At The Week Damon Linker is as puzzled about the braggadocio of American government officials as I am:

I fully support the policy of providing Ukraine with intelligence to aid in its fight, including intelligence that leads to the infliction of painful defeats on Russian forces. It’s also a good thing for Russia to know that we’ve played a significant role in enabling Ukraine to defend itself.

But it is a very bad thing for this information to be public knowledge. I don’t blame the journalists who’ve reported it. If high-ranking, trustworthy government officials reveal newsworthy information to a reporter, it’s usually considered acceptable to publish it. I blame the officials — especially since the Biden administration has made clear that it has not authorized the disclosures. This is a person or group of people showing off to journalists about their role in hurting Russia. That’s extremely reckless and could well lead to an exceptionally dangerous escalation of the conflict that ends up with the U.S. and NATO being draw into a direct military confrontation with Russia.

He attributes it to out-of-control government officials blowing off their mouths:

Author Yuval Levin has written about the trend in recent years of people who work in large institutions treating them as platforms for personal attention and applause rather than as structures that constrain individual behavior and channel it toward the ends the institution serves. I suspect that’s what’s been happening here: People on the inside who know about our covert efforts on Ukraine’s behalf have decided to brag to journalists about it, figuring it will enhance their image in the ruthless status hierarchy of official Washington.

During World War II a prominent component of American propaganda was “loose lips sink ships”, i.e. beware of unguarded revelations. Apparently, the prevailing wisdom in Washington is that loose tweets are neat. I can only think of a single circumstance in which that might well be the case which is if we are not nearly as potent as we claim to be.

IMO covert operations are most effective if they remain covert. Becoming an obvious open combatant not only exposes the United States to a heightened level of risk, it increases the likelihood of Russian escalation and exposes Ukrainians to a heightened level of rusk. While these reckless admissions may tell us nothing about our actual contributions to the Ukrainians’ efforts, they certainly tell us a lot about the Biden Administration’s control over the executive branch. The Trump Administration was bedeviled by sometimes outright opposition from lower level government officials, sometimes called the “Deep State”. Unless these claims are part of an information operation, it looks as though the Biden Administration has similar problems.

At the British site Spiked James Woudhuysen cautions Westerners not to be overconfident of a quick Ukrainian victory:

The Russian elite – with its penchant for meat-grinder militarism – might deem a protracted, bloody war of attrition and occupation perfectly worthwhile if it can restore Russia’s prestige abroad and shore up Putin’s regime at home. The Kremlin may be deluded, but in times of war rationality doesn’t always have the upper hand.

We’ve seen Russia try to lay waste to recalcitrant peoples before – think Chechnya during the 1990s. With its central location, its population of 45million, its agriculture and iron and gas deposits, Ukraine is much more important to Russia than that benighted country, of course. But the brutality of the Russian army’s attack on Mariupol suggests that Moscow might be prepared to try to visit on Ukraine the sort of destruction it visited on Grozny in 1999-2000.

So while the Ukrainian resistance has indeed been heroic, Russia’s defeat is not yet assured. Moreover, the Kremlin will draw strength for a while yet from what it perceives as the weakness and disunity of Ukraine’s Western backers.

concluding

Ukraine must win, and there’s no reason to think that it can’t. Ukrainian leaders have already proved wrong those in Western political and media circles who thought, at the invasion’s beginning, that Ukraine didn’t stand a chance and should just give in. Ukraine certainly doesn’t look like it will ever be a pushover for Putin.

Moreover, the Kremlin faces severe military weaknesses in supply, command, morale, training, numbers and all the rest. Dissent inside Russia may also one day grow to be significant.

But the last thing the Ukrainian cause needs right now is the complacent optimism of the Western political and media class. This approach dangerously underestimates the Kremlin’s willingness to go the distance.

And Ukraine has to be ready. This is not over, not by a long way.

