While I agree with Steven Roach’s point in his piece at Project Syndicate—that it will take China’s participation to “stop Russia”—I also think he’s dreaming:

Yet China can’t have it both ways. There is no way it can stay the course, as Li suggests, while adhering to the partnership agreement with Russia announced by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Many believed that Russia and China had come together in shaping a grand strategy for a new Cold War. I called it China’s triangulation gambit: joining with Russia to corner the United States, just as the Sino-American rapprochement 50 years ago successfully cornered the former Soviet Union. The US, the architect of that earlier triangulation, was now being triangulated.

Yet in the span of just one month, Putin’s horrific war against Ukraine has turned this concept on its head. If China remains committed to its new partnership with Russia, it faces guilt by association. Just as Russia has been isolated by draconian Western sanctions that could devastate its economy for decades, the same fate awaits China if it deepens its new partnership. This outcome, of course, is completely at odds with China’s development goals just enunciated by Li. But it is a very real risk if China maintains unlimited support for Russia, including tempering the impact of Western sanctions, as a literal reading of the February 4 agreement implies.

or, said another way, I don’t think he sees the likely course of events clearly. I don’t think President Xi can change his course without, er, “losing the mandate of Heaven” so he won’t. I think that the countries including the United States so roundly condemning the Russians will go through enormous contortions to avoid condemning China “by association”. Their positions and livelihoods are on the line which does wonders to focus the mind.

You might find this post by William Deresiewicz at UnHerd interesting:

“NPR,” I put it to a friend a few years later, “is my home in America.”

And that’s the way it was for over 30 years, through the advent of Talk of the Nation and This American Life, of On the Media and Here & Now. NPR became the soundtrack of my life — when I drove, cooked, ate, exercised, did laundry — three or four hours a day, every day.

That is, until around the beginning of last year. My discontent had been building since the previous summer, the summer of the George Floyd protests. It was clear from the beginning that the network would be covering the movement not like journalists but advocates. A particular line was being pushed. There was an epidemic of police violence against unarmed African-Americans; black people were in danger of being murdered by the state whenever they walked down the street. The protests were peaceful, and when they weren’t, the violence was minor, or it was justified, or it was exclusively initiated by the cops. Although we had been told for months to stay indoors, the gatherings did not endanger public health — indeed, they promoted it. I supported the protests; I just did not appreciate the fact that I was being lied to.

But it wasn’t just that story. Overnight, the network’s entire orientation had changed. Every segment was about race, and when it wasn’t about race, it was about gender. The stories were no longer reports but morality plays, with predictable bad guys and good guys. Scepticism was banished. Divergent opinions were banished. The pronouncements of activists, the arguments of ideologically motivated academics, were accepted without question. The tone became smug, certain, self-righteous. To turn on the network was to be subjected to a program of ideological force-feeding. I was used to the idiocies of the academic Left — I had been dealing with them ever since I started graduate school — but now they were leaking out of my radio.

Nor was it only NPR. One by one, the outlets that I counted on for reliable reporting and intelligent opinion — that I, in some measure, identified with — fell in line. The New York Times, which was already in an advanced state of decay, surrendered completely. Ditto The New Yorker. The Atlantic was drifting in the same direction. Inroads appeared in The New York Review of Books. Satirists whom I admired for their alert sense of irony, their ability to recognise the absurdity at all points of the political spectrum — Stephen Colbert, John Oliver — got the new religion, and started preaching sermons.

I’m not surprised nor do I disagree with his assessment. My question is how could the character of the coverage have escaped him for all these years? I’ve been aware of it for almost 70 years—since I first noticed the tremendous discrepancy between the history I was being taught and what I had learned to be true, both from my travels and other things I’d read. I’m not sure why Mr. Deresiewicz has just experienced his epiphany. To some degree it has the sound of an aging Gen Xer who has just noticed that he’s no longer one of the cool kids and the zeitgeist is leaving him behind.

