I think the short answer is that we don’t know. The longer answer is that, although the official estimates add up to around 6 million (1 million in the U. S.), it is suspected that the total number may be three ties as high.

The editors of the Washington Post declaim:

A new study, based in part on statistical modeling, suggests the loss in lives was close to three times greater than the official data. It is important to understand what happened and why in the greatest public health catastrophe since the 1918 influenza pandemic, which is estimated to have killed at least 50 million people.

The new study, peer-reviewed, was published Thursday in the Lancet medical journal and carried out at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The research, examining the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, found that while the official death toll worldwide was 5.94 million due to covid-19, in fact 18.2 million people might have perished in the pandemic. That estimate is similar to one reached by the Economist in ongoing research that uses different methods. Both studies suggest that the pandemic’s pain in lost lives has been undercounted because of a combination of factors, including neglected treatment for other ailments.

At the core of this is a measure of excess mortality, the difference between the observed numbers of deaths from all causes, and what would normally be expected over the same time period, absent the pandemic. Although excess mortality is an estimate, it can help underscore the true scope of the catastrophe in lost lives, help scientists prepare for the next pandemic and pinpoint vulnerabilities in public health systems.

Will that methodology really determine the number of deaths from COVID-19? How would you disaggregate the number of deaths from COVID-19 from the deaths caused by lack of medical treatment due to the lockdowns?

The number of deaths from Spanish flu worldwide in the pandemic of 1918, again a very crude estimate, is estimated around 50 million. Some will say that the greatly reduced number of deaths even as the world’s population grew enormously, is due to the benefits of modern medicine. Maybe. Maybe not. Contemporaneous accounts of Spanish flu make it sound much, much more serious than COVID-19.

Let me end with a question. If a low number of deaths due to COVID-19 becomes a source of national pride and confidence in the government, would you expect the statistics reported by the government to be accurate, particularly in authoritarian countries? I don’t think we’ll ever know how many people died of COVID-19.

“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”

Sun Tzu

In an op-ed at the New York Times Wang Huiyao explains how China can serve a role of the Russian-Ukraine conflict:

The longer the war goes on, though, China may find itself in a position of diminishing returns in its close relationship with Russia. This makes the argument for Beijing to take on an active mediation role even more compelling.

What form could mediation take? Any serious resolution would have to involve the United States and the European Union as key actors in European security arrangements. Beijing could help to broker an immediate cease-fire as a prelude to talks among Russia, Ukraine, the United States, the European Union and China.

Beijing’s goal would be to find a solution that gives Mr. Putin sufficient security assurances that can be presented as a win to his domestic audience while protecting Ukraine’s core sovereignty and NATO’s open-door policy. Finding a landing zone for such an agreement is challenging but not impossible. Some creative diplomacy could solve this, such as a formula for NATO expansion that rules out Ukrainian membership in practice while preserving its sovereignty and NATO principles in theory.

I wish that Dr. Wang had outlined the contours of such an agreement in greater detail. I don’t believe there is one and, indeed, the specific security assurances that President Putin demanded before the invasion have been rejected by both Ukraine and NATO. What’s missing from Sun Tzu’s formulation is that both sides need such a “golden bridge”. Having rejected security assurances can NATO provide them now? Wouldn’t that be rewarding Putin for this aggression? Furthermore, if those who claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is about economics rather than security or any other consideration are correct, wouldn’t any negotiated settlement need to contain economic concessions?

John D. Maurer’s piece at War on the Rocks on nuclear deterrence considers some important questions:

• Would the Biden Administration’s declared intention of announcing “no first use” weaken our nuclear deterrence?
• Do land-based nuclear weapons create more risks than they mitigate?
• Should we have more tactical nuclear weapons?
• Where does arms control fit in our nuclear deterrence policy?

I found that it made interesting reading. Thinking the unthinkable is becoming thinkable again.

You might want to read Neils Abderhalden’s analysis of the Pentagon’s approach to risk at RealClearDefense. Here’s a concise summary:

In 2016, just as the U.S. military was pivoting towards strategic competition, the DoD released its first manual on risk. This attempt at codifying risk analysis is as wrong as it is comfortably conventional. In measuring risk to force and risk to mission, this risk assessment methodology subverts the very strategies it is presumed to support. It nascently considers the risks to one’s immediate forces relative to a mission only considered in isolation with scant regard for the future operating environment. This understanding of risk is hindering decision making and will, over time, contribute to strategic failure. That is, unless the U.S. military changes now.

