I don’t link to articles in The American Conservative very frequently, but this one by Andrew Bacevich is an exception. Most of it consists of a lengthy diatribe against Robert Kagan but this is the passage to which I wanted to draw attention:

According to Kagan, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War occurred at least in part due to American passivity. Successive post-Cold War U.S. administrations fell down on the job. Put simply, they did not exert themselves to keep Russia in check. While it would be “obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine,” Kagan writes, to “insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.” The United States had “played a strong hand poorly.” In doing so, it gave Vladimir Putin cause to think that he could get away with aggression. Thus did Washington—as if sitting on its hands during the first two decades of the present century—provoke Moscow.

By “wielding U.S. influence more consistently and effectively,” presidents beginning with the elder Bush could have prevented the devastation that Ukrainians have suffered. From Kagan’s point of view, the United States has been too passive. Today, he writes, “the question is whether the United States will continue to make its own mistakes”—mistakes of inaction, in his view—“or whether Americans will learn, once again, that it is better to contain aggressive autocracies early, before they have built up a head of steam.”

to which Dr. Bacevich responds:

The reference to containing aggressive autocracies early requires decoding. Kagan is dissimulating. What he is actually proposing is further experiments with preventive war, which in the wake of 9/11 became the centerpiece of U.S. national security policy. Kagan, of course, supported the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. He was all in on invading Iraq. Implemented in 2003 in the form of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Bush Doctrine produced disastrous results.

Now, even two decades later, Kagan cannot bring himself to acknowledge the grotesque immensity of that mistake, nor its side effects, to include the rise of Trumpism and all of its ancillary evils.

In addition today’s Russia is not that of 30 years ago when Russia was practically supine.

I don’t believe that the U. S. forced Russia to attack Ukraine but pretending that countries do not respond to actions they consider provocations on the part of another is equally obscene. We have been playing our formerly strong hand poorly in two ways. First, by weakening our own hand in multiple different ways including destroying our own industrial base and trying to use our military to achieve political objectives to which it was ill-suited, giving the impression of being weaker than we actually are.

But the second is important, too. How can we insist on a “rules-based order” while refusing to obey our own rules?

As you are no doubt aware in the United States the annual inflation rate is presently running at 8.5%, the highest in 40 years. In my opinion these are the American political figures most responsible for the present situation:

1. Donald Trump
2. Joe Biden
3. Chuck Schumer
4. Nancy Pelosi
5. Jerome Powell

As they say it takes two to tango and in this case the two are monetary and fiscal policy. Today there’s a lot of reaction to the news.

In his latest New York Times column Paul Krugman assures us that inflation will clearly “whip back”. I sincerely hope he’s right. The editors of the Wall Street Journal see things somewhat differently. After showing the evidence that contradicts the claim that what we’re experiencing is “Putin’s inflation”, they summarize:

President Trump signed onto an unnecessary $900 billion Covid relief bill in December 2020, and Democrats threw kerosene on the kindling with another $1.9 trillion in March 2021. The Federal Reserve continues to support negative real interest rates nearly two years after the pandemic recession ended. This inflation was made in Washington, D.C.

In addition to their points I think we’re experiencing the long-delayed consequences of extremely bad policies adopted on a bipartisan basis over the period of more than 30 years. We’re not going to counteract that overnight and trying would be painful in the extreme. It will take time and concerted effort. So far I’m just not seeing the stars align.

Additionally, I’m a bit concerned that the FOMC is making some weak assumption—for example, that the U. S. economy is as or even more responsive to interest rate changes as it was 40 years ago. A lot has changed since then.

If you’re wondering how I came up with the list at the top of this post, Mr. Powell was wrong in his assumptions about the nature of inflation, has been quite slow to act, and did very little when he did act. His responsibility for the fiscal end of the equation should be unquestionable. Speaker Pelosi is next on my list because of Article I Section 7 of the Constitution:

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

with Sen. Schumer following close behind. President Biden forms the third leg of that fiscal policy tripod.

And President Trump did sign on to the $900 billion COVID-19 benefit bill in December 2020.