Von Clausewitz was the first to draw attention to the uncertainty of situational aware of combatants frequently referred to as the “fog of war” (Nebel des Krieges). It is still a factor and an enormous one, particularly in information operations. With modern technology we have become accustomed to minute by minute updates on events but that is an unreasonable expectation, particularly in warfare. If we are certain of events, it all but surely reflects propagandization. During the war in Ukraine “open source intelligence” has been tremendously useful in combating Russian disinformation but I have rarely seen it applied to combat Ukrainian disinformation of which there should be no doubt there is some. The Ukrainian government, for example, is highly reluctant to publicize information on military casualties or equipment losses. We receive information on Russian casualties and equipment losses on a daily basis but little about Ukrainian losses. It is in the Ukrainians’ interest to paint the brightest possible picture of the situation and they have done a good job of it.

IMO a quick victory by either the Ukrainians or the Russians is unlikely and actually becoming less likely by the hour. I genuinely want the Ukrainians to maintain their independence but I also think we should be under no illusions of the likelihood of that prospect.

In this piece at Science News by Sujata Gupta Brazilian cultural psychologist Igor de Almeida makes several very important points. The first, which should be obvious but apparently isn’t, is that culture shapes how you think, feel, your personality, and your general style:

Until four decades ago, most psychologists believed that culture had little bearing on the mind. That changed in 1980. Surveys of IBM employees taken across some 70 countries showed that attitudes toward work largely depended on workers’ home country, IBM organizational psychologist Geert Hofstede’s wrote in Culture’s Consequences.

Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, a cultural psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, subsequently fleshed out one Hofstede’s four cultural principles: Individualism versus collectivism. Culture does influence thinking, the duo claimed in a now widely cited paper in the 1991 Psychological Review. By comparing people in mostly the East and West, they surmised that living in individualist countries (i.e. Western ones) led people to think independently while living in collectivist countries (the East) led people to think interdependently.

That paper was pioneering at the time, Vignoles says. Before that, with psychological research based almost exclusively in the West, the Western mind had become the default mind. Now, “instead of being only one kind of person in the world, there [were] two kinds of persons in the world.”

The second is that since so much of the research has been done in the United States and Japan, thinking about culture and personality is very much limited by what the preconceptions of American and Japanese researchers:

To expand beyond that narrow lens, the team surveyed 7,279 participants in 33 nations and 55 cultures. Participants read such statements as “I prefer to turn to other people for help rather than solely rely on myself” and “I consider my happiness separate from the happiness of my friends and family.” They then responded to how well those comments reflected their values on a scale from 1 for “not at all” to 9 for “exactly.”

That analysis allowed the researchers to identify seven dimensions of independence/interdependence, including self-reliance versus dependence on others and emphasis on self-expression versus harmony. Strikingly, Latin Americans were as, or more, independent as Westerners in six out of the seven dimensions, the team reported in 2016 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

The researchers’ subsequent analysis of four studies comprising 17,255 participants across 53 nations largely reaffirmed that surprising finding. For instance, Latin Americans are more expressive than even Westerners, Vignoles, de Almeida and colleagues report in February in Perspectives in Psychological Science. But that finding violates the common view that people living in collectivist societies suppress their emotions to foster harmony, while people in individualistic countries emote as a form of self-expression.

To which I would add that your native language, which is related to but not identical to culture, is a powerful influence on how you think and feel, affecting both the thoughts that occur to you and how you interpret events.

You may recall that I have expressed skepticism about German pledges for additional defense spending. The editors of the Wall Street Journal note that such skepticism is warranted:

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised two months ago to deliver a substantial increase in defense spending. Where is that money now? Funny you should ask, since Mr. Scholz’s waffling on his signature pledge is a growing controversy in Berlin.

The “turning point” speech Mr. Scholz delivered on Feb. 27 included two promises: increase the annual military budget to at least 2% of GDP, in line with North Atlantic Treaty Organization targets, and create a one-time €100 billion ($105 billion) special fund for procurement. Crucially, the procurement fund would be exempt from the constitutional limit on government debt, although the regular military budget wouldn’t be.