It didn’t just start last year at NPR or in 2016 for the NYT. Back in the 1980s a friend of mine referred to NPR as “Radio Managua”. When they weren’t promoting the point-of-view of the Sandinistas, they were promoting the point-of-view of the NEA or the CTU. And, obviously, the propaganda didn’t start in the 1980s—a quick listen to a radio or television news broadcast from the 1960s should be enough to convince you of that.

While I don’t think that the high proportion of propaganda we’re getting just started, I do think it has ratcheted up to a new level over the last several years. I stopped being able to tolerate Fox News a dozen or so years ago and the NYT about the same time and things have just gotten worse since then. Once upon a time there was at least some attempt at journalistic integrity, fairness, and balance. Now such things are not only banished, they’re considered evil.

Seeking out resources that more closely reflect your views, as Mr. Deresiewicz found as his solution, is no solution. You’ve got to read and listen widely. Few have the time. So we’ll have ever smaller tribes and growing dissatisfaction.

As I’ve said before I think part of the solution is to change our libel laws to resemble those of Britain more closely. Then news outlets would stop telling flat-out lies that further their ideological bent out of self-preservation. Another part of the solution is for people to come to a better understanding of what they believe and why they believe it but few examine themselves so honestly.

This is an analysis site not a news site but this particular news is sufficiently significant I feel the need to comment on it. President Biden has just announced a complete ban on imports of Russian oil and gas in the United States:

Today, President Biden will sign an Executive Order (E.O.) to ban the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas, and coal to the United States – a significant action with widespread bipartisan support that will further deprive President Putin of the economic resources he uses to continue his needless war of choice.

The United States made this decision in close consultation with our Allies and partners around the world, as well as Members of Congress of both parties. The United States is able to take this step because of our strong domestic energy infrastructure and we recognize that not all of our Allies and partners are currently in a position to join us. But we are united with our Allies and partners in working together to reduce our collective dependence on Russian energy and keep the pressure mounting on Putin, while at the same taking active steps to limit impacts on global energy markets and protect our own economies.

Unlike some I would argue that the president has the authority to take such an action. International trade is foreign policy.

I do have some questions that go unanswered in the “fact sheet”:

• What about Hawai’i? Hawai’i’s imports of Russian oil and gas account for 25% of our total imports of oil and gas from Russia and, as previously documented, Hawai’i is heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas not just for gasoline but for generating electricity.
• How will they tell it is Russian oil and gas? Are they just creating a substantial opportunity for middlemen not as scrupulous as we?

Also keep in mind that the U. S. is Russia’s tenth largest customer. China is its largest with Netherlands, Germany, and Belarus filling the next three slots. Belarus is a lost cause. What about China?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal caution us that one of the implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that we will need to start spending a lot more on defense:

Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine has caused Germany to revolutionize its defense policy in less than a week. Will the Biden Administration have a similar awakening about defending Americans with dictators on the march?

Progressives complain the Pentagon budget is larger than any other nation’s, but the truth is that defense spending is at historic lows. It’s heading to under 3% of the economy. Defense spending reached a postwar high of 9.1% in 1968 but never fell below 4.5% even in the 1970s, reaching a high of 6% in 1986 at the height of the Reagan buildup that helped win the Cold War.

American military power in the last two decades has been burned up in counterterrorism operations, and the current force may be too small and geriatric to crush a peer military, let alone aggression on two fronts.

No matter, some say: Europe can deal with Russia, and Taiwan is in China’s sphere of influence. But authoritarians have little incentive to stop gobbling territory if they pay no price, and the U.S. is bound to defend treaty allies in NATO or Japan if they’re next on the menu, not to mention the U.S. territory of Guam.

One reason the U.S. is struggling to deter bad behavior is that adversaries know American military power is in retreat. Controlling the skies is indispensable to American warfighting in any theater, but the U.S. Air Force fighter inventory has fallen to about 2,000 from 4,000 aircraft in 1991 and the average age is 29 years old, up from 11.5 then.

The Air Force has cannibalized readiness to buy more capable equipment, which it also needs to stay competitive. President Trump’s Air Force Secretary, Heather Wilson, was right that to deal with “the world as it is” the U.S. needs 386 squadrons by 2030, up from 312—especially more bomber and tanker squadrons to cope with distance in the Pacific.

