After providing a reasonably good characterization of what we’re being told by our news media and political leaders:

He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re hedging their bets. He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv — two heavily Russian-speaking cities that Putin claims to be “liberating” from Ukrainian oppression — resemble what the Nazis did to Warsaw, and what Putin himself did to Grozny.

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Bret Stephens muses about the implications of their being wrong in his New York Times column. Noting that Russia’s prosecution of its war against Ukraine tracks pretty closely with what they did in Chechnya he counters:

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

It seems to me that there are a wide range of possibilities beyond “canny fox” and “crazy fool”. It seems to me that by far the likeliest explanation of what we’ve seen unfold over the last 30 days can be discerned by taking Putin precisely at his word. He views his aggression against Ukraine as putting down a civil war. That’s not crazy; it just stems from a completely different understanding and assumptions than those of our political leaders. That’s no more crazy than the Iranian mullahs’ conviction that U. S. intervention in the Iranian revolution was prevented by the direct intervention of Allah. It’s not what we believe but it’s not crazy, either.

I sincerely hope that the “conventional wisdom” is the fair dinkum or at least the part about Russian troops’ bungling and Putin miscalculating. The part about his being irrational not so much.

What if Mr. Stephens’s scenario is correct? What if some other scenario is? What worries me most is a hasty intervention after being surprised by events.

Economist Hans-Werner Sinn comments at Project Syndicate on the consequences of 30 years of German policy:

Green politicians in Germany always hoped that other countries would emulate this energy agenda once they saw how well it was working. But, in light of the war in Ukraine, the world is instead witnessing how Germany’s approach has created a policy disaster.

To cushion the twin phaseout of coal and nuclear, and to close supply gaps during the long transition to renewable energy, Germany decided to build a large number of additional gas-fired power plants. Even immediately before Russian forces invaded Ukraine, policymakers assumed that the gas for these facilities would always come from Russia, which supplied more than half of Germany’s needs.

Unfortunately

Germany’s pledge to abandon coal and nuclear, the very energy sources that would have given it a degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy, has thus placed the country in great danger. Not so long ago, Germany was the world’s second-largest lignite producer, after China. And it easily could have procured the tiny amount of uranium needed to run its nuclear power plants, and stored it domestically for many years.

Committed Greens claim that the twin phaseout would not have been a problem had Germany pressed ahead with developing wind and solar energy to achieve green energy autonomy. If anything, they say, the need to ensure energy security is an argument for, not against, Germany’s renewables-based strategy.

This view is debatable. Despite the fact that turbines and photovoltaic panels now dot much of the landscape, in 2021 the share of wind and solar power in Germany’s total final energy consumption, which includes heating, industrial processing, and traffic, was a meager 6.7%. And while wind and solar generated 29% of the country’s electricity output, electricity itself accounted for only about a fifth of its final energy consumption. Germany would not have come close to achieving energy autonomy even if the renewables sector had expanded at twice the speed that it did.

The Green argument also overlooks the fact that the planned scaling of wind and solar-based energy supply must always be complemented by adjustable conventional electricity production, given that storage solutions are difficult and extremely expensive. This power is fed into the grid when wind and sun do not produce enough energy, and can ensure that the economy is not disrupted during a protracted wind and solar lull.

You will notice in his observations some of the things I have written about around here. Although I would welcome Germany’s changing its course, I don’t actually expect the Germans to do so. It would be just too politically and economically painful. They’re also pledging to increase their military spending. I don’t actually expect them to do that, either, at least not in any meaningful way. I also would not be surprised if American military leaders wouldn’t discourage the Germans from rebuilding their military capabilities. It flies too much in the face of their long-standing objectives.

Okay, here’s a question for you. In what country or countries is the likelihood of regime change the greatest?

My answer may strike some as being out of the blue but I would say Egypt. Egypt’s government isn’t particularly popular and Egypt is probably more vulnerable to a reduction in imports of wheat and corn from Ukraine and/or Russia than any other country in the world.

I will only make two remarks about Will Smith’s behavior at the Academy Awards ceremony. First, the wisecrack I read somewhere else is all too true: the entire country is now The Jerry Springer Show. And that’s a best case scenario. Imagine if one or both of them had been armed. That’s happening in shopping malls in various places in the country.