It always gets my attention when an out-of-town paper runs an editorial on Chicago and this one from the Wall Street Journal is no exception. It’s about the homicide rate in Chicago and gun control. They scoff:

Democrats blame guns for the violence, and on Monday President Biden announced a new regulation on firearms, including restrictions on privately made weapons. Yet Illinois already has strict gun laws. It requires a license for all gun ownership and universal background checks, among other rules. Chicago bans assault weapons, silencers, mufflers and laser sights; limits the sale of handguns and high-capacity magazines; and restricts sales at gun shows. This amounts to much of the progressive gun-control wish list, but it isn’t making Chicago safer.

The real problem is the lack of political will to stop the mayhem.

I don’t think their assessment is quite right. I think that the prevailing opinion among Chicago Democrats is that, if Indiana, Wisconsin, and Missouri had gun control as strict as Chicago’s, it would reduce Chicago’s problem with gun violence. And Chicago does have a problem with gun violence and, indeed, with crime more generally. There are fewer homicides in Chicago this year than last year at this time but more than 2018, 2019, and 2020. The number of carjackings in Chicago last year exceeded those in New York and Los Angeles put together. And hardly a day goes by without a report of a tone-y store on the Mag Mile being looted. Some of them have already been looted several times this year.

And Chicago’s problem is actually a lot worse than a lack of the political will. It is patently obvious that Chicago’s problem is gangs and the sad truth is that there are Chicago pols in bed with the gangs. There are NGOs whose relationship to the gangs is roughly the same as that between the IRA and Sinn Fein—when they’re shooting at each other they’re gangs and when they’re engaged in community organizing they’re NGOs.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with strict gun control (but for the pesky 2nd Amendment) but I’m afraid that such measures are futile. It seems to have escaped the president’s among other’s attention that laws primarily influence the law-abiding. Criminals are criminals because they don’t obey the law. Chicago’s homicide problem is mostly criminals shooting each other and innocents being caught in the crossfire.

In her regular Washington Post column Katrina van den Heuvel makes a point I have raised around here. After noting the U. S. treatment of Cuba over the period of the last 60 years she observes:

Cuba is not alone. The United States has imposed harsh sanctions on Venezuela and Nicaragua for sustaining regimes Washington opposes. Even the recent sanctions on Russia, says Juan Sebastian Gonzalez, the senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council, are designed such “that they will have an impact on those governments that have economic affiliations with Russia … So Venezuela will start feeling the pressure; Nicaragua will start feeling the pressure; as will Cuba.”

At the same time, the national security establishment is raising alarms about growing Chinese involvement in the Western Hemisphere. China is now Latin America’s leading trade partner, as well as a leading source of direct investment and financing. Interested in security access to commodity exports, China assisted the region after the 2008 financial crisis, with investments that generated jobs and helped decrease poverty in the region. During the pandemic, the Chinese rushed vaccines (of questionable effectiveness, it should be noted) into the region and provided continued demand for products.

concluding:

Hypocrisy is common in international relations. The Russians and Chinese, for example, constantly invoke international law, even as they trample it when they deem it necessary. The United States champions a “rules-based order,” in which we make the rules and hold ourselves exempt from them when desirable. The “principle” of respecting nations and their right to choose their own path is a good one. The countries of our own hemisphere wish we would practice it as well as preach it.

In other words we believe in “spheres of influence” when they’re our own. There are two intellectually consistent points of view. One of them is to accept spheres of influences as facts of life. The other is to reject the notion of spheres of influence including our own. That’s my preference and it’s usually castigated as isolationism. Or we could continue on as we have. Hypocrisy, too, is a fact of life.

I found this analysis of the French elections by Mathias Bernard at The Moderate Voice, originally published at The Conversation, interesting. Here’s his conclusion:

The apparent stability of the balance of power masks important changes. The political landscape continues to shift rightward. Testament to this is the emergence of Éric Zemmour’s identity-based platform and Emmanuel Macron’s renewed political offer. While Jean-Luc Mélenchon made gains, they were not enough to compensate for the Socialist Party’s precipitous decline.

Populism also continues to grow. In five years and under the effect of a certain number of social movements (the Yellow Jackets in particular), its rhetoric has become more radical. More than ever, the split between the people and the elite shows itself at the ballot box. This populist rise weakens Emmanuel Macron, whose position is less favourable than it may appear at first glance.