The Navy is working at the same clip as the Cold War with half as many ships, and the fleet is smaller and older than China’s navy. The sea service needs and wants many more attack submarines—a potent defense against China—but the Navy lacks the maintenance yards to keep up with even current inventory. Carriers need attack aircraft with longer range.

The Marines are the only branch adapting fast for the future. But the price is a shrinking force, including three fewer infantry battalions and tanks the country may miss if land battles make a comeback. The Army’s brief should be Europe, though the land force’s budget is down nearly 11% since 2018 in real terms, as analyst Thomas Spoehr calculates, including cuts to exercises and procuring less of everything from helicopters to ammunition.

Any conflict would require enormous amounts of munitions, and on current plans U.S. forces could run out of some of the most lethal and important stuff in weeks. The Pentagon needs to ramp up planned purchases of long-range antiship and joint air-to-surface standoff missiles—now. But it can’t afford to stop working on hypersonics or offensive cyber, which means spending will have to increase.

The Biden team has been pushing a “divest to invest” strategy that skimps on weapons to develop technology for the 2030s, a plan that now belongs in a Pentagon paper shredder.

while in an op-ed also at WSJ Glenn Hubbard discusses ways and means:

Paying for higher levels of defense spending will force most governments either to raise taxes or cut spending. Tax increases raise risks to growth. The larger non-U.S. NATO economies are already taxed to the hilt. Tax revenue relative to the size of the economy in France (45%), Germany (38%), Canada (34%) and the U.K. (32%) doesn’t leave much room to tax more without depressing economic activity. The U.S. has a lower tax share of GDP—about 17.5% at the federal level and 25.5% in total—but its patchwork quilt of income and payroll taxes makes tax increases more costly by distorting household and business decisions about consumption and investment.

A significant tax increase in the U.S. would need to be accompanied by fundamental tax reform, dialing back income taxes (as with the 2017 reduction in corporate tax rates) and increasing reliance on consumption taxes. A broad-based consumption tax could be implemented by imposing a tax at the business level on revenue minus purchases from other firms (a “subtraction method” value-added tax). Alternatively, the tax system could impose a broad-based wage and business cash-flow tax, with a progressive wage surtax on high earners. These consumption-tax alternatives would be efficient and equitable in a revenue-neutral tax reform. And they are crucial in avoiding decreases in savings, investment and entrepreneurship that accompany a tax increase.

Since the 1960s, spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has come to dominate the federal budget. Outlays for these programs have almost doubled since then as a share of GDP to 10.2% today, and the Congressional Budget Office projects they will consume about another 5% of GDP annually by 2040. Spending offsets to accommodate higher defense spending would surely require slowing the growth in social-insurance spending. As with tax increases, there are trade-offs. It is possible to slow the growth of this spending while preserving access to such support for lower-income Americans. Accomplishing that will require focusing net taxpayer subsidies on lower-income Americans, along with undertaking market-oriented health reforms. Such changes require serious attention.

I’m not sure where to start. Neither the editors nor Dr. Hubbard mention moral hazard. The reason that the U. S. had military spending as high as it did was because not only were we carrying the freight for our own defense we were carrying it for our European allies as well. That was because both our political leadership and our military leaders preferred it that way. I disagreed with that strategy then and I disagree with it now. If we stand up they will stand down. The more we spend the less they will need to spend.

I think that the U. S. needs to be able to contribute to a land war in Europe but it does not need and should not have the ability to wage such a war on its own. Our European allies have an aggregate GDP about equal to our own with twice our population. They are completely capable of defending themselves. They just don’t wanna and who can blame them? Not spending on munitions and training enables them to spend on other priorities.

Similarly with Asia. I do not see how the ability to wage a land war in Asia furthers our security. Quite the opposite.

I’m more interested in right-sizing our military, refurbishing it and upgrading it to deal with the security issues of the 21st century. And for goodness sake can we stop invading and occupying other countries, trying to convert the natives? I do not see any way in which that increases our security or stands up for our principles.

