I strongly encourage you to read Bill Roggio’s assessment of the situation in Ukraine in the Daily Mail. The TL;DR version is that while the Ukrainians are winning the information war the Russians may be winning on the ground.

Additional points:

• Putin may be having some problems at home:
  

  On Friday, Russia organized a massive rally in an effort to show the Russian people stand behind him. Meanwhile, thousands of Russians have been arrested for protesting the war.

  Putin has also issued a chilling warning to dissenters in his country, likening them to gnats and signaling new repression, while passing laws that make protests illegal and protesters are subject to fines and even prison sentences.

  The leader of a unified cause does not employ these tactics.

• We should maintain perspective on the timeframe:
  

  We must remember that it took the U.S. military three weeks to take Baghdad and 42 days to conquer Iraq in 2003.

  And the Iraqis put up less resistance than the Ukrainians are.

• Russian military capabilities should also be seen in perspective:
  

  While the information campaigns have clouded the reality of the situation on the ground, what has also become clear is that Russian military does not pose a conventional threat to NATO.

  Smaller, non-NATO members, such as Moldova, are not so lucky.

Read the whole thing.

Veteran journalist Dan Froomkin is upset with the editors of the New York Times over a recent editorial:

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental misreading of the freedom of speech – or an organization whose credibility depends more on understanding it correctly – than today’s lead editorial from the New York Times editorial board.

The First Amendment asserts a right to free speech. It does not assert a right to not be criticized for speech. In fact, it protects critical speech.

And the protection is against government action, not against other people.

He does make a point. If senior journalists don’t support or even understand freedom of speech, who will?

There are some complexities Mr. Froomkin doesn’t address, however. When governments or elected officials reach out to social media giants, asking them to ban or curb opinions with which they disagree, those are in fact violations of freedom of speech.

Tanner Greer has an op-ed in the New York Times, urging us to consider the consequences of our policy with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rather than focusing solely on the righteousness of the Ukrainians’ cause. The observant might recognize Tanner as “T. Greer”, the blogger at The Scholar’s Stage. The Scholar’s Stage is one of my favorite blogs and I have added it to my blogroll.

Here’s a snippet from the post at The Scholar’s Stage on the op-ed:

I have an op-ed out in the New York Times today arguing that we must intentionally ground our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in careful, cost-benefit calculation instead of emotional reaction or moral fervor. The piece is given the unfortunate title “Ukraine’s Cause is Righteous. That Shouldn’t Shape Policy.” My argument is not that the rightness of the Ukrainian cause does not matter, but that in moments of crisis it is easy to do things that feel right even if they do not help us achieve the right outcomes. The righteous demand to do the right thing—now!—unnaturally speeds the tempo of decision making and warps the policy review process. The end result are statesmen rushing into policies whose consequences they have not fully gamed out.

These points are not new to you all: I made them all at greater length in an essay published on this website two weeks ago. Like that essay, today’s New York Times piece hearkens back to the poor policy planning process that preceded the invasion of Iraq. This comparison is not playing well on Twitter. This is partially because the idea that Iraq was a problem of moral imperatives gone wrong is not intuitive to folks who have not studied the origins of that war in close detail (e.g. see here, here, and here), and there was no space to provide those details in the column. But a lot of what is riling people up is the implicit moral comparison they think is being made between the neocons of Bush ’43 and Western leaders today. But that is not my argument! The comparison is necessary not because an invasion and a stand against invasion are moral equivalents, but because in both situations we find American statesmen working outside of the normal policy process in the immediate aftermath of an emotionally charged attack on innocent people.

That dovetails nicely with James Joyner’s assessment of the situation at OTB:

The obvious settlement is one in which Ukraine concedes Crimea, which is already a fait accompli, as well as Eastern Ukraine to Russia along with a pledge to never join NATO. That would be a bitter pill, indeed, for Zelensky. But he’s more-or-less made the NATO pledge already and Crimea was gone years ago.

Would President Biden and other Western leaders go along with this? I’m not so sure. While far short of his original war aims, it would be a clear victory for Putin and a massive reward for his atrocities.