My other remark is that I don’t think the producers of the show are receiving sufficient criticism. The design of the stage facilitated what happened. They should have made rules of conduct and dress clear and enforced them. Will Smith should have been ejected from the ceremony immediately. If that had happened there would no longer be a need for a discussion of consequences—he would already have experienced them.

I materially agree with Jakub Grygiel’s Wall Street Journal op-ed but I think he’s missing something basic. His main points are that

1. The “rule-based international order” is an illusion and always has been.
2. Regional hegemons can and will break the rules.
3. Regional conflicts rarely have decisive conclusions.

Here’s a lengthy passage:

Over the past three decades these regional orders—in Europe, the Middle East and Asia—have been relatively stable and the local competitions subdued. The resulting impression was of a world order. Liberals saw this global stability as the product of international rules, a growing number of democracies, and greater international trade—a “rules-based order” enhanced by democracies and commercial peace. Realists saw a world order underwritten by a rough equilibrium between the great powers—the U.S., Russia and China—with nuclear weapons as an effective pacifying equalizer.

Both visions of world order put too much emphasis on the global nature of this stability. If we look at the world through the lens of regional orders, the picture is more worrisome.

Russia’s wars in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014, as well as Iran’s actions in Iraq, Yemen and Syria, and China’s military expansion in Asia, were signs of growing local volatility. But until now these had been tentative pushes, conducted by hesitant revisionist powers and checked by American power. Russia’s war in Ukraine is the first full-fledged military offensive that aims to change the local balance of power drastically. Russia seeks to be the decisive power in Europe, and for that it needs to dominate Ukraine.

Regional orders are fragile for two reasons. First, military force is more likely to be used in local contests than in disputes between distant rivals. The stakes are high for the local parties, the perceived risks limited. A revisionist power is likely to pursue its goals, such as conquest of territory or control over a neighboring state’s political life, through war more than through negotiations. And the revisionist power’s targets won’t accept a hostile takeover without a fight. In the end, both sides are interested less in preventing war than in making war usable for their own objectives. War is an enduring regional reality.

The U.S. tends to think of stability as a broad goal of its grand strategy. As President Biden has said, the goal is to “strive to prevent” World War III. But regional revisionists in Eurasia aren’t afraid of putting pressure on their own frontiers to extend their influence. The states they threaten will also choose war over submission, regional disorder over lost independence. The U.S. will have to figure out how to navigate, even embrace, instability and war in regions that are important to its national interests.

What he’s missing is that the “impression of a world order” he describes was created by U. S. global hegemony. As that hegemony has decreased, the perceived “rules-based order” has withered away along with it. We have helped that withering along by not conforming to the order we were purportedly trying to establish. Guess what? Other major powers chafe under the control of a global policeman particularly when the cop is on the take.

That hegemony was both military and economic and we have recklessly let both of them wither away.

Our European allies in particular have grown so used to living under that dome of U. S. hegemony they don’t recognize it for what it was. Are they coming to a rude awakening now or just pretending to? I guess time will tell. Germany is still importing a significant amount of gas from Russia every month.

IMO we have erred over the last 40 years, not just in failing to apply the rules to ourselves but in overestimating the value to us of what our European allies were willing to do and underestimating the role of the U. S. economy in keeping that dome active.

You owe it to your to take at least a glimpse at this roundtable on the U. S. grand strategy after Ukraine at Foreign Policy. Here are a couple of snippets:

The bottom line is that Europe can handle a future Russian threat on its own. NATO’s European members have always had far greater latent power potential than the threat to their east: Together, they have nearly four times Russia’s population and more than 10 times its GDP. Even before the war, NATO’s European members were spending three to four times as much on defense each year than Russia. With Russia’s true capabilities now revealed, confidence in Europe’s ability to defend itself should increase considerably.

and

Past use of sanctions rarely—if ever—brought regime change or ended wars. As we can all see in Ukraine, even massive sanctions have yet to deliver recognizable victories. The West will find that sanctions are not without fallout and even casualties. Shortfalls and price spikes induced by sanctions will wrack the U.S. and European economies. Civilians, especially in poorer countries around the world, could die as food prices skyrocket and houses get unbearably hot or cold when electricity fails.

and

Seeing the unity of the West and its partners in response to Russia’s war, Beijing may just now be learning how dangerous a game it is to attempt to change the status quo by force. It will become increasingly difficult for China to justify a Sino-Russian partnership with “no limits,” as Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping jointly described it shortly before the invasion. China may emphasize that it is not an outlaw state like Russia while doubling down on establishing a sphere of influence through nonmilitary coercion, as it is already doing. In Washington, it appears as if the battle between advocates of strategic competition and those of engagement has been settled in favor of the former, but we may see pushback by those who favor engagement based on the argument that China is behaving more responsibly than Russia.