The great danger was, and remains, that the pacifist wings of all three parties in the coalition government—Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP)—would water down this commitment by wasting money on non-defense projects such as renewable energy or foreign aid. The best news of the past two months is that Berlin is so far resisting this temptation.

The government said in mid-March it will use the special fund to buy 35 F-35 jets from the U.S. to replace obsolete fighters and fulfill German obligations under NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangement. Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht has emphasized the need for disciplined investment in capabilities.

Yet Mr. Scholz is struggling to say what he meant by his twin promises. His February speech neglected to specify whether he meant he’d spend 2% of GDP plus €100 billion, or whether he’d spend 2% of GDP including the €100 billion. The distinction matters.

Hitting the 2% goal would mean annual defense spending of some €75 billion in the next fiscal year, but Mr. Scholz’s government has submitted a budget accounting for only €50 billion, roughly the same amount as before the “turning point.” The plan seems to be to top up annual spending by including one-quarter of the special procurement budget.

Are the Germans “hedging” like India, Mexico, and Brazil?

At Yahoo News Aarthi Swaminathan and Michael B. Kelley report that historian Niall Ferguson declaims that we are now in “Cold War II” with Russia and China:

“Cold War II is different, though, because in Cold War II, China’s the senior partner, and Russia’s the junior partner,” Ferguson explained. “And in Cold War II, the first hot war breaks out in Europe, rather than Asia. This is a bit like the Korean War was, in 1950, where suddenly discovering that cold wars sometimes run hot, but this time, Ukraine is the battlefield.”

He attributes the war in Ukraine to NATO’s not making Ukraine a member.

Ferguson stressed that the “the worst possible thing that we can do is to talk about NATO membership without delivering it. That was what made Ukraine so vulnerable.”

There are many other differences. Imagine that during the original Cold War we had been dependent on the Soviet Union for strategic materials, that our annual trade deficit with the Soviet Union was greater than $300 billion, or that the Soviet economy had been as large as our or larger. Or that we had opened the original Cold War by undermining the international banking system.

If we are in a new Cold War and if we are to prevail, a lot will need to change and, frankly, I see no willingness to make those changes.

In an article in Foreign Affairs Michael J. Mazarr first articulates two “vulnerabilities” of the “postwar order”. The first vulnerability is overreach:

The first is excessive ambition: the architects of the postwar system risk pushing their objectives too far and generating a violent backlash. This is arguably what happened with NATO in Europe. Under the United States’ watch, the alliance metastasized from a measured and carefully calibrated program to fortify European security into a limitless, duty-bound imperative.

and “liberal interventionism”. The second is “hedging”, avoiding taking a stand:

hesitate to enforce the norms of the order. These countries—including Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey—participate in and support many elements of the international system. They broadly support the order’s norms and typically respect them. Some of these countries are set to become major economic and military players. Yet if more of them come to see a Chinese-Russian axis as a useful counterweight to U.S. and Western dominance and therefore defect from U.S.-led institutions, the postwar order will be in deep trouble.

I think he’s being kind or maybe it’s just wishful thinking. Is Saudi Arabia, for example, hedging or is it on the other side? He concludes:

To preserve the postwar international order, Washington will have to moderate and restrict its promotion of the order’s norms and the enforcement of its rules. A rigid and uncompromising approach will produce repeated overreach, provoke needless backlash from hedging states, and ultimately jeopardize the consensus at the order’s core. This may be the most important lesson of recent events in Europe and beyond: the United States needs to embrace a practical and sustainable, rather than inflexible and absolute, approach to the rules-based order.

Such an approach should focus on a few nonnegotiable norms: constraints on physical and cyber-aggression, collaboration on climate change, and cooperation to promote a stable global trade and financial system. It would accept the need to work with democracies and nondemocracies alike. It would actively promote free societies but do so by helping established and emerging democracies rather than forcing change on undemocratic ones. It would accept flawed but effective arms control deals rather than holding out for perfection.

