At MSNBC Zeeshan Aleem argues that the disaster unfolding in Ukraine could have been avoided:

The prevailing wisdom in the West is that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never interested in President Joe Biden’s diplomatic efforts to avert an invasion of Ukraine. Bent on restoring the might of the Soviet empire, this narrative goes, the Russian autocrat audaciously invaded Ukraine to fulfill a revanchist desire for some combination of land, power and glory.

But is that a complete explanation of what happened? He argues maybe not:

But the abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent.

The fact that the NATO status question was not put on the table as Putin signaled that he was serious about an invasion — so plainly that the U.S. government was spelling it out with day-by-day updates — was an error, and potentially a catastrophic one. It may sound cruel to suggest that Ukraine could be barred, either temporarily or permanently, from entering a military alliance it wants to be in. But what’s more cruel is that Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States’ reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.

Analysts say it’s widely known that Ukraine had no prospect of entering NATO for many years, possibly decades, because of its need for major democracy and anti-corruption reforms and because NATO has no interest in going to war with Russia over Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Russia has meddled and backed armed conflict for years. But by dangling the possibility of Ukraine’s NATO membership for years but never fulfilling it, NATO created a scenario that emboldened Ukraine to act tough and buck Russia — without any intention of directly defending Ukraine with its firepower if Moscow decided Ukraine had gone too far.

There’s no question that the Russians and Russian President Putin in particular are the immediate causes of the war. Russia invaded Ukraine without having been attacked by Ukraine. But has American fecklessness been a contributing factor? In particular was the announcement in 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine would become members of NATO prudent? Under the circumstances was it moral?

There hasn’t been much in the way of articles to react to today, so let’s discuss something, shall we? What is the likely outcome of the Russian-Ukraine war? Let’s consider several.

1. Russia defeats the Ukrainian military, puts down the resistance, and annexes Ukraine.

I think this scenario is possible but not the most likely.

2. Russia substantially reduces the Ukrainian military, does not eliminate the resistance, but annexes Ukraine anyway.

This, too, is possible but even less likely than the first outcome.

3. Russia substantially reduces the Ukrainian military, does not eliminate the resistance, and withdraws from Ukraine.

I think this may well be Putin’s intended objective. Or, at least I think it would be a prudent one. If the Ukrainian government is willing to make some concessions about the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasti, this may become highly likely.

4. In order to prevent any of the first three outcomes from happening, NATO enters directly into the conflict and Russia withdraws from Ukraine, weakened and humiliated.

I think this is extremely unlikely but with every passing day it seems that more in the West envision this sort of outcome actually taking place.

5. Intending to prevent any of the first three outcomes from happening, NATO enters directly into the conflict. Russia uses nuclear weapons against NATO troops in Ukraine. There is a nuclear exchange. In the ensuring conflict a billion people die.

I don’t think this is likely, either, but I think it’s more likely than #4.

I don’t see any way that Ukraine prevails in the conflict without direct NATO participation and I think a major escalation of that sort would be disastrous for all parties. Pat Lang seems to envision covert NATO against the Russians, either in Ukraine or Russia. I think that would be the effective equivalent of direct NATO participation, indeed, I think that our intelligence apparatus is sort thoroughly penetrated either by the Russians or the Chinese or both, as to make such an action ineffectual or, at least, a lot more public than he might envision.

So, what’s the likely outcome?

Note that I’m not endorsing or recommending any of these outcomes. What I would like to happen is for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine immediately and unconditionally but I think that’s the least likely outcome of all.

Patrick Armstrong, a retired Canadian military analyst specializing in Russia, remarks on the situation in Ukraine:

So far the Russian military operation in Ukraine has been a reconnaissance in force preceded by the destruction of the supplies and headquarters of the Ukrainian Armed Forces by standoff weapons. The object being to suss out where the Ukrainian forces are, to surround them, to check existing Russian intelligence against reality and, at the same time, destroy known headquarters, air and naval assets, supplies and ammunition depots. And, perhaps, there was the hope that the speed and success (Russian/LDPR forces dominated an area of Ukraine about the size of the United Kingdom in the first week) would force an early end (aka recognition of reality).