As far as ways and means go, while I support a major overhaul in our tax system, Dr. Hubbard does not address the havoc that any form of consumption tax would wreak on state budgets which tend to be heavily dependent on sales taxes. And the implication of his notions on social spending would require means-testing Social Security and Medicare. That is DOA. A non-starter.

What I think we really need to do is to get more bang for our government spending buck. We spend more on our defense, roads, bridges, healthcare, and education systems than any other country without getting outcomes better than those in other countries. Indeed, in many of those areas our outcomes are worse. Just to cite one example over the last 30 years we have tripled our real spending on education without greatly improving students’ test scores or on-time graduation rates.

I recognize the difficulty of the problem. I just see no way around it.

At 1945 Robert Farley lists five ways the Russian-Ukraine War might turn into a global nuclear war:

• Russia escalates to de-escalate
• Ukrainian forces fire from the wrong side of the border
• Russia accidentally strays across a border
• Russia intentionally retaliates for arms transfers and foreign fighters
• NATO vs. Russia: World War III Possible?

IMO the first is quite likely. Our leaders should recognize that our supplying Ukraine with munitions is a violation of our own neutrality (neutrals cannot take sides). Indeed, the economic sanctions we have imposed themselves may be considered belligerent acts.

Nonetheless Mr. Farley is relative optimistic:

It’s important to understand that even if there’s a limited engagement between NATO and Russian forces this does not guarantee escalation to strategic nuclear warfare. In every one of the crises discussed above, both sides would have multiple opportunities to step back from the brink and de-escalate the situation.

I’m not sure how he reconciles that with the reality that every wargaming of such a conflict has always gone nuclear.

To the best of my knowledge every time the price of oil has increased 50% we’ve had a recession.

It may well be true that we are less dependent on oil than we were, say, 5 years ago but that doesn’t necessarily reduce the risk.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal come out not just for sanctioning Russian oil and gas imports to the United States but for “secondary sanctions”::

Nancy Pelosi has endorsed the idea, and vulnerable House Democrats like New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer are jumping on board.

“We have the opportunity to cut off Putin’s largest revenue source, to support America’s own energy independence and security, and to work with our allies to stabilize the global energy market to help us mitigate rising energy costs for our hardworking families,” says Mr. Gottheimer.

A U.S. purchase ban would do none of those things. But it would let politicians claim credit for doing something even as they avoid the sanctions that really matter—on any company or bank in the world that buys Russian oil and gas.

Russian energy is exempt from the Swift sanctions against some Russian banks, and the U.S. has declined to impose so-called secondary sanctions against banks world-wide that finance the Russian energy trade. The U.S. has imposed those sanctions on Iran and North Korea, and they are effective.

The case for secondary sanctions on Russian oil exports is stronger than for natural gas, which Europe needs in the near term. The worry is that oil sanctions would send the global crude price soaring even higher than Friday’s close of $118 a barrel.

How high could prices go? Nobody knows. It would depend on how long sanctions are in effect and how long the war in Ukraine lasts. Russian crude is already selling at a discount, and last week 70% of Russian oil exports couldn’t find a buyer due to logistical challenges and sanctions risk.

I agree that, if the sanctions are to have any effect, the United States and other countries must suspend or end Russian oil and gas imports. I’m not certain they’ll have the desired effect anyway as long as China does not cooperate. Won’t the effect of sanctions be to reduce the cost of oil in China? Do we really want to do that?

Additionally, there are practical considerations. Since Hawai’i derives not just its gasoline but the oil used to generate electricity as well from Russia, we need to find a way to replace the Russian oil that Hawai’i needs. I propose a) suspending the Jones Act and b) diverting enough oil from California to Hawai’i to make up the shortfall. It would be a relative drop in the bucket for California and California doesn’t depend on oil for electricity.

In his New York Times column this morning Ross Douthat is thinking about how we can avoid nuclear war over Ukraine:

Clear commitments — we will fight here, we won’t fight there — are the coin of the nuclear realm, since the goal is to give the enemy the responsibility for escalation, to make it feel its apocalyptic weight, while also feeling that it can always choose another path. Whereas unpredictable escalations and maximalist objectives, often useful in conventional warfare, are the enemy of nuclear peace, insofar as they threaten the enemy with the no-win scenario that Petrov almost found himself in that day in 1983.