Then again, the West has very little skin in this game. We’re supplying massive amounts of weapons to help the Ukrainians fight on. But will that be enough to achieve a total victory? If not, how many Ukrainians do we want to die by prolonging this fight for months, or even years?

Which leaves me where I’ve been for weeks: I simply don’t know the answer to these questions.

I’ll make the remarks here I was tempted to make there. Discounting the risk of escalation to increasing direct participation by NATO which every wargame has found leads to a nuclear exchange, I think there’s a substantial risk that the U. S. and our NATO allies will be reluctant to accept a resolution of the war that the Ukrainians themselves are willing to accept. I suspect that James’s scenario described above fits that. What would the Ukrainians get from it? An end to the shelling of Ukrainian cities, the shelling and bombing of Ukrainian cities not intensifying, and a small amount of sovereignty since the present Ukrainian government would remain in place. It would save Ukrainian lives.

I recognize that’s not a moral solution. Will it encourage Putin to engage in similar actions in the Baltic or elsewhere? I honestly don’t know but I doubt it given the Russian experience in Ukraine.

Whether we would accept that is a question of priorities.

Such a suggestion will no doubt be condemned as immoral, appeasement, crypto-Russian, etc. Again, it’s a question of priorities. I still don’t believe that Putin is Hitler (or crazy), that Russia is Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or that Ukraine is Poland in 1939.

At the Australian Lowy Institute Roland Rajah and Alyssa Leng dig into the trends, analyzing the likely development of the Chinese economy. Their conclusions are

• China’s economy is likely to become the largest in the world (if it isn’t already)
• Its growth rate is likely to slow below 5% and below 3% within 20 years
• That means it is unlikely to “enjoy a meaningful lead” over the United States

which comports pretty well with what I’ve been saying here over the period of the last 20 years. Here’s a snippet:

Our projections imply a vastly different future compared to the dominant narrative of China’s ongoing global rise. Expectations regarding the rise of China should be substantially revised down compared to most existing economic studies and especially the expectations of those assessing the broader implications of China’s rise for global politics. If China were on track to grow at 4–5% a year to 2050, as many seem to hold, it follows that China would be on course to become the world’s most dominant economy by far. With 2–3% growth, China’s future looks very different. China would still likely become the world’s largest economy. But it would never establish a meaningful lead over the United States and would remain far less prosperous and productive per person than America, even by mid-century.

and especially this point:

China has achieved significant productivity gains over the past four decades since reform began, with productivity growth averaging 3.9% a year over the entire period by our estimate. However, placed in proper context, China’s performance looks less impressive. China is not really a “miracle” economy when it comes to productivity. Instead, China’s historically strong productivity performance appears more a reflection of its incredibly low starting point, the deep inefficiencies plaguing the planned economy of Maoist China, and the large catch-up dividends unleashed by gradual market-oriented reforms over the ensuing decades.

The most important reason for the slowing? Demographics.

Don’t confuse this with the sort of reflex boosterism so common in American analyses.

The post is full of great charts and graphs. They make a convincing argument.

The editors of the Washington Post provide advice on what we should do to reduce the likelihood of global famine:

Rich nations such as the United States, Australia and much of the European Union will see food prices jump even higher, straining lower-income households that already report they are struggling with inflation. But at least the bread and cereal aisles will still have products on the shelves. In many parts of the developing world, there will be a genuine risk of starvation and famine, because low-income countries do not have enough money to pay high food prices. Fifty countries depend on Russia and Ukraine for more than 30 percent of their wheat, and many are among the poorest nations in North Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The worst possible response to the food crisis would be for wealthy nations to halt or heavily restrict exports of key crops. It’s tempting in tough times to hold on to all available supplies, but that exacerbates hunger in developing nations. This scenario played out during the Great Recession in 2008, when dozens of countries severely curbed exports of key crops, triggering food riots from Egypt to Haiti. Egypt has already banned exports of wheat, flour and beans. Meanwhile, China has been quietly scooping up supplies on the global market.