At the moment they are readying for the next phase. The long column that so obsessed the “experts” on CNN is the preparation for the next phase. And that is this: “You didn’t get the hint, so now we have to hit you”. The fact that the column has been sitting there indicates that the Russians know they have complete air superiority. Secondly it is a message to the Ukrainian armed forces that it’s over, give up. (And one should never forget that the Russians/Soviets have always been the best at strategic deception, so who knows what’s actually there versus what the images show?)

As far as I can see they’ve created three cauldrons (encirclements). Probably the most important one is the one around Mariupol where the main concentration of Azov, the principal nazi force, is. Another is being established around the main concentration of the Ukrainian Armed Forces facing LDPR. And there appears to be another developing to the east of Kiev. A super cauldron of all three is visible. The nazis will be exterminated; the ordinary Ukrainian soldier will be allowed to go home. The nightmare question is how many ordinary Ukrainians will be free to choose.

Read the whole thing. You will observe how consistent his analysis is with Bill Roggio’s to which I linked earlier. I don’t believe that either Bill Roggio or Patrick Armstrong are Russian stooges or info ops.

Mr. Armstrong thinks the Ukrainian government sees the hand writing on the wall and is resigning itself to neutrality. He also points out something I observed: if the prices of oil and gas rise high enough it’s quite possible the Russians could actually benefit economically from the situation. Our response needs to be calibrated very carefully if we are to avoid being counterproductive.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are musing today about whether the Chinese authorities are starting to regret China’s close relationship with Russia:

Little about Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is going right for Beijing. One of the bigger disasters so far concerns the fate of Chinese citizens in Ukraine. Speculation is rampant over whether Mr. Putin warned his Chinese counterpart an invasion was imminent. Either way, Beijing didn’t evacuate its embassy or the Chinese citizens now struggling to escape Mr. Putin’s tanks and bombs.

This exacerbates Mr. Xi’s deeper diplomatic dilemma. Having positioned himself as Mr. Putin’s closest friend, the Chinese leader now is under immense pressure from the rest of the world to talk Mr. Putin out of the war. If he can’t do so, and signs so far aren’t encouraging, it will highlight the limits of last month’s strategic alignment.

The Ukraine war is exposing other limits to Chinese power. Beijing has refused to impose financial or other sanctions of the sort Western governments have placed on Russia. But Chinese companies may have no choice but to comply with the Western sanctions anyway. This is especially true of Chinese banks, which this week found they may need to cut off some business with Russian counterparties to maintain their access to the far more important dollar and euro financial systems.

I think there’s an aspect of the situation the editors are ignoring. The Chinese don’t see the situation the same way we do as this article by Li Yuan in the New York Times points out:

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Kremlin’s media machines worked well in China. Combined with Beijing’s censorship of pro-Ukraine content, they wove a web of disinformation that proved difficult for most Chinese online users to escape.

The message they are trying to drive home: Russia’s military actions are anti-West, anti-NATO expansion and anti-Nazi — thus justified and popular.

In China’s state media, there’s very little about the international condemnation of Russia; Ukraine’s success in the battle for public opinion, led by President Zelensky; or antiwar protests in Russia.

The one-two punch is working, keeping the Chinese public from facts while sowing confusion.

On the Chinese social media platforms, many people adopted Mr. Putin’s and Russian media’s language, calling the Ukrainian side extremists and neo-Nazis.

They kept bringing up the Azov Battalion as if it represented all of Ukraine. The battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard, is known for having neo-Nazi sympathizers but remains a fringe presence in the country and its military.

President Zelensky himself is Jewish and won the presidential election in 2019 with 73 percent of the votes. His approval rate soared to over 90 percent recently for his wartime leadership.

The fog of disinformation thickens when Chinese state media portrays Russia’s war as an anti-fascism effort. After Russia’s defense minister announced this week that his country would host the first international anti-fascism conference in August, the CCTV posted a one-paragraph story, then created a Weibo hashtag. Within 24 hours, it had 650 million views and was used by 90 media outlets. Many commenters called Ukraine and the United States fascist countries.

