.4 trillion in 2033, and the debt-to-GDP ratio will rise by more than 20 points, to 118%.

Some believe this increase doesn’t matter much for the economy or average families, but the evidence suggests otherwise. For one thing, this increase will trigger a debt spiral in which the U.S. must borrow more and more simply to pay the interest on its debt. Between 2022 and 2033, annual interest payments on the public debt will triple, from $475 billion to $1.4 trillion, and double as a share of GDP. Because a substantial portion of this debt is held by foreign entities, including the Chinese government, the U.S. will be transferring more of its income and wealth overseas.

For another, increases in the national debt tend over time to increase long-term interest rates, which slows economic growth. A recent analysis by Lukasz Rachel and Larry Summers found that each percentage-point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio raises interest rates by 3.5 basis points, or 0.035 percentage point. If that’s correct, the 20-point increase in store for us over the next decade will raise rates by 0.7 percentage point, which will have a significant negative effect on investment and output.

Unless something dramatic happens it looks very much as though we have a protract period of inflation higher than we’ve become accustomed to conjoined with growth too slow to do much about it. What does Mr. Galston propose?

Here’s what I’d do to prevent the debt spiral. First, stop the bleeding by agreeing to prevent the debt-to-GDP ratio from increasing over the next decade. This would mean reducing the projected $22 trillion debt accumulation by about $7.5 trillion during this period.

Second, put everything on the table. If Republicans continue to insist that tax increases are off the table while Democrats proclaim that Social Security and Medicare are untouchable, negotiations won’t go anywhere.

Third, establish some guiding principles. Mine are simple: Do no harm to low-income and working-class families; do not allow the burdens on upper-income households to be lighter than for those further down; and, within these constraints, orient the federal budget to maximize the rate of economic growth that can be sustained over time.

To my mind eliminating FICA max is a no-brainer. At the very least it should be raised to cover nearly all wage income—to $538,000 indexed. I don’t believe that increasing it to cover all income is either achievable or desirable. That alone won’t solve Social Security’s problems: you need to change the benefit formula at the same time.

Although I believe in Medicare I’ve said in the past that as implemented it was a terrible policy error, one, unfortunately, that’s impossible to undo at this point. The best we can do is hold the line on reimbursement rates. Let’s not kid ourselves. That will have implications, too.

What we can’t do is keep things the way they are right now on both sides of the ledger without impelling serious problems.

There are two drastically different accounts of the war in Ukraine, one epitomized by President Biden’s speech in Kyiv and the other by Russian President Putin’s speech. The Ukrainians’ and our account of the war is a year ago Russia made an unprovoked attach on Ukraine and have piled atrocity on atrocity in their prosecution of the aggressive war. Russia’s account is that it was a spoiling attack which disrupted an assault by Ukraine on the Russia-aligned people of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. While I suspect that there’s more truth in the Ukrainian account, neither their nor the Russian account is the whole truth. Like so much in this war its obscured by, to use Carl von Clausewitz’s felicitous description, the fog of war.

I’ve read many opinions of the two speeches over the last several days. Here’s the opinion of the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Putin’s goal is unchanged: Control most or all of Ukraine, and incorporate it into his greater Russian empire. He still thinks he can outlast the Ukrainian government and its Western supporters. Many in the U.S. and Europe are ready to head to a negotiating table, but Mr. Putin is not. The only settlement he has in mind is Ukraine’s surrender.

The fastest route to peace then is defeating Mr. Putin, which the Biden Administration still seems reluctant to admit. Mr. Biden hasn’t wavered in his rhetorical support for Ukraine, and his Tuesday Speech in Poland struck the right note that autocrats “cannot be appeased” but “must be opposed.”

Yet his air of triumphalism is premature—Ukraine could still lose—and it is backed by ambivalent action. In the latest example, Mr. Biden is still holding back the Army tactical missile system, long-range weapons that the Ukrainians desperately want so they can strike deeper into Russian positions. The Administration is leaking that the U.S. military doesn’t have any to spare, but allied inventory estimates run in the thousands.

This has been the pattern for a year. The Biden team throws up reasons why a certain weapon—tanks, Patriot missile defenses, Himars—can’t be provided to Ukraine. The system is too complex. The training will take too long. Then these objections suddenly vanish after criticism in public and from Congress, and Ukraine gets the goods. Can we skip ahead and provide F-16 fighter jets now?

Getting Ukraine the weapons they need is increasingly urgent. If Russia receives arms from China, the war will descend into an even bloodier stalemate or a Ukrainian defeat. Political support could fray in European capitals and in Washington, even as Beijing’s involvement raised the global risks of defeat.

I don’t view these things through a prism of right and wrong. That is not to say that I don’t think there is a right and wrong but that I think it’s unproductive to couch matters in those terms. I tend to look at things in terms of interest and distinguish among the achievable, the hard to achieve, and the impossible or nearly impossible to achieve.

Claiming that we’re supporting Ukraine in defense of a rules-based order is sophistry. If we believe in a rules-based order, why do we have troops in Syria? Why do we have troops in Niger? I think we have made it abundantly clear that we consider hurting Russia in our national interest.

Viewed through that prism, what is achievable? I would say that preventing Russia from occupying all of Ukraine is achievable as is admitting Ukraine to NATO and the European Union. Returning to the pre-2022 borders would be hard to achieve; returning to the pre-2014 borders would be impossible or nearly impossible to achieve.

At this point to me is what can be accomplished without a direct involvement of NATO troops, assuming, of course, that NATO regulars are not already fighting in Ukraine, something asserted by the Russians. IMO achieving the hard to achieve or nearly impossible goals would require such involvement.

Blithely asserting the choice is the Ukrainians’ to make is facile. Our supplies and support change the Ukrainians’ calculus. I would not doubt that they will continue to fight even should we reduce or eliminate our support. The question is to what end? I strongly suspect their goals would change.