A better approach for the United States and its allies to take is to increase financial aid to the World Food Program and similar initiatives. These organizations respond quickly to needs on the ground and are connected to many suppliers. It would also help if the United States would end or at least temporarily waive the renewable fuel standard during this food crisis, because that diverts substantial amounts of U.S. corn, sorghum and barley to produce ethanol.

Once again I’m having problems relating ends to means. The U. S. grain harvests for 2021 are already in and the 2022 harvests are in the future. Our exports will primarily be from the 2021 harvest. Last year’s wheat harvest was probably the worst in 50 years but the corn harvest was the second greatest on record. About 40% of U. S. corn is used in the production of ethanol. Will waiving the renewable fuel standard decrease the price of corn, increase it, or have no effect?

Maybe I’m reading the tealeaves wrong but it seems to me that the increase in the price of oil will do more to incentivize turning corn into fuel than removing the renewable fuel standard will do to disincentivize it.

I’m honestly not sure whether I agree with Tom Z. Collina’s New York Times op-ed or not because it’s such a jumble of means, ends, and unspoken assumptions. It includes assertions with which I agree:

But there is a limit to how far we should go. Even as our hearts go out to the brave Ukrainian people, the Biden administration is right to resist calls to deepen American military involvement in Ukraine, because the consequences of a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia could be unimaginably dire.

but I have reservations about its antecedent:

Given the stakes, the United States can and should do more to end the war and help alleviate human suffering in Ukraine. We were already providing weapons for the Ukrainians to defend themselves, such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles and Javelin antitank missiles, as well as hitting Russia with huge economic sanctions. And soon after Mr. Zelensky’s speech, President Biden announced that the United States would send an additional $800 million in military assistance to Ukraine, as part of the $14 billion of support he had already approved.

Is the objective

• help alleviate human suffering in Ukraine?
• end the war?
• defeat Russia?
• something else?

and what are their relative priorities? They don’t necessarily all fit together unless there’s something missing in it. Arming the Ukrainians may or may not allow them to defeat the Russians but it will definitely prolong the war which means it will also prolong suffering. Maybe prolonging the suffering in Ukraine now will result in less suffering in Ukraine later. Is that the assumption? Is there actual evidence for it?

Mr. Collina is emphatic in his belief that the U. S. should renounce a first nuclear strike option:

The Biden administration should rule out “first use,” thereby declaring it will not start a nuclear war, and seek to build an international consensus around the idea that the sole purpose for nuclear weapons is to deter their use by others. Mr. Biden has supported this position for years.

That strikes me as cognitive dissonance. Will announcing a “no first use” policy do anything other than convince other countries (as if they need convincing) that the United States cannot be trusted and is lying?

In addition, the United States should start now to build international support for the deep reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons so they cannot be used by strongmen and autocrats to enable their atrocities.

That strikes me as naive. Let’s use North Korea as a test case. How will international support for the deep reduction or even complete elimination of nuclear weapons onvince Kim Jong Un to renounce NK’s nuclear weapons? I would think it would do precisely the opposite.

I find it all terribly confusing.

There’s a piece at the Columbia Journalism Review consisting of eight brief reflections by journalists who have spent much of the last 20 years in Afghanistan, covering the war there. I found it interesting not just for the insight it provided on the plight of reporters and the situation in Afghanistan but for its potential importance for what we’re experiencing now. I’ll except some brief snippets but I encourage you to read the whole thing.

The first snippet is from Kathy Gannon who has spent most of the last 35 years reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Associated Press:

The coverage was making everybody but the Taliban a good guy, when the reality was there were a lot of bad guys. People were being made heroes who had done horrible things. And I thought, “How much of history as we know it is like this?”

That is very much to the point I have been trying to make here. “First draft of history” my Aunt Fanny.