Chinese media is also propagating Russian disinformation that Ukraine has been using civilians as human shields. In its prime-time news program on Feb. 26, CCTV quoted President Putin as making that allegation. A few days later the nationalistic news site, guancha.com, ran a banner headline that said the Russian military was going only after military targets, while the Ukrainian military was using civilians as human shields.

Taken collectively, Chinese online users are seeing a quite different war from much of the world.

which in turn is consistent with the point I have made about the ongoing information war. What is the true state of affairs? I honestly have no way of determining.

Russia invaded Ukraine. The Ukrainians are resisting. Many have fled the country. The Russians are advancing on Ukraine’s major cities. That’s just about as much as I have any confidence in.

The implication of China’s spreading of the information they are receiving from Russia, whether it is true or not, is that the Chinese authorities are committed to supporting Russia. It would be very difficult for them to back away now although I suspect they are hedging their bets in ways that aren’t visible to me.

I see that Illinois’s latest political scandal has caught the eye of the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

The 106-page indictment describes myriad schemes by Mr. Madigan, state House Speaker for 36 years and Democratic Party chairman for 23, to enrich himself and his allies. According to the indictment, he tapped his close friend Michael McClain, a co-defendant, to run the “Madigan enterprise” day-to-day.

Mr. McClain allegedly pressed execs at investor-owned utility ComEd to appoint a Madigan friend to their board, arrange jobs for Democratic Party officials and give contracts to political allies that involved little or no legitimate work. In return, Mr. Madigan steered ComEd’s legislative priorities.

“I am sure you know how valuable [Lawyer A] is to our Friend,” Mr. McClain wrote to the ComEd CEO in 2016. “I know the drill and so do you. If you do not get involve [sic] and resolve this issue of 850 hours for his law firm per year then he will go to our Friend. Our Friend will call me and then I will call you. Is this a drill we must go through?”

The 106-page indictment describes myriad schemes by Mr. Madigan, state House Speaker for 36 years and Democratic Party chairman for 23, to enrich himself and his allies. According to the indictment, he tapped his close friend Michael McClain, a co-defendant, to run the “Madigan enterprise” day-to-day.

Mr. McClain allegedly pressed execs at investor-owned utility ComEd to appoint a Madigan friend to their board, arrange jobs for Democratic Party officials and give contracts to political allies that involved little or no legitimate work. In return, Mr. Madigan steered ComEd’s legislative priorities.

“I am sure you know how valuable [Lawyer A] is to our Friend,” Mr. McClain wrote to the ComEd CEO in 2016. “I know the drill and so do you. If you do not get involve [sic] and resolve this issue of 850 hours for his law firm per year then he will go to our Friend. Our Friend will call me and then I will call you. Is this a drill we must go through?”

In their conclusion they quote the governor:

Regardless, “an indictment of this magnitude is a condemnation of a system infected with promises of pay-to-play,” as Mr. Pritzker said. Democrats dethroned Mr. Madigan as Speaker last January after leaks about the sprawling public corruption investigation helped cost them their progressive tax referendum in November 2020. Mob bosses are only useful until they’re not.

The notion that Gov. Pritzker was unaware of the corruption beggars belief. He was certainly aware of Gov. Blagojevich’s corruption—we have it on tape. I don’t believe the governor is particularly bright but I don’t think he’s as stupid as Blagojevich. And, of course, all of Mr. Madigan’s colleagues in the Illinois House must have been aware of it as well. At the very least they should all be facing indictments for misprision of a felony if not for being accessories before and after the fact.

Mr. Madigan was elected by around 15,000 voters. That’s fewer than 1% of Illinois’s voters. Keep that in mind when making the argument that Illinois has the government its people want. Or if you think the state is a democracy.

In today’s Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria points out what is blindingly obvious, at least to me:

There is one path to changing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculus: sanctioning Russia’s oil and gas industry. This is Putin’s golden goose, the source of the state’s wealth and the reason he might believe that he can weather any storm. So far, not only have these been left untouched, but the financial sanctions have been carefully designed to allow Russia room to continue to sell energy to the world.

