It takes Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba quite a while to get to the actual plan but he does ultimately in this piece at Foreign Affairs. Here it is:

In the east, Ukraine can gain the upper hand with more advanced heavy weapons, allowing us to gradually stall Moscow’s crumbling invasion in the Donbas. (The Kremlin’s gains in this region may make headlines, but it is important to remember that they are limited and have resulted in extremely high Russian casualties.) The pivotal moment will come when our armed forces use Western-provided multiple launch rocket systems to destroy Russia’s artillery, turning the tide in Ukraine’s favor along the entire frontline. Afterward, our troops will aim to take back pieces of land, forcing Russians to retreat here and there.

On the battlefront in the south, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are already carrying out counterattacks, and we will use advanced weapons to further cut through enemy defenses. We will aim to put the Russians on the edge of needing to abandon Kherson—a city that is key to the strategic stability of Ukraine. If we advance in both the south and the east, we can force Putin to choose between abandoning southern cities, including Kherson and Melitopol, in order to cling onto the Donbas, and abandoning newly occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk so he can hold the south.

That’s pretty much it. They think that will bring Putin to the bargaining table. Much of the piece is devoted to encouraging the U. S. and other G7 supporters not to lose heart. The ratio of propaganda to intelligence in the reporting on Ukraine is so enormous I have no way of assessing the likelihood of success of the plan.

I found former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s account at Project Syndicate of world economic history over the last half century interesting:

A half-century long power play, led by corporations, Wall Street, governments, and central banks, has gone badly wrong. As a result, the West’s authorities now face an impossible choice: Push conglomerates and even states into cascading bankruptcies, or allow inflation to go unchecked.

For 50 years, the US economy has sustained the net exports of Europe, Japan, South Korea, then China and other emerging economies, while the lion’s share of those foreigners’ profits rushed to Wall Street in search of higher returns. On the back of this tsunami of capital heading for America, the financiers were building pyramids of private money (such as options and derivatives) to fund the corporations building up a global labyrinth of ports, ships, warehouses, storage yards, and road and rail transport. When the crash of 2008 burned down these pyramids, the whole financialized labyrinth of global just-in-time supply chains was imperiled.

To save not just the bankers but also the labyrinth itself, central bankers stepped in to replace the financiers’ pyramids with public money. Meanwhile, governments were cutting public expenditure, jobs, and services. It was nothing short of lavish socialism for capital and harsh austerity for labor. Wages shrunk, and prices and profits were stagnant, but the price of assets purchased by the rich (and thus their wealth) skyrocketed. Thus, investment (relative to available cash) dropped to an all-time low, capacity shrunk, market power boomed, and capitalists became both richer and more reliant on central-bank money than ever.

I’m not sure I disagree completely with his assessment although I don’t think it was quite as concerted as he implies. And he neglects to mention how European (German in particular), Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese mercantilism contributed to the problem. In other words, yes, it’s Wall Street’s fault but it’s not all Wall Street’s fault. Ben Bernanke didn’t need to use quantitative easing to try and goose the economy. The U. S. could have imposed steep tariffs on imported goods. Unions could have gone to the mat over, for example, buying auto engines from Japanese suppliers. There are lots of things that might have prevented the rise of China as well as lifting on the order of a billion people out of abject poverty.

At this late date what can be done? We can’t undo the last 50 years but we can start doing some things better. One thing we can do better is to stop the sophistry about “investments”. Speculating in the stock market may or may not be investing. It really depends. Buy and hold is more likely to be genuine investment than making quick profits buying and selling stocks is. Paying for journalism, psychology, and interest studies degrees isn’t investment, either.

Whether infrastructure spending is investment depends also. It depends on the utility of the particular project over its expected life. Bridges to nowhere are not investments. Neither are projects that are never completed. Is California’s high speed rail system an investment or just frittering money away? The project has been under way for more than a decade with zero real outputs at this point. There’s talk that one fairly short leg of it will be complete by 2023 but I’ve also read analyses that is a fantasy.

Yesterday President Biden floated the idea of suspending the federal gas tax as a tactic for providing consumers some relief at the pump. Unfortunately, that tax jubilee wouldn’t accomplish much as this piece at Politico by Tanya Snyder points out:

The hard realities: Even if Congress was in a mood to cooperate with Biden’s plan, most studies show that only a small portion of the savings from halting the tax would make its way to consumers. Meanwhile, the tax pause would take money away from Biden’s signature infrastructure law — and it probably wouldn’t offer his party much help with voters in November. It does, however, give Biden some cover to appear as if he’s at least trying to tackle an issue that’s hitting Americans in the pocketbook.