Here’s a brief quote from Sebastian Junger, author and documentary film maker, who has reported for ABC, National Geographic, and Vanity Fair, based on his experience “embedding” with an American platoon for a whole year:

What I took away from that experience: before that, I hadn’t known how powerful group affiliation can be. You would think something like the Army results in a diminishment of free will and autonomy. What’s weird is, instead, many soldiers experience a kind of expanding of themselves. Like, “This is the real me. This is me on the grandest scale.” The question is always, “Why do soldiers come back so messed up?” Well, I think part of it is that what they experience over there—a group of people, facing adversity and relying on each other—that’s all of human history. But a lot of modern America doesn’t require that anymore, and soldiers miss it. It was even true for me, and I didn’t carry a gun, I wasn’t defending shit. I had a camera. I was in my mid-forties, preconditioned by a liberal upbringing not to be part of any of this mess. But that social contract—that “I’ll help you, you help me, and we’ll get through this together”—I truly felt that. When it was over, I was heartbroken.

War is hell but in an unexpected way it is also a sort of heaven. A fact that bears reflection.

This is from Atia Abbadi, NBC News’s lead Afghanistan correspondent:

At the end of a long day, when we could finally get on air, they had me on with a reporter in Kabul and another journalist in D.C. The battle is raging, and the control room tells me, “We’re not going with you first, we’re going with the guy in Kabul.” So, I’m listening to the coverage, and I hear this reporter saying that the Marines have “complete control” on the ground in Marja—as bombs are literally going off all around me. And it wasn’t this reporter’s fault, he was great. The problem was he was talking to coalition leadership in Kabul. So, I’m listening and I’m getting frustrated. And then they’re like, “For more, let’s go to Washington.” And again I hear, “Complete control, complete control.” I start yelling at the control room, and when they do finally come to me, the poor anchor is like, “Well, Atia, things seem great.” And I go, “Absolutely not!”

I eventually saw the broadcast. You can hear the fighting going on behind me, and the anchor’s eyes are bulging, because he’s realizing that for ten minutes they’ve basically been giving the news as propaganda. Later that night, some Marines who’d overheard my report came up to me and said, “Are they really trying to say that everything’s okay and we’re safe? That’s bullshit.”

From Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, international correspondent for NPR:

So much of the coalition’s efforts were Kabul-centric or focused on other city centers. But that doesn’t make sense in such a rural country. In the north, I found farmers yearning for the Communist days, when they’d had a communal tractor to use—because for all the aid programs money just wasn’t showing up there like it was in other parts of the country. You’d have a province like Bamiyan which was mostly quiet and peaceful, so nobody was interested and it got very little aid. I did a story in 2008 about how they had only one mile of paved road in the entire province. Then you had Kandahar, where hundreds of millions, at least, were pouring in to build an entire network of roads—but those were being blown up every five minutes.

in case you’re wondering how we could have been there for 20 years and accomplished so little.

Laura King, national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times:

If you wanted to write stories about civilian casualties in an errant airstrike, for example, you could maybe do that a couple times, but there was a sensitivity on the part of editors back home to things taking on a certain sameness. This was a time when innocent people were starting to become hurt or killed so often. It was a huge emerging theme, but it wasn’t something we could write about over and over—and that’s not a criticism of my news organization, I think we all experienced this as journalists.

Instead, we got into a pattern where, if you wrote critical stories, you were thought to have this bitter, defeatist attitude. You’d get emails from readers saying, “Why do you hate America?” I remember thinking, “Why would somebody think that?” I was always comfortable with the way I’d characterized things, but I think these ideas about journalists—these assumptions of bad faith—were already taking hold in society. I regarded it an aberration then, but now of course I see how pervasive it was.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s ten times worse now. “Sameness” is only a handicap for stories that don’t promote the narrative your organization wishes to have promoted.

Azmat Khan, investigative journalist for New York Times Magazine:

I started by getting the coordinates for every school built by USAID or the military, focusing especially on battlefield provinces where America had invested so much money to “win hearts and minds.” Then I just started showing up, unannounced. At one school, in Kandahar, records showed the school had opened and there’d been a ribbon cutting ceremony. But it was boarded up, and inside all this construction equipment was laying around. Across the street, in this mosque, I found boys and girls rocking back and forth, reading Koran. There’s a guy holding this skinny stick, which I asked about, and one kid said, “If there’s no beating, there’s no learning.” Eventually, a man who owned the land told me he was supposed to have gotten money to build the school I was looking for—from the district governor’s brother—but he’d never been paid and so he refused to let the school open. So I went to the governor’s brother’s creepy mansion—he’s got this framed dagger on the wall—and the guy was like, “Oh, no, I never had that contract, that was another company.” Okay, so then I pulled up the website for that company—and, no, it turns out it’s a partner of the brother’s own company.