I do give him credit for conceding that economic sanctions have rarely succeeded in impelling a country to change course. I disagree with him about Iran; I think South Africa is the only example. Even in that case I’m not sure it was the sanctions that caused the white South Africans to end apartheid. My hypothesis is that they did so because they already knew it was wrong and the social pressure of worldwide disapproval caused them to change.

As should be needless to say, that doesn’t apply in the present case to Russia.

I don’t think that Mr. Zakaria actually comes to terms with the reasons why we haven’t imposed sanctions on Russian oil, gas, and coal or, alternatively, I think he’s entirely too generous in the explanation he offers:

The conventional wisdom is that the West cannot sanction Russian energy because it would trigger an energy crisis along the lines of the 1970s episode, which would cause deep discontent at home.

Let me put it another way: it’s domestic politics. As Joschka Fischer once put it, the politicians know what they need to do; they just don’t know how they will keep their jobs if they do it. And so far neither Germany nor the U. S. has given up anything (other than spending money to arm the Ukrainians). The NS2 pipeline was shipping zero gas to Germany. The Germans are giving up future gas not present gas. Imposing sanctions on Russian oil, gas, and coal would put Hawai’i, for example, in a real pickle.

And (to put it into econspeak) changes in U. S. oil production are not completely elastic, i.e. they won’t happen immediately or for free. Were the United States to embargo Russian oil and gas, either the price of electricity and gasoline in Hawai’i would skyrocket or (if prices are fixed by law) there would be outages and/or shortages.

At Politico Ben Lefebvre and Zack Colman argue that higher prices for oil and gasoline are not President Biden’s fault:

The biggest element of Biden’s climate agenda, the Build Back Better bill, has been left for dead in the Senate. Meanwhile, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions spiked 6.2 percent last year, the climate research firm Rhodium Group noted, a surge that reflects how little the infrastructure underpinning the nation’s economy has moved away from carbon.

And even though the Biden administration has paused new oil and gas lease sales on federal land, the Interior Department processed more oil and gas drilling permits during Biden’s first year in office than three of the four years of the Trump administration. The U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas this year, and domestic oil production is forecast to reach about 12 million barrels a day, putting it close to where it was before the Covid-era collapse in fuel demand in 2020.

Still, Republicans are leaning on the European turmoil to swipe at Democrats’ green designs. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday cited the European conflict as a reason the state is leading a challenge to an Environmental Protection Agency proposal from December to strengthen vehicle emission standards, which would benefit electric cars and trucks.

“At a time when American gas prices are skyrocketing at the pump, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict shows again the absolute need for energy independence, Biden chooses to go to war against fossil fuels,” Paxton said in the press release announcing the lawsuit.

Here’s the graph they produce of U. S. oil production:

To my eye that looks as though production did, indeed, crash during the lockdowns of 2020 and is recovering slowly but has not returned to its 2019 levels. No?

Summarizing their argument:

1. We’re producing a lot of oil.
2. There’s a war on.

Leaving aside a “the buck stops here” argument or the reality that presidents get blamed for what happens on their watch whether their actions produced the situation or not, let me ask some basic questions. Why does Hawai’i, amazingly, import more gasoline and oil from Russia than any other state? Why does it use oil to generate electricity at all? Because

1. It doesn’t have domestic supplies of oil.
2. The Jones Act

If you’re not familiar with it the Jones Act regulates the prices that can be charged for shipping between U. S. ports. In practice it ensures that it’s cheaper to ship oil from Russia to Hawai’i than it is from Long Beach.

Why doesn’t Hawai’i use solar or wind? About 30% of Hawai’i’s electricity comes from solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal (mostly solar and wind). Why doesn’t Hawai’i use more geothermal? Because the people are on Oahu, the geothermal is on the Big Island, and Hawai’i’s sole geothermal plant is offline due to an eruption. Besides getting the power from where it is to where it’s needed is expensive and impractical. The state doesn’t actually have much choice. Using imported oil or LNG are just about its only options for baseline power. Relaxing the Jones Act might help.

