Leonard and Michael Hochberg have published the second installment in their series on U. S. national interests and the war in Ukraine at RealClearDefense. This installment deals with the second possible outcome—reinforcing the rules-based international regime through a complete Ukrainian victory:

One reason that the war in Ukraine has been met with such alarm is that it is a direct attack on the rules-based international order, which stipulates the sanctity of the territorial integrity of sovereign states. In the absence of a global government enforcing these rules, enforcement rests on the willingness of the U.S., as a now-weakened global hegemon, to enforce its treaty obligations.

As desirable as that outcome might be, I think there are several major roadblocks. The first of those is that it is far from clear that it is an achievable goal, especially without direct intervention of American forces and such an intervention would appear to contradict directly the limits President Biden has placed on our involvement. It would also be quite risky.

The second is that our commitment to a “rules-based international regime” rings a bit hollow at this point. Invading Iraq? Our intervention in Libya went far beyond the empowering Security Council resolution and our interventions in Serbia and Kosovo took place without such a resolution. In other words we’ve made it pretty clear that we only follow the rules when it suits our purposes. Not to mention all the times we have turned a blind eye on other countries’ violations of the rules when responding to them was simple not seen as being worth the cost.

I look forward to the third installment. Since the first installment dealt with Russian victory and the second with Ukrainian victory, I assume it will deal with some sort of negotiated settlement.

The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is “goblin mode”, defined as “a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”. That cuts pretty close to the bone. I might have suggested “normalization”.

In my lifetime the people and things we have been trying as a society to normalize are vast. In just the last 30 years I could mention quite a number. For example, the number of female-headed households has risen sharply, from about a third in 1990 to half today.

Some of the things that have been normalized over the last three quarters of a century are benign, e.g. graduating from high school. Others less so, e.g. illegitimacy.

Right now we’re struggling to normalize marriage between homosexuals, people using drugs and surgery to “transition” from one sex to another, and in some places petty crime. I question whether such rapid normalization is a viable social strategy.

Maybe “goblin mode” was a good pick.

in a thought-provoking piece at RealClearDefense Michael and Leonard Hochberg consider outcomes and U. S. interests in the Russia-Ukraine War. It’s the first of a three part series.

Regarding Ukraine: What exactly is the goal of the U.S. intervention? What is the outcome that we believe serves our national interests? Regrettably, neither American nor allied Western politicians have clearly answered this question.

In this first part they actually enunciate several interests. For example:

The United States, as the foremost maritime power, has an enduring interest in stopping Russia from dominating the Black Sea; therefore, the United States must seriously consider defending the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

What I found most interesting was their hat tip to “fractured nature of American strategic culture”. Despite the heartfelt declarations of support from some in the U. S. to the U. S. role as guarantor of democracy and freedom everywhere, the reality is somewhat different. There should be little doubt that there is no limit to the extents to which we will go in defending our own democracy and freedom. However, the facts support the view that our willingness to guarantee the democracy and freedom of other countries is subject to cost-benefit analysis. We have demonstrated that in Vietnam and Afghanistan, just to name two. Many countries see that as hypocritical of us and for that reason are chary of considering the U. S. a reliable ally. Said another way defending democracy and freedom is not an ironclad principle with us—it’s a means to an end. What’s the end?

I tend to believe more in principles than most of my fellow Americans. Consequently, I think we should be more reticent about declaring our support for the democracy and freedom of any country other than our own. I that sense I follow John Quincy Adams: we are the well-wishers of democracy and freedom everywhere but the guarantors only of our own. At least other countries would know where we stand were that our posture. It’s not a instance in which strategic ambiguity works to our advantage.

In the first installment the authors only consider one strategic outcome: trading Ukraine for a Russian alliance which I think is too cynical a goal for me to believe they are raising it as anything but a strawman. I look forward to the remaining installments.

For a long time the “Clovis culture” was thought to be the first settlers of the Americas, something between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago. “Clovis points”, stone arrowheads and spearheads with a characteristic design, have been found, mostly in the American Southwest and Southeast. A recent discovery may redraw the Clovis map. From the Scientific American a report by Aaron Martin:

I became aware of the site back probably in the mid seventies as I was surveying the and identifying sites around this large glacial marsh and the Belson site sits on the north side of that marsh. I’d walked into the field and found this this bottom section.

I knew exactly what it was. I got right back in the truck and came home. And this time… The first Clovis point turned up in 2006. And I picked it up. I identified it. It’s laying there for, you know, 13,000 years.

First, I thought it was kind of a fluke because Clovis was never discovered here in Michigan before. The theory is Clovis wouldn’t be found here because by the time that fluted point technology reached the Great Lakes Basin, it had morphed into a different style. You opened up the site and we’re very pleased at what we’ve found. The big question was underneath the plow zone, in the subsoil, was there undisturbed Clovis material?

And yeah, we’re recording a whole layer of Clovis material that’s undisturbed. It’s laying there for, you know, 13,000 years.

That provides evidence that Clovis peoples were in Michigan, farther north and east than they had previously been found. That’s an important finding.

I want to quote a sizeable passage from Bruce Abramson’s post at RealClearPolitics:

Who wins in Trump vs. Biden 2024? Not which candidate wins; two years and a vast array of variables render all such predictions purely speculative. No, the real question is whose interests would such a choice serve? The interests of the American people? The American establishment? The American future?

I propose that the answer is an emphatic “none of the above.”

In 2016, Trump provided the country with a wake-up call. Sanders might have done the same. These candidates generated passion because they were very different from the bland, corrupt, elitists that voters had been taught to swallow. Using the power of their distinctive personalities and the divergence of their ideological orientations, they provided starkly similar warnings: “America! Look at what’s been done to you! If you want to preserve the future you’ve come to expect, it’s almost too late to act!” In a phrase now popular in certain quarters, they implored Americans to see what time it is.