At a moment when much of the world is aligned against Russian aggression, it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that Washington should dial back the intensity of its defense and promotion of the rules-based order. After all, that order has given the United States a tremendous competitive advantage and helped stabilize world politics. But the war in Ukraine has exposed the system’s brittleness. And unless the United States adopts a more pragmatic and flexible approach to maintaining it, the postwar order may collapse into a new era of conflict.

I think there’s a certain amount of wishful thinking in that statement. “Much of the world” is not “aligned against Russian aggression”. It’s basically just the G7. The rest of the world is either “hedging” to use his terminology or they’re on the other side.

However, I’m afraid he fails to “grasp the nettle” as me auld mither used to say. In the specific case of Ukraine what should the U. S. posture be? How do we avoid upsetting a rules-based order whether through excessive ambition or liberal interventionism? My own view is that for a rules-based order to persist we had to follow the rules. We stopped doing that sixty years ago. Now, faced with peers or near-peers who are eager to ignore those rules as much as we have been, a new order must be crafted under very difficult conditions.

I thought that Nicholas Riccardi made a very important point in this report at the Associated Press on immigration and inflation, one that is insufficiently recognized:

The U.S. has, by some estimates, 2 million fewer immigrants than it would have if the pace had stayed the same, helping power a desperate scramble for workers in many sectors, from meatpacking to homebuilding, that is also contributing to supply shortages and price increases.

“These 2 million missing immigrants are part of the reason we have a labor shortage,” said Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California at Davis, who calculated the shortfall. “In the short run, we are going to adjust to these shortages in the labor market through an increase in wages and in prices.”

including this observation:

“At some point we either decide to become older and smaller or we change our immigration policy,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist and former official in President George W. Bush’s administration who is president of the center-right American Action Forum. He acknowledged a change in immigration policy is unlikely: “The bases of both parties are so locked in.”

Ignoring the confusion between “inflation” and “price increases” reflected in the piece (inflation is when all prices increase and it is monetary in nature), I agree with the premise. I think we have a choice and it’s one we should make consciously rather than having it forced on us. If we want cheap domestically-grown lettuce and strawberries and other commodities that depend on what is ungraciously called “stoop labor”, we need to be willing to bring in more workers who are willing to work for the rock-bottom wages those jobs offer. My own view is that the numbers don’t add up.

The incremental public costs of a family of four including education, health care, safety, transportation, etc. is on average around $35,000 ($14,000 for each child plus another $7,000 for other services). Obviously, that family isn’t going to pay enough in taxes to cover their costs in services ($29,000 is two adults working full-time at the national minimum wage) and increasing the wages for that family to the point where they can pay their own way will necessarily raise the prices on those commodities to the point where they aren’t cheap anymore. As I say, the numbers don’t add up.

I think that what we need is a lot more automation which means more investment but it also means more jobs for people to build the systems and machines for that automation. I may be in the minority in thinking that would be a better future for the United States but, again, it’s a choice and one we need to make rather than having it forced on us.

In his New York Times column via Asharq Al-Awsat Thomas Friedman urges Americans to have more caution about the war in Ukraine:

First, The Times disclosed that “the United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.” Second, The Times, following a report by NBC News and citing US officials, reported that America has “provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike” the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. This targeting assistance “contributed to the eventual sinking” of the Moskva by two Ukrainian cruise missiles.

As a journalist, I love a good leak story, and the reporters who broke those stories did powerful digging. At the same time, from everything I have been able to glean from senior US officials, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, the leaks were not part of any thought-out strategy, and President Biden was livid about them. I’m told that he called the director of national intelligence, the director of the C.I.A. and the secretary of defense to make clear in the strongest and most colorful language that this kind of loose talk is reckless and has got to stop immediately — before we end up in an unintended war with Russia.