I think there are a couple of factors they all miss. One is that to a greater extent than any other major power American grand strategy is an emergent phenomenon, the product not only of the White House but the White House, Pentagon, State Department, private companies, NGOs, and individuals. Our grand strategy can be shaped by decisive White House action but it cannot be dictated by it, however the sitting president might wish to do so.

The DoD has its own grand strategy and that has not been completely aligned with that of the White House or State Department for decades. Part of its grand strategy is for the U. S. military to be the only one at the highest level of preparedness. Note how much at odds that is with Europe taking primary responsibility for its own defense. There is a coming Donnybrook over these matters and I have no idea what the outcome will be.

Doomberg points out the incipient problems with a number of key inputs (fertilizer, herbicides, diesel fuel, semiconductor chips, propane, etc.) used by farmers and concludes:

We believe we are at the onset of a global famine of historic proportions. In a staggering defiance of logic, many US politicians are still attacking the lifeblood of our own energy production infrastructure, looking to score political points against “the other team,” blaming price-taking producers of global commodities for gouging, threatening producers of energy with windfall profits taxes, resisting calls to remove bureaucratic hurdles to new production, and refusing to open an introductory physics textbook to help guide them through the suite of policy choices that require true leadership to get right. They remain stuck in an endless loop of platitudes, blamestorming, corruption, and ignorance.

I wish I didn’t have to repeat this but I continue to think that the risks of globalization have been drastically underestimated.

Illinois’s scandals always catch my eye. Consider this report from Adam Andrzejewski at RealClearPolicy:

In 2020, Gov. JB Pritzker’s trust bought stock in the health insurance company Centene Corp. That same year, Illinois gave $2.6 billion worth of Medicaid contracts to Centene Corp.

An investigation by the Better Government Association, a nonprofit Illinois watchdog, uncovered these interesting investments. Even though Pritzker’s investments are in a blind trust, which means that Pritzker is not privy to investment decisions, they demonstrate why blind trusts can’t prevent conflicts of interest.

Each year, Pritzker receives a copy of his current investments from his fund managers, which have the potential to influence the state contracting process.

Intentional or not, legal or not, this is still a corrupt practice. Gov. Pritzker, pursuant to his campaign pledge not to invest in companies that did business with the state, should have conveyed that directive to his trust managers.

How corrupt is Illinois? When the reformers engage in corrupt practices despite campaign promises, what can one say?

You undoubtedly heard about the fire onboard the transport ship, Felicity Ace, in the Azores and the subsequent sinking of the vessel along with its half billion dollar cargo of expensive automobiles. You may not have heard that fighting the fire was exacerbated by the lithium ion batteries of EVs which may even have caused the fire. From the report at CTIF:

Joao Mendes Cabecas, who is the commanding officer of the port on the island, predicted that the fire would be difficult to fight successfully. According to Reuter´s news agency, he stated a few days into the fire that the lithium-ion batteries in the cars would “keep the fire alive”.

Special equipment for extinguishing battery fires were reportedly at the time on the way to the ship´s location.

It was not clear whether the batteries first sparked the fire.

“The ship is burning from one end to the other … everything is on fire about five meters above the water line,” Joao Mendes Cabecas said to press outlets at the time.

The loss is expected to increase the insurance costs of shipping substantially says Nick Blenkey at MarineLog:

Volkswagen AG has come far from the days of the beloved air-cooled bug. These days its portfolio includes brands such as Bentley and Lamborghini. That means that the fire still burning aboard the MOL car carrier Felicity Ace could soon join the list of very expensive maritime casualties, pushing up the costs of marine insurance.

No comments on whether insuring all cargoes will be increased or just those for shipping vehicles.

I’m not opposed in principle to electric vehicles. Indeed, I strongly suspect that a lot more of them are in our collective future, even in the United States and Australia where sales remain relatively low. That may be particularly true in highly urbanized areas where they’re more practical than in the suburbs, exurbs, or rural areas. In Europe sales of EVs are skyrocketing. Roughly a third of new vehicle sales in Germany last year were EVs.

But we shouldn’t ignore their risks, either, which may further impede sales.