This kind of corruption happened all the time, and the US was totally aware. It was so common to hear things like, “Yeah, he’s a warlord, but he’s our warlord.”

The only way to win is not to play.

Tom Bowman, NPR’s Pentagon correspondent:

Looking back, I wish we’d pressed the Pentagon and military commanders much, much harder. You know, “You’ve been here now six years, nine years, twelve years. How long will this go on? What are your metrics for success? This is how much money’s being spent, and these are the things that aren’t changing.” That said, I could go on the radio and say things like that, and it seemed like they just went into the ether. It was like people didn’t care. And so, we continued to hear, “Oh, six months from now, things will get better. A year from now, things will get better. The Afghan troops, they’re getting better every day.” In more recent years, leaders were just hiding information. They were hiding Afghan casualty numbers. By 2019, they weren’t even giving information on which districts were in government control. What does that tell you? It didn’t tell me that things were getting better.

And you wonder why I keep talking about propaganda. Don’t think that what we’re getting is the news. It’s like the news through a keyhole.

Magazine writer Matthieu Aikins:

We were wrong, for example, about how much the Afghan elite actually represented the people of the country. One of the key trends in two decades was the development of this whole cadre of well-educated Afghans who all worked, in one way or another, for Western-supported companies and institutions, as well as for the government and media organizations. Many of these people were from cities and often they couldn’t really travel the country, because of safety concerns—some understandably had less risk tolerance than a foreign journalist coming in to make their career. I think we tend to better understand the stories and the voices of people who are similar to us. And so, the people in Afghanistan who felt similar, who spoke our language, and who represented our values were the voices that were listened to most by the media. But really these were people firmly on one side of a civil war—which was our side, too.

At Foreign Policy Esther Tetruashvily lays out the prospective ways she thinks the Russian-Ukraine war might end. They are:

• Stalemate: A lose-lose situation
• Checkmate: Putin achieves his objectives
• Forced-mate: Revolution in Russia

which to my eye appears to be in roughly descending order of likelihood although with the amount of propaganda and disinformation flying around it’s difficult to understand just what’s going on.

Note that none of those outcomes is actually favorable to the U. S. or Ukraine for that matter. Look around and you’ll see what I mean. Regime-change in Russia is more likely to mean a regime even less friendly to the United States that the present one.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Holman Jenkins observes:

As we go down this road, let’s be realistic about a few things. Some say it was a mistake to open the door to Ukraine NATO membership while simultaneously saying “not yet.” But this is the hindsight fallacy. Just as arguably, this half-measure deterrent worked until President Obama failed to enforce a red line in Syria. It worked while the unpredictable Donald Trump was president. Joe Biden certainly pulled out nearly every stop to warn Mr. Putin off his mistake.

Possibly the only way to imagine a peaceful Russia is with NATO or something like it on every border closing the door to regional conflict. Any Ukraine that emerges now, far from being neutralized or disarmed, will have to be bristling with weapons or allies or today’s war will be a down payment on the next.

Unless you believe that Russia is eternally hostile to the rest of Europe there was another way: incorporate Russia into Europe rather than distancing it from it. But I agree that ship has sailed—the process would need to have been started 30 years ago.

Beyond that I think it depends on your assumptions. If you see Russia as the equivalent of the Soviet Union, aiming for world domination, then he’s right. I don’t see it quite that way and I don’t see being anti-Russian as a winning posture for anybody. But I was wrong about Putin’s invading Ukraine so who knows?

There continue to be an enormous mass of bad assumptions. The entire world has not sanctioned Russia; at this point it’s primarily the U. S. and Europe. China, India, Mexico, Arab countries, Central and South American countries, and African countries have not imposed sanctions on Russia yet. Russian oil and gas continues to be imported even by most of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia. Can sanctions on Russia be effective without China’s participation or imposing sanctions on China?