I have found the news coverage and commentary lately so dispiriting I have had difficulty in rising to post anything at all. I thought I’d make some remarks about the arrest of Columbia University Mahmoud Khalil, presumably prior to his deportation. I thought the legal aspects of this case were discussed pretty well by Andrew R. Arthur in this post at the Center for Immigration Studies. Many are focusing on the First Amendment issues but, as the linked post makes clear, there are issues to consider other than freedom of speech. Here’s his conclusion:

As you can see, I’ve relied on a lot of suppositions and guesswork to get to the conclusion that Khalil was arrested by ICE because the secretary of State has concluded that his presence in this country “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.

If I’m right, expect to see the Trump administration rely more heavily on the foreign policy removal charge in section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the INA in response to pro-Hamas activity in the United States — and also expect a raft of legal challenges to follow.

I suggest you read the enter post. It’s not terribly long and quite informative.

Going beyond the legal and human rights issues at stake in this case, one of the things that struck me was how well this particular case supported my views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s a “wicked problem“. As I see it there are only three possible resolutions of the conflict: the Israelis can kill all of the Palestinians or expel them from their homes, the Palestinians and kill all the Israelis or expel them from their homes, or their can be a negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians.

Clearly, Hamas is a major impediment to the third alternative (negotiation). Its explicit raison d’être is the second resolution. Does the full-throated, unconditional, uncritical support of the U. S. government for Israel make the third alternative more likely? I don’t think so. I think it’s a barrier to the Israelis negotiating. I suspect that the sad reality is that our interests in the conflict are more domestic political ones than they are any particular commitment to either the Israelis or the Palestinians but they are domestic political interests held both by Republicans and Democrats.

There is, of course, another way of looking at this case. Do we really want to import professional activists from other countries into the United States? I don’t think so. The number of hypothetical comparisons is practically endless. How do you think the United States would have acted if a Nazi activist were granted a student visa and spent his time agitating against our support for Britain in 1940?

That in turn raises another question. Is it possible for a Palestinian to be pro-Gazan without being pro-Hamas? Given that Hamas is in fact the elected government of Gaza I think the answer is “no”.

I wanted to call your attention to this highly informative post on the history of Poland’s borders from Tomas Pueyo at Uncharted Territories before it becomes inaccessible. Cutting to the chase over the last 500 years the lands in the “European plain” that crosses Europe from northern France to the Urals have changed hands dozens, possibly hundreds of times. Poland is right in the middle of it. Part of the time it was Poland, sometimes it was Germany, occasionally Russia. Here’s a map illustrating the greatest extent of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century:

For me the point is that this is history but it’s not our history. American history has little to do with the claims and grievances of the various peoples of Europe.

I believe that forcing people from their homes is wrong and I don’t think it makes much difference whether they’re Germans, Poles, or Ukrainians.

Here’s the meat of David Ignatius’s most recent Washington Post column:

The diplomatic agenda was summed up well by Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general who’s serving as Trump’s Ukraine envoy. “What you are seeing now are urgent efforts to bring both sides to the table to get to a peace settlement. Bringing both sides to the table means applying pressure points and incentives — sticks and carrots,” he said in a talk Thursday at the Council on Foreign Relations.

So far, Zelensky has been getting all the sticks. Trump pounded him in an Oval Office shouting match last Friday — and that ugly scene produced the concessions Trump wanted: Zelensky sent a message this week offering to halt air and sea attacks on Russia, and to immediately sign a deal giving the United States a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth. He lamented the “regrettable” fracas at the White House. “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible,” he said.

Okay, Putin, how about you?

There are some good words for President Trump:

Give Trump this much: He’s right that the time has come to end the horrific Ukraine war, and he’s right, too, that the United States needs to reestablish a relationship with the Kremlin to play an effective mediating role.

as well as some criticisms:

But beyond that, he’s winging it. As one Trump associate put it to me, his foreign policy is like jazz: It’s free-form, with no structure and constant improvisation. It could save lives — or get lots more Ukrainians and Russians killed.

and a soupçon of realism:

Here’s the paradox at the core of the negotiations: Though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has bristled at Trump’s pressure, he badly needs a ceasefire. His forces are tired and depleted and could begin to buckle in the next six months. As for Russian President Vladimir Putin, he has welcomed Trump’s embrace — but he doesn’t want a ceasefire unless it gives him the victory he hasn’t won on the battlefield.

What I deeply miss from Mr. Ignatius’s column is any inkling of how to square that circle. What is the resolution that will bring a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine without “rewarding Putin” for his aggression?

Let me put it this way. If the only choices are a complete subordination of the entirety of Ukraine to Russia or starting a nuclear war, which do you choose? If you don’t think those are the only choices, what choices do you think are at hand? Please make sure that your answer comports with your characterization of Putin.

President Trump has exempted Mexico from the tariffs he imposed a few days ago. From Reuters:

March 6 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said Mexico won’t be required to pay tariffs on any goods that fall under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade until April 2, but made no mention of a reprieve for Canada despite his Commerce secretary saying a comparable exemption was likely.

“After speaking with President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, I have agreed that Mexico will not be required to pay Tariffs on anything that falls under the USMCA Agreement,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “This Agreement is until April 2nd.”

Now I understand Trump’s rationale for tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods even less than I did before.