The incumbent president obtains scores comparable to some of his predecessors who were not re-elected for a second term: Giscard d’Estaing in 1981 (28% of the vote), Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 (27% of the vote). Moreover, he cannot capitalise on the desire for change that largely explained his victory five years ago. The campaign between the two rounds will thus bring into play two antagonistic projects, two visions of society, but also a tension between the “dégagisme” (i.e., a political ideology based on the French verb dégager, “to oust”, calling for the rejection of the established political class) hostile to the outgoing president, and calls by most first round candidates for a collective front against the extreme right.The Conversation

I have no ability to assess the accuracy of his analysis. The outcome of the French elections is, however, important if for no other reason that the French have the only European military at the highest level of readiness.

Update

At Politico Paul Taylor adds:

Anguish over soaring food and fuel prices have raised the specter of another wave of grassroots Yellow Jacket roadblocks, and trade unions have vowed to fight his flagship manifesto pledge, which would raise the official retirement age from 62 to 65.

In a country with a long tradition of taking to the barricades, another popular revolt against a president often perceived as arrogant and technocratic is highly likely. Strikes for higher pay and against pension reform could kick off within weeks after the August summer holidays.

Similarly, if Marine Le Pen — Macron’s opponent of five years, who scored 23.2 percent in Sunday’s first round — conquers the Elysée Palace in her third attempt, the hard-right nationalist is sure to face left-wing demonstrations against her anti-immigration “national preference” platform from day one, with violence from the radical fringes very probable.

Despite Le Pen’s efforts to project herself as a stateswoman and tone down her past Euroskeptic and anti-Islam rhetoric, as well as her long-standing admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, she remains a target of hostility from the left and the mainstream media.

he predicts a third round of voting.

Update 2

At the Washington Post James McAuley says he sees four “unsettling takeaways”:

1. The election is now Macron’s to lose
2. The traditional parties have vanished, and extremes are on the rise
3. The far right has never been stronger
4. The French left is not ‘dead,’ it’s just fragmented

I remain unconvinced of several of his takeaways. Isn’t the first trivial? When an incumbent is running, it’s always his or election to lose, isn’t it? I have no comment on the French left but is the British left dead or just pining for the fjords? My point is that there’s a lot of that going around.

I am seeing lots of reports that Finland and Sweden will be joining NATO soon. I’ll be more impressed if both of those countries start spending more than 2% of GDP on their militaries. Otherwise it looks like a wild grab at a dollar bill, keeping their levels of social spending up on Uncle Sugar’s tab.

Maybe I’m missing something but Johns Hopkins economists John Greenwood and Steve H. Hanke’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, whose kernel is in this passage:

If the Fed wants a soft landing, its focus must be on the rate of growth in the money supply, broadly measured. The ratio of broad money to nominal spending, the inverse of income velocity, typically has a stable trend. Therefore, the amount of new money created gives a reasonable estimate of new purchasing power injected into the economy. The growth in the money supply is the “altimeter” that any central bank pilot needs on the dashboard to ensure a soft landing.

really seems to me like a long-winded way of rephrasing Milton Friedman’s famous dictum that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. Have the members of the Fed Open Markets Committee forgotten that or do they just no like the implications?

Basically, if you increase the quantity of money without increasing production, you’ll get inflation. That’s why I keep emphasizing production. Also if you want to consume more you’ve got to produce more. Conversely, if you’re determined to reduce production, you’ll also need to reduce consumption. All of those seem pretty basic to me.

I became aware of this working paper by Phil Kerpen, Stephen Moore and Casey B. Mulligan at the National Bureau of Economic Research on the “final report card” on the various states’ response to COVID-19 based on mortality, impact on the states’ economies, and impact on education within the states via the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a summary of their methodology:

Our measures fall into three categories: the economy, education, and mortality. For economic performance we used two measures: unemployment and GDP by state. For education we used a single metric: the Burbio cumulative in-person instruction percentage for the complete 2020-2021 school year, with hybrid instruction weighted half. For ID-associated deaths reported to the CDC and all-cause excess mortality. Of course, even without a pandemic, states populations are heterogeneous and their economies emphasize different industries. And because the pandemic had a much more negative effect on economic output in some industries (such as entertainment, energy production, mining, hotels and food), we adjust unemployment and GDP changes for industry composition. We adjust COVID mortality (through March 5, 2022) for age and “metabolic health,” by which we mean the pre-pandemic prevalence of obesity and diabetes – as these are highly correlated with higher death rates from the virus.