Using more tidal power could probably be accomplished. That would, however, be unsightly and Hawai’i is highly dependent on tourism.

The state plans to be using 100% “renewables” to generate electricity by 2045. We’ll see.

You will find more infographics at Statista

On Tuesday evening 38 million Americans watched President Biden’s State of the Union message. From the Associated Press via Our Quad Cities:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An estimated 38.2 million TV viewers watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, according to Nielsen ratings.

That surpassed the audience of 37.2 million for Donald Trump’s last such address in 2020, but fell short of the 45.6 million who tuned in for Trump’s first State of the Union speech in 2018.

Nielsen said it was “important to note” that this year’s tally reflects the additional measurement of out-of-home viewing and viewership on streaming-enabled TV sets that rely on devices such as Roku or Xbox.

When the latter measurement is taken into account, viewership can increase as much as 13% for televised political events, Nielsen said.

Biden’s first address to Congress after taking office, in 2021, drew about 27 million people, while Trump’s comparable 2017 inaugural joint session of Congress address was seen by 47.7 million.

Nielsen measured viewership on 16 networks and channels that aired live coverage of Tuesday’s roughly hour-long speech, in which Biden focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, inflation and the coronavirus pandemic.

Fox News Channel averaged the biggest audience for the address, an estimated 7.2 million. ABC averaged 6.3 million viewers, followed by CBS with 4.9 million; CNN’s 4.8 million; NBC’s 4.7 million; MSNBC’s 4.1 million; Fox, 1.9 million.

The graph at the top of this page illustrates the audiences for the State of the Union message over the period of the last 30 years. I don’t think there’s much question: audiences are declining.

There are all sorts of interpretations one could make of that but here’s mine. I think it’s time to end the televised SOTU message, at least in its present form. It just doesn’t speak to modern audiences.

Pomp and circumstance don’t impress Americans as much as they used to. The attention spans of people today are shorter. They expect something more, shall we say, kinetic or at least graphic than some old person surrounded by a bunch of other old people talking for over an hour. Think infographic, preferably animated, rather than oration.

Two Washington Post columnists. Two opposing views of President Biden’s State of the Union message. Ruth Marcus sees the SOTU message as heralding that President Biden is shifting to the center:

To the extent this speech is remembered, and few such addresses are, I suspect it will be for Biden’s move from placating his party’s liberal base to recognizing the sober reality that his legislative options are already limited. His presidency is likely to be even more constrained after the midterm elections, which means his political future is tied more closely to finding areas of common ground with Republicans — or at least appearing to seek them — than engaging in partisan warfare.

As evidence she cites the amount of time in the speech the president devoted to competitiveness initiatives, infrastructure, and his rejection of the “defund the police” mantra of the progressive wing of his caucus.

Henry Olsen on the other hand interpreted the speech as “doubling down”:

State of the Union addresses tend to be unmemorable, providing little boost to a president’s political standing. There was some hope, maybe an expectation, that President Biden’s address on Tuesday night might be different, what with the war in Ukraine and his abysmal job approval numbers. That, sadly for Biden and perhaps Ukraine, was not the case.

Let’s start with the politics. Biden’s domestic agenda was nothing more than a rehash of things he has already called for. Now, the Build Back Better bill will be broken into component parts, probably because that’s what polls show does better with voters. But in the end, it adds up to the same legislative package that Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has already said he won’t support.

Where is Biden on tackling inflation? It’s Americans’ No. 1 concern. He announced a competition initiative, but that simply won’t bring inflation down over the next several months before the midterms, even as he is now publicly committed to the fight. Thus, Biden will be seen to be fighting inflation — and losing. Voters never reward ineptitude.

I think that’s a bit harsh. The question is whether the voters will “reward” Democrats for presumably good intentions. We’ll see.

My own interpretation of the SOTU was that President Biden was trying to face his poll numbers head on, taking each of areas in which he’s losing support and highlighting how his plans will address them. Somewhat less charitably, he was rhetorically triangulating while pragmatically doubling down.