The reason for that is two-fold. First, the jubilee wouldn’t even roll prices back to where they were last month. Second, the gas taxes go into the federal highway fund and are used for maintaining the interstate highways.

As Ms. Snyder points out the degree to which such jubilees are passed on to consumers varies from state to state:

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School examined the impacts in the states that have paused their gas taxes in the last few months and found that in Maryland, 72 percent of tax savings were passed onto consumers, compared with 58 percent to 65 percent in Georgia and 71 percent to 87 percent in Connecticut. Still, the Wharton researchers found that “these price reductions were often not sustained during the entire holiday.”

And the dollar amount Wharton put on the savings from a potential gas tax holiday at the federal level was meager. In March, they found that suspending the federal gas tax through December would save the average person between $16 and $47 on gas while lowering federal tax revenue by about $20 billion.

and it is possible that the tax jubilee could have perverse consequences:

Drivers would easily forget the small savings in the gas tax amid daily fluctuations in fuel prices, which can “drop or surge by 10 to 20 cents a gallon in a single [trading] session,” said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service. It could even backfire: “The problem with an 18 cents a gallon gas tax holiday is that it juices up demand when the supply-and-demand balance is already tilted toward tight supply.”

Furthermore, if the reduction in federal gasoline tax revenue is offset by deficit spending, it would exacerbate part of the reason we’re experiencing the present general inflation.

All of which goes to demonstrate that policy is hard.

Just in case you’re curious the gas taxes we pay here in Chicago are

All taxes are levied in cents per gallon.

The situation with the state tax is complicated and, as should be expected, highly political. The statutory state gas tax is scheduled to rise from 19 cents per gallon to 39 cents per gallon on July 1 but Gov. Pritzker has delayed the tax increase, forcing gas station owners to put stickers on the pumps claiming that Gov. Pritzker reduced taxes thereby turning every gas pump into a campaign advertisement. It’s an election year. The station owners are responding by putting an additional sticker on the pumps explaining what is happening in more detail.

There’s an excellent analysis of the last time the port of Odessa was impeded, resulting in a wheat shortage, by Nicholas Lambert at the U. S. Naval Institute which sounds remarkably similar to what’s happening now. Here are the conclusions he draws from it:

First, doing nothing in the face of rising grain prices may not be an option, but the risks of action should be understood and acknowledged. Sending in the Navy, for escort duties or mine-sweeping, would be a protracted and high-risk operation with serious danger of escalation.

and

The second lesson is that the United States should check before agreeing to support any operation premised on assertions that Ukrainian wheat is available for export from Odessa and more is on the way. It seems clear that some Ukrainian wheat is sitting in ports—but are the handling facilities working? Are the quays clear? And has the rail infrastructure, normally used to move wheat from farm to port, survived the Russian onslaught (which has targeted transportation networks)? The pump may be primed, but will the engine fire? The grain in ports is only one part of the supply chain—a concept we have heard a great deal about in other contexts, but very little about in this one.

He concludes that it is more likely that we will repeat the mistakes of 1915 rather than taking the lessons that might be learned to heart.

Speaking of tactical requirements Dimitri K. Simes makes a point at The National Interest:

NATO can undoubtedly strengthen Ukraine’s position by providing more arms and military training, enabling Kyiv to achieve limited tactical successes. But should these successes—contrary to current conventional wisdom—go beyond territories conquered by Russia after February 24 and start to look like a humiliating defeat for the Putin government, Moscow is more than capable of significant escalation, both through military mobilization and putting the economy on a war footing. Such a development might well force the United States to choose between suffering a major military setback in Ukraine or moving up the escalation ladder—closer and closer to the nuclear threshold. Those who dismiss Moscow’s ability to improve its military situation forget that Russia today is fighting not just a “special military operation” but indeed a limited war, one quite different from a full-scale war where Moscow would deploy all the resources it could muster—military, economic, and political—if absolutely necessary for the protection of the regime.

I’ve been questioning whether the tactics being proposed are actually logistically possible but Mr. Simes raises another point: do the tactics produce a good strategic outcome?