I believed – and still believe – that we needed to hear that message in 2016. At the time, I thought we’d suffered through 16 years of abysmal leadership. Yet until Trump and Sanders shattered the rules, relatively few Americans seemed comfortable opining that George W. Bush and Barack Obama had both failed as presidents in many ways.

The needs of 2024 will not be those of 2016. With America’s needs having changed, so too will the candidates capable of meeting those needs.

America today is embroiled in a cold civil war – frequently miscast as a war over culture, but more correctly understood as a struggle over values. We disagree about the meaning of critical words, beginning with the all-important concepts of “good” and “evil.”

Sizable swathes of the electorate have moved beyond thinking that the party they oppose has bad ideas that will make us unsafe and poorer. The fear today is that the opposition party seeks to turn America into a country in which we would not want to live.

That’s pretty much the way I see what has been happening. I like my neighbors. I like my fellow Chicagoans somewhat less. I like Illinoisans even less. And I don’t like what the United States has developed into at all. I’m old. I can afford to keep my head down and tolerate the awfulness for the few years I have left. My nieces and nephews aren’t that lucky. And I weep for their children.

Update

Apparently, I’m not alone.

I’m sincerely glad that Brittney Griner is being released from a Russian prison. I hope she avoids foreign travel in the future.

At Foreign Policy Douglas London wonders whether the unrest observed in Russia, China, and Iran is due to luck or skill?

In recent weeks, there have been major street protests in China and Iran, two of the United States’ main adversaries, and a mass exodus of fighting-age men amid an economic and military meltdown in Russia. Is it luck? Coincidence? Is CIA Director William Burns a total genius? Or is it the result of painstaking preparations to bring about a moment like this to bolster U.S. policy preferences? The answer is complicated—as are the options for U.S. officials when it comes to exploiting the circumstances.

I do not believe that we should be meddling in the internal affairs of other countries at all, whether they’re rivals, adversaries, or allies. Destabilization has a way of coming back to bite you in the butt.

For my part, although I’m sure that Mr. Burns would be delighted to take the credit for it (if that’s the right word), I strongly suspect that the correct answer is that neither luck nor skill but something else is the primary culprit and I would point to COVID-19. Stressors have ways of causing events to turn in peculiar and unpredictable ways.

BTW IMO the CIA should be abolished, its covert operations turned over to the military. Today it’s redundant. There are plenty of other agencies analyzing intelligence.

The Labor Department reported a very minor uptick in the number of jobless claims last month, illustrated in the graph above. As you can see the number is pretty stable and close to pre-pandemic numbers. At the Wall Street Journal Austen Hufford reports:

Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, rose by 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 230,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was near the 2019 weekly average of around 218,000 when the labor market was also robust.

Continuing claims, which reflect the number of people seeking ongoing unemployment benefits, rose to their highest level since late February, though they also remain historically low. Continuing claims increased by 62,000 to 1.67 million in the week ended Nov. 26.

Jesse Wheeler, an economic analyst at Morning Consult, said the slow rise in continuing unemployment claims is an indication workers are remaining on unemployment insurance for longer instead of immediately finding a new position.

“People who are losing their jobs are finding it more difficult to find a new job,” he said.

The latest report comes as the labor market remains tight, with continued job growth and low unemployment. Still, several major companies have laid off workers or stopped hiring in recent months.

So, unemployment is pretty stable, the job market is robust, gas prices are falling, and the rate of inflation is decreasing.

Here’s my question. Why doesn’t Joe Biden get the credit he deserves? Americans continue to have negative views of Biden and the economy. If you think it’s bad media coverage, please prove it. I don’t see it. That doesn’t mean individual stories or even an individual network—it means the preponderance of coverage.

I think it’s because when they go to the grocery store or gas station Americans see higher prices; they don’t look at the inflation rate—that’s a first derivative phenomenon. The stories they’re hearing are of layoffs by some of the biggest employers in the country. Changes in the rate of inflation are a second derivative phenomenon. Not something to which people tend to react.

And, as has been said (at least by men’s clothing manufacturers), you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Normally, I wouldn’t have mentioned the aborted coup attempt in Germany but, since it touches on one of my pet peeves, I thought I’d mention that angle. I sincerely wish that Americans wouldn’t project their own politics and political differences onto the politics of other countries about which they generally know next to nothing. “Right” and “Left” mean different things in different countries and just because you consider yourself left-leaning doesn’t mean that a left-leaning party in another country holds your ideological brethren.

To take the simplest, most proximate example, American conservatives have practically nothing in common with British Tories and only the most extreme American progressives would find their views aligned with those of British Labour. Most similarities are superficial and, I presume to both of their horrors, more Democrats are like Tories than Republicans are.

The coverage of the German coup attempt has been very clear. In much of Europe “extreme right-wing” means royalist and that is what this coup attempt was. Some extremists wanted to install a distant inheritant of the German throne as head of state.

In the United States, although there has been some growth in would-be monarchists over the last dozen years, “extreme right-wing” tends to be radical libertarianism. The only point of contact between the extreme right in Germany and that here is that both tend to be nationalist but it should go without saying that German nationalism and American nationalism are incompatible. We’ve participated in two major wars to oppose German nationalism. Now is no time to think that it’s a good thing.

My recommendation is for American to focus on U. S. politics and avoid meddling in the internal politics of other countries. Leave commenting on the internal politics of other countries to those with more expertise. We barely understand our own society and politics.