Read the whole thing.

At 1945 Daniel Goure advises that NATO must do five things “to deter a dangerous Russia”:

1. The United States, UK, should deploy “heavy forces” in Eastern Europe
2. Rebuild its land warfare capabilities
3. Accelerate the delivery of F-35s to the countries that have ordered them
4. Expand ground-based air and missile defense
5. Modernize all three legs of the Strategic Triad

Of those I certainly agree with the fifth. The first four strike me more as “convince Russia they’re right to fear NATO aggression” than deterring a dangerous Russia.

On #2 I question whether, for example, the U. S. should invest in an extensive tank capability. I think that countries should suit their military capabilities to their needs. The U. S., UK, and France need modernized and durable navies and air capabilities. Powerful navies make less sense for Germany, Czechia, and Slovakia (just to name three). I also should repeat a point I’ve made before: having our NATO allies rebuild their militaries requires a change of doctrine. Otherwise as we stand up they will inevitably stand down.

The bitter irony of all of this is that the steps our NATO allies should take are what they should have been doing all along. We might want to think about why they haven’t.

With respect to revitalizing our nuclear deterrent, its most important aspect is that prospective enemies must be convinced we will use nuclear weapons. We’ve spent the last 30 years discouraging that, assuming, incorrectly that the world was a safe place and nuclear war was unthinkable. We need to start thinking about it again and be resolved that we may need to use nuclear weapons. Without that there is no deterrent.

Here’s the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s assessment of present U. S. inflation:

Mr. Biden can blame Mr. Putin for many things, but not U.S. inflation. The root cause is homegrown: Two years of historically easy monetary policy, and explosive federal spending that fed economic demand even though the economy had long ago emerged from the pandemic recession.

The Ukraine invasion will feed inflation in March and coming months if oil prices keep rising. But getting inflation back under control requires a U.S. policy change: Tighten monetary policy, and control federal spending.

I think that President Biden deserves his share of the blame but I think our problems are broader and shared by both political parties. We’ve had a half century of folk Keynesianism, excessive dependence on personal consumption, and an adverse balance of trade. Solving our present problems will be extremely difficult and painful.

After devoting most of his Wall Street Journal column to a lengthy comparison of Russian President Vladimir Putin with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Walter Russell Mead summarizes:

Like Mussolini, Mr. Putin was fortunate to face an ungifted generation of Western leaders. Nobody will be expanding Mount Rushmore with sculptures memorializing any of America’s post-Cold War presidents, and the generation of European leaders that included figures like Gerhard Schröder and François Hollande will not long be remembered. Playing a weak hand aggressively, Mr. Putin managed to divide and confuse this motley crew long enough to threaten the Western order in Europe and reassert Russia’s place among the great powers.

But as Mussolini discovered, diplomatic and even military victories cannot make an impossible dream come true. Mussolini was unable to build an Italian economy that could support his ambitions or a military capable of rivaling the great powers like Germany and Britain. This is where the limits of Mr. Putin’s achievements also seem to lie. After 20 years in power, he has failed to equip Russia with either the economy or the military that a great power needs. And because his power rests on such narrow and unsatisfactory foundations, his foreign policy remains one of brinkmanship and adventurism that is always vulnerable should his adversaries call his bluff—or if he miscalculates and bites off more than he can chew.

The best way to think about Mr. Putin is as a gifted tactician committed to a strategic impossibility: for Russia to regain the superpower status once held by the Soviet Union. Such leaders are unappeasable because their goals can never be reached. The rise of China, Russia’s continuing demographic decline, and its continuing inability to create a modern and dynamic economy will not end because Russian flags fly over the ruins of Kyiv.

The part that caught my eye was “Russia’s continuing demographic decline, and its continuing inability to create a modern and dynamic economy”. Here’s what he means by “demmographic decline”:

The graphic above is from Macrotrends. But it’s his economic analysis that falls flat:

If Russia’s GDP per capita rises, the country will become more prosperous even as its population declines. That’s what’s happening in Japan.