And some of the points made in his conclusion may sound familiar to you:

It is one thing to argue that there should be no settlement without the Ukrainian government’s involvement and agreement, but it is another thing entirely to outsource negotiations with another nuclear power to Kyiv. The most fundamental responsibility of the Biden administration is to assure the survival of the republic. The Ukrainians are entitled to wield veto power over any territorial arrangement with Russia, but they cannot—and should not—exercise a veto power over U.S. decisionmaking, including the types and quantities of weapons the United States provides to Ukraine, and even more so, what kind of general relationship (sanctions included) Washington chooses to adopt with the only other nation capable of destroying the United States. Putin has demonstrated that he is willing and able to make ruthless and daring military decisions. His strategic vision notwithstanding, he is also the product of a different political culture and has his own narrative of what has transpired between Russia and the West. That narrative is quite different from the one that prevails in Washington and can bring Putin to reach different conclusions than those widely held in the West. Assuming that Moscow will act upon American definitions of caution could lead to a fatal miscalculation.

Unless you believe that Ukraine’s tactics do not change in response to our actions, something I find incredible, we might want to consider that Ukraine’s strategic objectives are not synonymous with ours.

Glen Loury and John McWhorter’s most recent conversation is about the consequences of present diversity, equity, and inclusion policies for black Americans. I’m not sure they arrive at any conclusion other than that there’s a lot we don’t know. Here are some snippets from their conversation.

After remarking on some of the cultural underpinnings of the strong performance in certain activities of young Asians:

But just to say, there are behavioral and cultural foundations for these differences in in group performance.

Another:

We’ve created a regime where the message that we send out to students of color is, you can be okay but not absolutely great, and you still can have a pretty good chance of getting admitted to our program. The idea that that would not affect people’s behavior, I think, is just contrary to common sense. How much is a question that would have to be studied, but the incentives here are not entirely healthy.

Another:

Just this final point. It’s not equality when you create a special dispensation for blacks and then look the other way at their relatively poor performance after admission. That’s condescension. That’s not really equality.

Another:

Shelby Steele has a passage in one of his books where he says something along the lines of, “We exempt black students from serious competition and then wonder why they’re never qualified for it.” And that’s exactly it. They never seem to hit the highest note, but then again, they’re not required to.

Another:

But yeah, it’s a kind of condescension, and all of it is where you get Carol Kelley. It’s where you get Ibram Kendi. All of these people who are very comfortable with the idea of saying that if black kids aren’t good at it, it’s racist, and therefore let’s get rid of it, even for other students. And when you fight against this ideology, you’re told that you’re a racist, you’re an Uncle Tom, that you just don’t get it. But what is the “it” to get? And the society that these people want to create is one that I really would not be interested in participating in. I worry about my children going out into this society. I’m just waiting for them to start being treated as these tokens of diversity. And it’s not the way things should go. Ugh.

There’s one matter they don’t touch on. There are presently roughly 2 million black sub-Saharan African immigrants to the U. S. and another couple of million black Haitian and Jamaican immigrants. Most are working age. On average they have higher levels of educational attainment than native-born blacks.

Employers preferentially hire sub-Saharan Africans and Caribbean black immigrants over native-born blacks for educational and cultural reasons. They don’t have the baggage that the group that the late sociologist Charles Moskos called “Afro-Americans”, i.e. native-born black Americans, the descendants of slaves, do. Consequently, the net effect of DEI programs is to subsidize the importation of sub-Saharan and Caribbean workers while consigning Afro-Americans to hopelessness in crime-ridden inner cities. It’s a perverse policy.

In a similar vein Seth Cropsey has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he proposes to allow Ukrainian grain shipments to leave Odessa by using a “coalition of the willing” to convoy them:

The obvious solution is to free up Ukrainian grain exports, relieving pressure on the global food supply and mitigating inflation. This would require an extensive demining and escort mission to create a corridor from Odessa to the eastern Mediterranean. It would demand a naval force large enough to deter Russian interruption.

An escort mission worked in similar circumstances during the Iran-Iraq war under Operation Earnest Will. Iran and Iraq, like Russia and Ukraine, had settled into a long-term fight. Iraq lost its port access after Iranian offensives. It turned to Kuwait to export Iraqi oil, but Iran attacked Kuwaiti ships. The U.S. responded by deploying a major naval task force to escort Kuwaiti oil tankers and conducting a handful of demonstrations of military power to deter continued Iranian pressure.