Economy and schooling are positively correlated (correlation coefficient = 0.43), which suggests a relationship between the willingness of the population (or its politicians) to resume normal activity in business and school. MT, SD, NE, and UT are the states highest on the economy score and also among only seven states to exceed 85 percent open schools. The correlation between health and economy scores is essentially zero, which suggests that states that withdrew the most from economic activity did not significantly improve health by doing so.

and here’s a quick take on their findings:

The approach I generally use in assessing such studies is to come up with the simplest explanation I can that might explain the results. In this case what leapt out at me was two things. First, the states that were in the top 10 included many of the states with the lowest level of income inequality while the states in the bottom 10 were among those with the highest levels of income inequality. The second thing was that quite a few although not all of the states in the top 10 were among the whitest states in the Union, e.g. Utah, Nebraska, Vermont. Those two observations may be related.

I also briefly considered whether billionaires per capita were not sufficient to explain high levels of income inequality. It isn’t although, oddly, absolute number of billionaires seems to be.

All of which leads me to suspect that the authors may not be measuring what they think they’re measuring but rather they may be measuring social cohesion.

My observation throughout the COVID-19 pandemic is that despite all of the huffing and puffing policy seems to be a lot less important than other factors like demographics, population density, and lifestyle. I just don’t see the findings of this study as being as important as the authors seem to.

I guess that depends on your operative definition of “working”. Russia has not withdrawn from Ukraine. The Russian economy hasn’t collapsed. The Russian people haven’t risen up and overthrown Vladimir Putin. If this op-ed by Kevin T. Dugan at MSN’s Intelligencer is to be credited, they aren’t accomplishing much at all:

Anecdotally, the pressure seems to be diffuse and hard to pinpoint: A Moscow resident I’ve known since well before the war told me over Telegram that grocery stores were full of food and mostly 5 to 10 percent more expensive; diesel gas prices were 53.59 rubles a liter, or roughly equivalent to $2.70 a gallon — cheaper than just about everywhere in the U.S.; and luxury-goods retailers on Tretyakovsky Proyezd, Moscow’s equivalent to Rodeo Drive, are still apparently selling clothes and handbags on the down low to some of their most prized customers, thanks in part to the government blessing the gray market in upscale goods. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called sanctions a “declaration of war” — and perhaps it is, but it has also been a propaganda boon for the Kremlin as it escalates its war in Ukraine.

Remember, Russia was prepared for this. As one of the world’s largest economies — with a gross domestic product of around $1.8 trillion — Putin has leveraged the country’s most important asset, its oil and natural gas reserves, so that countries like Germany are more reliant on it than ever. But it’s not just that the rest of world was caught flat-footed. According to Columbia University economist Adam Tooze, the Russian budget had been engineered prior to the invasion to balance out if the price of oil fell to $44 a barrel, meaning that it’s been able to sock away a ton of money. Ever since 2014, when Putin faced Western sanctions for the annexation of Crimea, more of Russia’s goods have been produced domestically and debts were restructured to be paid in the local currency. In its run-up to war, Russia effectively removed itself from the global system where it was spending while further entangling its neighbors that were giving it money, and given the country’s size and power, made it difficult for the world to reverse course.

Contrary to the imputed objectives, Russia has not been shut out of the financial system and has not been isolated. And this is a critical point:

If you want to to see how the West is undermining its own sanctions, look no further than Russia’s oil and gas sales. Those deals, negotiated prior to the war, are in dollars and euros. While Putin has previously tried to get “unfriendly” countries to pay for the energy in rubles, that hasn’t really been the case. Ribakova points out that all those unsanctioned banks can still hold foreign currencies — effectively acting as a replacement for some of the dollars and euros that the Central Bank of Russia has been frozen out of. “It was a dramatic blow to the whole sort of principle of fortress Russia, the central bank sanctions,” she says. “For them, it would be important for financial stability purposes to accumulate foreign reserves.”

Maybe further escalations and more time are needed for the sanctions to really bite.