I also wanted to bring Rob Smith’s post at RealClearMarkets to your attention. I don’t agree with everything in it but IMO it’s a point-of-view worth knowing about. Here’s a snippet:

In my last article, I explained how the real world is different from the Hollywood movie script of Putin v. Zelensky. Putin was born in 1952, and his parents survived the Siege of Leningrad, where some Russians ate each other to keep from starving. It would be impossible for Hitler’s invasion of Russia not to be permanently a part of Putin’s consciousness. Perhaps the greatest time of peace and prosperity in Ukraine was during the 263 years it was part of the Russian Empire (1654 to 1917). Crimea is overwhelmingly ethnic Russian, and Russian was its predominant language. A referendum was held, and Crimea voted to join Russia. Although it was a “rigged election,” a fair election would have certainly delivered the same result. Yes, Putin seized Crimea, but it was only after Victoria Nuland and Obama deep-state operatives executed a coup overthrowing pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. At the same time, Ukraine, with the help of the United States, began to oppress the native Russian population in the Donbas. A regional civil war ensued. The majority of the Donbas are also ethnic Russians, and they too have voted for independence and to be part of a Russian federation. Isn’t self-determination mentioned in the preamble of the UN Charter? Who’s to say that the people of these regions won’t be better off, happier, and more prosperous being part of Russia?

I want to offer a few corrections. To the best of my knowledge the Donbas does not have an ethnic Russian majority and the author presents no sources. Ethnic Ukrainians held a narrow majority in the 2001 census, the Soviet census of 1970, the Soviet census of 1939, and the imperial census of 1897. Again to the best of my knowledge the territory of Ukraine has always been multi-ethnic and multi-confessional and still is.

He’s right about Crimea, though. It has never had a Ukrainian majority. In the 2014 census ethnic Ukrainians comprised about 25% of the population there.

I would also say, contrary to Mr. Smith that we don’t really know what has been happening in Ukraine. Much is a question of whose propaganda we choose to believe.

Now that President Trump’s tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports have gone into effect, I wanted to repeat my view of them. I think that tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports are a very bad idea for the reasons that many are mentioning. They are paid by consumers. They will raise prices and the effects will be regressive—they will fall hardest on those least able to afford them.

Hopefully, the president will have accomplished whatever it was that he intended by them and they’ll be rescinded soon.

In contrast I think that much higher tariffs should be imposed on imports from China. As I’ve said before I think tariffs in the amount of the total of the value of American intellectual property infringed on by the Chinese, the costs borne by American companies and governments to defend themselves against state-supported Chinese hackers, and the subsidies China provides to state-owned enterprises that export to the United States should be applied. I haven’t checked lately but the last time I did that amount was a multiple of total U. S. imports from China.

I wanted to call attention to George Friedman’s guest post at Rod Martin’s Substack blog. His thesis is that Russia has lost its war with Ukraine:

Wars are fought with an intent formed by an imperative. A prudent leader has to take steps to avoid the worst possible outcome, and Putin, as a prudent leader, prepared for the possibility that NATO would choose to attack Russia. He expressed this fear publicly so the only question was how to block an attack if it occurred. He needed a buffer zone to significantly impede a possible assault.

That buffer was Ukraine, and he on several occasions expressed regret that Ukraine had separated from Russia. The distance from the Ukraine border to Moscow, on highway M3, is only about 300 miles (480 kilometers). Russia’s nightmare was that Germany could surge its way to Moscow. Three hundred miles by a massive force staging a surprise attack is not a huge distance. He rationally needed Ukraine to widen the gap.

I predicted years before the war that Russia would invade Ukraine to regain its buffers. That Russia wanted to take the whole of Ukraine is confirmed in its first forays into the country. The initial assault was a four-pronged attack, one thrust from the east, two from the north and one from the south via Crimea. The two northern prongs were directed at the center of Ukraine and its capital, Kyiv.

The long and the short is that Russia does not have its buffer; therefore it lost.

I don’t disagree with Mr. Friedman but I would go farther. All parties including the Ukrainians and the Americans have lost this war.

Ukraine’s losses are obvious—you only need look at the death and destruction. But we have lost as well. Our losses are not just the billions we have given to Ukraine but any remaining vestiges of our sole superpower status. I don’t think we look nearly as invulnerable nor as potent as we used to.

I had an eye exam yesterday and having your pupils dilated really impedes your ability to look at computer screens. I did watch President Trump’s speech last night or, more accurately, I watched the first half. Then I went to bed.

The first half was about what I had expected—full of superlatives and exaggerations with churlishness from supporters and opponents alike. I thought the handling of the Democratic congressman who attempted to disrupt the speech was about right.

CNN’s spot poll found that almost 80% of those who listened to the speech approved of it. What did you think?

I agree with some of what the editors of the Washington Post have to say although I may disagree with them in others and the reasons:

Treating allies less kindly than adversaries reflects naiveté about the threat a revanchist Russia poses to the Western world, including NATO. Zelensky does want to end the three-year war that has ravaged his country, but he is clear-eyed that a bad deal is worse than no deal because he knows that, absent ironclad security guarantees from Ukraine’s allies, Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted to uphold a ceasefire.

I agree that President Trump and Vice President Vance should have been kinder to President Zelensky. He’s in a trying situation, a novice, and under enormous pressure. I’m skeptical that Russia is a threat to Western Europe or even to Poland although Russia is undoubtedly a threat to Poland’s regaining the territory it held once upon a time. Neither Germany nor France is behaving as though they believe that Russian invasion is a likely contingency.

Their reading of history is highly selective. My own view is that we should refrain from embroiling ourselves in the grievances of other countries and focus more narrowly on our own interests.