In the case of Ukraine, American deployment must be more aggressive. A nuclear-armed Russia, with clear incentives to deter greater U.S. participation in the war, may attack escorting warships. Washington can head off this possibility by employing an overwhelming naval task force consisting of small and large surface combatants with submarine and air support. Russia would be loath to intervene.

The U.S. shouldn’t conduct this mission through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. France, Italy and Germany likely would veto it. America should instead act with an ad hoc coalition—likely Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and possibly the Baltic States, Sweden and Finland—to mitigate NATO divisions.

To his credit and unlike most pundits recommending similar actions, although he doesn’t mention the Montreux Convention directly he does nod to it:

Turkey need not participate actively. But it must allow this coalition force to operate in the Black Sea. It is therefore imperative that the Biden administration gain Turkish consent. Ideally Washington would offer to allow Turkey’s participation in the F-35 program and purchase of F-16s, the greatest point of tension between the U.S. and Turkey and the best, low-cost way to ensure Turkish acquiescence.

It would be interesting to see if Turkey rises to the bait. For one thing I think they can strike a harder bargain than that. How badly do we actually want Sweden and Finland to join NATO?

Nonetheless my previous question remains. Do we actually have the ability to accomplish the mission he proposes? The Black Sea and the Persian Gulf are roughly equivalent in terms of ease of navigation but neither has the ease of the Indian Ocean. The Persian Gulf is too shallow for submarines; I presume he meant submarine operations in the Indian Ocean.

Odessa is up there in the “less than 200 meters” depth area. I’m not sure that submarines would be particularly useful.

William A. Galston’s latest Wall Street Journal column is essentially a plea for the United States to start building a lot more heavy weaponry. I want to focus on this passage:

It is above all the artillery imbalance between Russia and Ukraine that is driving current results on the battlefield, and Kyiv is urgently asking Europe and the U.S. to expand and accelerate its deliveries of heavy weapons. Mykhailo Podolyak, a key adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, has said that the country needs 300 multiple rocket-launch systems and 1,000 howitzers to combat the Russians, far more than its allies have considered providing.

1,000 howitzers is more than the United Kingdom, France, and Germany possess in aggregate. It is approximately half the number possessed by the United States. The enormity of the Ukrainian ask is among the reasons I have been skeptical of the Western confidence in the outcome of the war since the start. And what of the logistical and training requirements?

This will take time, and so will deploying modern NATO artillery and missile launchers. The problem is not only providing equipment, but also training troops to use them, which can take several months. American instructors are trying to shorten this cycle, but even in the best case it will be a long time (if ever) before Ukraine can attain parity in artillery and missiles.

Are we actually willing or able to supply Ukraine for the sort of war that is emerging in Ukraine? That’s a question. I don’t know the answer. We can’t wave the equipment the Ukrainians are requesting into existence. How long would it take us to build it?

I am still attempting to make sense out of this story, reported by William Boston at the Wall Street Journal via MarketWatch:

BERLIN—Germany will restart coal-fired power plants and offer incentives for companies to curb natural gas consumption, marking a new step in the economic war between Europe and Russia.

Berlin unveiled the measures Sunday after Russia cut gas supplies to Europe last week as it punched back against European sanctions and military support for Ukraine.

The steps, part of a broader strategy initiated after the invasion of Ukraine, aim to reduce gas consumption and divert gas deliveries to storage facilities to ensure that the country has enough reserves to get through the winter.

Russia’s gradual cutting of gas supplies has raised the specter of a potential fuel shortage if Europe goes into winter with less-than-full stowages. It has also raised prices, putting additional pressure on economies that are already struggling with high inflation and rising borrowing costs and face the prospect of a recession.

Why am I puzzled? Germany imports all of the coal it uses for energy production, half of it from Russia. So if Russia cuts back on its shipments of gas or oil to Germany, the Germans plan to replace it with Russian coal?

I don’t see how that makes any sense at all. It doesn’t make sense from a carbon emissions standpoint. It would mean that Germany continues to finance Russia’s war against Ukraine so it doesn’t make any sense from an opposition to the war standpoint. The price of coal rose after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, too, so it doesn’t make a great deal of economic sense. It’s just barely possible it makes sense from an arbitrage standpoint since the prices of oil, gas, and coal don’t rise in perfect lockstep but that’s pretty cynical. Could that be the plan?

Do they have more confidence in their ability to import all of the coal they need from the United States and Australia? Cue President Biden’s announcement of the end of coal-mining.

Or does it just not make any sense?