The staggering takeaway from these leaks is that they suggest we are no longer in an indirect war with Russia but rather edging toward a direct war — and no one has prepared the American people or Congress for that.

Vladimir Putin surely has no illusions about how much the US and NATO are arming Ukraine with material and intelligence, but when American officials start to brag in public about playing a role in killing Russian generals and sinking the Russian flagship, killing many sailors, we could be creating an opening for Putin to respond in ways that could dangerously widen this conflict — and drag the US in deeper than it wants to be.

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we didn’t start to see clandestine operations against high-ranking U. S. military officers either here or abroad. He goes on to express an opinion that tallies pretty closely with my own:

Alas, we have to be alive to the fact that it’s not only the Russians who would like to involve us more deeply. Have no illusions, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has been trying to do the same thing from the start — to make Ukraine an immediate member of NATO or get Washington to forge a bilateral security pact with Kyiv. I am in awe of Zelensky’s heroism and leadership. If I were him, I’d be trying to get the US as enmeshed on my side as he is.

But I’m an American citizen, and I want us to be careful. Ukraine was, and still is, a country marbled with corruption. That doesn’t mean we should not be helping it. I am glad we are. I insist we do. But my sense is that the Biden team is walking much more of a tightrope with Zelensky than it would appear to the eye — wanting to do everything possible to make sure he wins this war but doing so in a way that still keeps some distance between us and Ukraine’s leadership. That’s so Kyiv is not calling the shots and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath.

The view of Biden and his team, according to my reporting, is that America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty and beat the Russians back — but not let Ukraine turn itself into an American protectorate on the border of Russia. We need to stay laser-focused on what is our national interest and not stray in ways that lead to exposures and risks we don’t want.

To that end we should avoid either demonizing the Russians or idealizing the Ukrainians. Ukrainian corruption isn’t a consequence of being “economic vassals” to Russia. It’s because it’s Ukraine. Since the 2014 revolution, according to Transparency International Ukraine’s Corruption Perception Index (the most widely accepted measure of corruption) has improved—from 26 to 32 out of 100 (our score is 67—worse than France, Germany, or the United Kingdom. I don’t even want to think what Illinois’s would be).

Mr. Friedman concludes:

My bottom line echoes my top line — and I can’t underscore it enough: We need to stick as tightly as possible to our original limited and clearly defined aim of helping Ukraine expel Russian forces as much as possible or negotiate for their withdrawal whenever Ukraine’s leaders feel the time is right.

But we are dealing with some incredibly unstable elements, particularly a politically wounded Putin. Boasting about killing his generals and sinking his ships, or falling in love with Ukraine in ways that will get us enmeshed there forever, is the height of folly.

Update

I see that some of the same issues have captured James Joyner’s attention as well:

Of course we’ve been supplying intelligence. Of course we want to see Russia weakened. Putin knows these things. But actually saying them out loud serves no obvious purpose.

and echoes a point I’ve made here:

Now, it happens that the United States is fundamentally at war with Russia—we would certainly think any country supplying weapons to forces fighting American soldiers was a belligerent—but saying the quiet part out loud is unhelpful.

He thinks we “rubbing Putin’s nose in it deliberately”. I think that we’re doing so thoughtlessly, our attitude towards the Russians much as it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The video above is a visualization using photogrammetry of the largest known find of cave art images made by indigenous Americans. From Antiquity:

Since 1979, when the first cave art was documented in North America, dozens of other examples have come to light. Among these, 19th Unnamed Cave in Alabama contains hundreds of pre-contact Native American mud glyph drawings. In 2017, 3D modelling of the glyphs was initiated, ultimately enabling digital manipulation of the chamber space and revealing images that could not be perceived prior to modelling. Most surprisingly, the cave’s ceiling features very large anthropomorphic glyphs that are not apparent in situ due to the tight confines of the cave. We argue that photogrammetry offers untapped potential for not simply the documentation but also the discovery of a variety of archaeological phenomena.