To be sure Russia has serious problems impeding that growth, namely corruption and income inequality. Does that sound at all familiar to you?

Had the U. S. not had an enormous influx of mostly illegal immigrants over the last 50 years, we would be in “demographic decline” as well. Our problem is that, unlike pre-WWI immigrants, those immigrants are liabilities rather than assets. Their net contribution to U. S. GDP is negative for the simple reason that their earnings don’t make up for the enormous amount we need to spend to educate their children and on highways, sewer systems, and so on. If all of our immigrants were South Asians or East Asians with masters degrees who speak, read, and write English, we should take all we can get but that’s simply not the case. The majority of our immigrants are poorly educated non-English speakers and that will be true for the foreseeable future.

My point here is that the optimistic case for the future is one of “demographic decline”. That’s true not just for Japan and the U. S. but the entire world. The days of prosperity through an ever-increasing population are nearing an end.

In his New York Times column David Brooks gives his explanation for why Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot “back down”:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the writings of conventional international relations experts to be not very helpful in understanding what this whole crisis is about. But I’ve found the writing of experts in social psychology to be enormously helpful.

That’s because Vladimir Putin is not a conventional great power politician. He’s fundamentally an identity entrepreneur. His singular achievement has been to help Russians to recover from a psychic trauma — the aftermath of the Soviet Union — and to give them a collective identity so they can feel that they matter, that their life has dignity.

The war in Ukraine is not primarily about land; it’s primarily about status. Putin invaded so Russians could feel they are a great nation once again and so Putin himself could feel that he’s a world historical figure along the lines of Peter the Great.

Maybe we should see this invasion as a rabid form of identity politics. Putin spent years stoking Russian resentments toward the West. He falsely claimed Russian-speakers are under widespread attack in Ukraine. He uses the tools of war in an attempt to make Russians take pride in their group identity.

The Soviet Union was a messed-up tyranny, but as Gulnaz Sharafutdinova writes in her book “The Red Mirror,” Soviet history and rhetoric gave Russians a sense that they were “living in a country that was in many ways unique and superior to the rest of the world.” People could derive a sense of personal significance from being part of this larger Soviet project.

The end of the Soviet Union could have been seen as a liberation, a chance to build a new and greater Russia. But Putin chose to see it as a catastrophic loss, one creating a feeling of helplessness and a shattered identity. Who are we now? Do we matter anymore?

A little background might be clarifying here. There is a theological and political belief in Russia that goes back to the 15th and 16th centuries, to the period of Ivan Grozniy, the very foundations of the Russian state, that Moscow is the “Third Rome”, the heir to Rome and Byzantium. The belief has three aspects:

1. a theological aspect that the Eastern Orthodox Churches will be united
2. a social aspect that there it a unity of East Slavic peoples in the Eastern Orthodox faith and Slavic culture
3. a political aspect in which the prince of Moscow is the rightful ruler of Eastern Orthodox countries and defender of Eastern Orthodoxy.

and these three aspects are God’s will. You should be able to see the relationship between those beliefs and the Russian reaction to NATO’s actions in the former Yugoslavia, Putin’s assistance to Syria, and the present situation in Ukraine. It’s sort of Russia’s version of “Manifest Destiny” and very deeply ingrained. No, he won’t back down, it doesn’t matter how economically painful it becomes. It would be heresy.

By the way, if you think that Manifest Destiny died in the 19th century, you haven’t been paying attention. It’s alive and well and represented by the “American Greatness” school of foreign policy of which the late Sen. John McCain was the primary exponent up until his death. It’s still a major factor both among Republicans and Democrats. The Democratic version includes things like standing up for women’s rights, treatment of sexual preference, etc.

As should be needless to say, I don’t believe that Moscow is the Third Rome, that the United States has a Manifest Destiny, or, indeed, that “the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice”. But I don’t dismiss that a lot of people do, that those beliefs inform their actions, and that not everything can be reduced to economic determinism.

There is a cruel irony in American government and politics. The area in which the president has the most Constitutional authority is foreign policy but Americans don’t much care about foreign policy until it comes home to them. Then they care about the consequences very much.