These insights have several implications for our strategy right now. First, they suggest that even if you believe the United States should have extended security guarantees to Ukraine before the Russian invasion, now that war is begun we must stick by the lines we drew in advance. That means yes to defending any NATO ally, yes to supporting Ukraine with sanctions and weaponry, and absolutely no to a no-fly zone or any measure that might obligate us to fire the first shot against the Russians.

Second, they mean that it’s extremely dangerous for U.S. officials to talk about regime change in Moscow — in the style of the reckless Senator Lindsey Graham, for instance, who has called on a “Brutus” or “Stauffenberg” to rid the world of Vladimir Putin. If you make your nuclear-armed enemy believe your strategy requires the end of their regime (or very life), you are pushing them, again, toward the no-choice zone that almost trapped Colonel Petrov.

Third, they imply that the odds of nuclear war might be higher today than in the Soviet era, because Russia is much weaker. The Soviet Union simply had more ground to give up in a conventional war before defeat appeared existential than does Putin’s smaller empire — which may be a reason why current Russian strategy increasingly prioritizes tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a conventional-war retreat.

concluding:

We were extremely careful about direct escalation with the Soviets even when they invaded Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan, and the result was a Cold War victory without a nuclear war. To escalate now against a weaker adversary, one less likely to ultimately defeat us and more likely to engage in atomic recklessness if cornered, would be a grave and existential folly.

Of course, back then we had political leaders who knew war and wanted to avoid it. For most of our political leadership now war is something someone else or someone else’s children or grandchildren do. Now whether there’s a nuclear war may depend on how willing our political leaders are to have someone else stand up for their principles.

At CNNMoney Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi considers the implications of the war for the U. S. economy:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine complicates things further, ensuring the pain of inflation is set to get worse and last even longer. Global oil prices have risen dramatically since the invasion began to more than $110 per barrel. Even though global supplies have not been significantly disrupted by the Russian invasion, there is a considerable threat that they will be. The higher prices we’re seeing are a premium oil traders add to oil prices to compensate for this risk. If supplies are significantly disrupted, then we could see oil prices rise to more than $140 per barrel and gas prices rise to more than $5 per gallon.

But even assuming there are no supply disruptions, and oil settles in near $100 per barrel, then American consumers will still be paying more than $4 for a gallon of regular unleaded by this spring, according to my own estimate. If sustained, $100-a-barrel oil would ultimately add as much as half a percentage point to year-over-year consumer price inflation, based on simulations of Moody’s Analytics’ model of the global economy, which accounts for the impact of higher oil prices on the production and transportation of goods. That would cost American households another $50-plus per month in higher gasoline bills.

Also worrisome is that oil and gasoline prices play an outsize role in shaping the inflation expectations of global investors, businesses and consumers. Most of us purchase gas regularly and see the price each day as we go to and from work. Nothing influences people’s thinking about future inflation more than what they are paying at the pump today.

If inflation expectations start to rise, then the Federal Reserve will likely feel compelled to raise interest rates more aggressively. The Fed knows that if inflation expectations increase, then this may ignite a so-called wage-price spiral. That is, workers will demand their employers pay them more to compensate for the expected increase in their cost of living, businesses will agree to do so as they will feel they can pass the higher cost along to their customers, and so it goes.

He also makes this interesting observation:

Criticism that the administration’s efforts to address the threat posed by climate change is significantly contributing to the higher oil prices are specious. To be sure, the administration is working to make fossil fuel production less economically attractive and green energy investments more, but this will play out over years and decades.

I wish he had expanded on that more. Consider this chart:

from Macrotrends. To my eye it looks as though oil prices had recovered to their pre-pandemic levels by February 2021. Yes, there was a one month dip in November 2021 after which prices resumed their rise substantially. Only prices above $85/barrel can be attributed to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Am I reading that correctly?