At the Wall Street Journal Michael C. Bender reports that the WSJ’s latest poll found despite approval of President Biden’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that has affected his approval rating hardly at all because they’re unhappy about the way rising prices are hitting their pocketbooks:

The new survey showed that 57% of voters remained unhappy with Mr. Biden’s job performance, despite favorable marks for the president’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a recent State of the Union speech, which provided him an opportunity to directly speak to millions of Americans. Just 42% said they approved of Mr. Biden’s performance in office, which was virtually unchanged from the previous Journal poll in mid-November.

Meanwhile, Democratic advantages narrowed over Republicans on issues related to improving education and the Covid-19 response. A 16-percentage-point Democratic edge on which party would best handle the pandemic was down to 11 points, while a 9-percentage-point lead on education issues was down to 5 points.

When asked about which party was best able to protect middle-class families, the 5-point advantage for Democrats four months ago evaporated and left the parties essentially tied on the question.

Voters also gave Democrats poor marks for handling inflation and the economy, which 50% cited as the top issue they want the federal government to address. The Ukraine conflict was No. 2, with 25% of voters saying it was most important.

A majority of voters, 63%, said they disapproved of Mr. Biden’s handling of rising costs, the president’s worst rating on six policy issues surveyed in the poll. Meanwhile, 47% of voters said Republicans were better able to handle inflation, compared with 30% who preferred Democrats.

That’s hardly surprising. The year-on-year inflation is closing in on 8%—the highest in decades, enough to swamp pay increases. In her column in the Washington Post Catherine Rampell says that Democrats are “in denial”:

Consumer prices rose 7.9 percent in February from a year earlier, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday. This was, yet again, the fastest pace of price growth in four decades. The increases were broad-based, affecting food, fuel, airfares, shelter and more. Meanwhile, worker paychecks fell further behind, as overall inflation outpaced average wage growth.

These data were collected largely before the Russia-related run-up in global energy prices. Which suggests that next month’s overall inflation reading could be worse.

Given these trends, Americans are unhappy with the economy. But many on the left don’t want to hear it.

In recent months, many Democrats and their allies have approached the (political) problem of inflation by either denying any serious issue exists; or acknowledging it exists but demagoguing about its cause.

Some lefty politicians and commentators have argued that inflation is not that big of a deal. Americans have been tricked into thinking things are bad mostly because the media (and/or Republicans) keep telling them things are bad, this argument goes. Articles such as this one, drawing attention to inflation, are to blame.

and she closes in on a point I’ve been making around here:

To be clear, prices are rising — not because corporations suddenly remembered to become greedy. They’re always trying to make a buck. The issue is that supply remains constrained by pandemic-related disruptions (and now, also, Russia sanctions). Meanwhile, consumer demand is red-hot. People are buying sports equipment and appliances at record levels, and companies can’t keep up. So firms continue to charge ever-higher prices.

Demand is hot by design: Policymakers decided to boost demand with fiscal and monetary policy designed to get as many people back to work as quickly as possible. This strategy succeeded at generating strong job growth and saved many Americans from the scars of long-term unemployment. The downside is it contributed to faster inflation.

Democrats could defend these policy choices on the merits. They could say: Yes, we’ve been running the economy hot, but that’s better than the alternative. Instead, many pretend that there were no price-related trade-offs from their fiscal strategy.

homing in on the risks I’ve identified here:

For example, if “profiteering” is really the cause of high gas prices, Warren’s proposed “windfall-profits tax” for the oil industry might sound like a reasonable solution. But the last time Congress implemented a similar tax, it reduced domestic production. And once again: A key problem now is that production — a.k.a. supply — is too low to meet demand.

When it comes to economic policy, even if you diagnose the problem correctly, figuring out the remedy is still hard. Really hard. (What can government do to nudge supply higher? There’s lots of debate about this.)

But if you’re in denial about the diagnosis itself, getting the prescription right is nearly hopeless.

I think the problem is slightly worse than that. I strongly suspect that the temptation to “double down” on their preferred strategy—subsidizing consumption—will be irresistible, compounding present problems, while, for example, broad subsidies for producers would fracture their own caucus.