I think that the views expressed in Walter Russell Mead’s most recent Wall Street Journal on how China, Russia, and others view President Biden’s foreign policy:

Last week Russian troops fanned out across Kazakhstan; the Myanmar junta sentenced Aung San Suu Kyi to four more years in prison; and China transferred a senior official from Xinjiang to lead the People’s Liberation Army’s garrison in Hong Kong. Two things are clear. First, America’s geopolitical adversaries aren’t impressed by the Biden administration. Second, the administration’s attempts to make a priority of human rights and democracy have so far failed to reverse or even to slow the retreat of democracy around the world.

The Biden administration’s political fragility at home is partly to blame. But adversaries are watching more than American domestic politics; they see incoherence in American policy. The administration has signaled that balancing China in the Indo-Pacific, the promotion of democracy and climate policy are its overriding foreign-policy priorities. Our adversaries—and some of our friends—think that these goals can’t be pursued successfully at the same time. They conclude that American policy focused on incompatible objectives will ultimately fail.

miss something fundamental.

U. S. military power and diplomatic policy are both downstream from American economic strength. They are dependent on it. For us to have a “coherent” diplomatic policy as he puts it or for us to maintain and renew our military strength we must reindustrialize. Regardless of what some Americans seem to think people in other countries don’t aspire to American values. They want prosperity.

That’s the reason that people from practically every country in the world but particularly from Central and South America are willing to pay human smugglers enormous sums (by their standards) to bring them here. Note that’s not a problem that Russia, China, or Iran has.

For us to maintain the caliber of military we need to defend ourselves or have a foreign policy that anybody pays any attention to, we must rebuild our economic strength. We can’t maintain either of those as China’s biggest customer.

My schedule today has prevented any posting. I did comment a few times.

Here’s a question. I don’t believe that the federal government has the authority to mandate that people get vaccinations. We’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say about it. I do believe that the states have that authority and the federal government has the authority to regulate travel between the states.

I heard a story about a recent study which determined something I think is pretty obvious: obese people are at a higher risk of serious COVID-19. Here’s the question. Do the states have the authority to require individuals to lose weight?

I honestly don’t think any state would do that. I suspect it would cause an enormous uproar since from a statistical standpoint blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be obese than whites.

You might be interested in this post at FilterBuy by David Heacock on the metro areas that have seen the fastest incrases in the cost of living:

Over the last decade, many of the places where the cost of living grew the most were economically prosperous states that have seen growth in high-paying jobs and attracted more residents to their major metros, like Washignton (Seattle), Oregon (Portland), and Massachusetts (Boston). Price increases now, however, appear to be a nationwide phenomenon, and for areas where the rate of job and wage growth is slower, household expenses may take up an increasingly large share of workers’ earnings.

Highest: Seattle, Denver, Portland.

If you’re wondering where Chicago stands, it’s way down on the list—housing prices are increasing slowly because no one wants to live here.

An interesting post from Scott Grannis on inflation. Here’s a sample snippet:

What’s happening these days is a vicious circle of sorts: money demand has failed to keep with the growth in the money supply, and this has led to rising prices; rising prices, in turn, erode the demand for money, since the value of money is declining as prices rise, and all of this reinforces the public’s desire to reduce money balances, borrow more, and increase spending.

This inflationary dynamic won’t end until a) the Fed substantially reduces the supply of reserves to the banking system, b) the Fed substantially increases short-term interest rates (by enough to offset the erosion of money’s value via inflation, c) the banking system becomes less willing to lend, and/or d) the public becomes less willing to borrow.

Of those four the easiest to accomplish from a technical rather than from a political standpoint is b closely followed by a. Then c and, finally, d. The politics is different. The ease is exactly the opposite. I’m guessing the Fed and the White House both start complaining about d.

At RealClearPolicy No Labels presents five facts on the shortage of truckdrivers:

1. According to the American Truckers Association, the U.S. currently faces an all-time high shortage of 80,000 truckers.
2. Four million job postings for trucking positions in 2021 required a Commercial Driver’s License at a minimum — and many also sought past professional experience.
3. Four out of five U.S. truckers are over age 45 — and nearly one in four are over age 55.
4. Turnover for truck drivers in fleets with more than $30 million of annual revenue was 92% at the end of 2020.
5. The Transportation Department projected last year that ground freight totals will rise by 50% by 2050 to 28.7 billion tons.

Here’s my question. When what passes for industrial policy in the U. S. over the period of the last 30 years has been to send everyone to college, preaching that the only way of getting a job that will enable people to maintain a decent standard of living is to go to college in search of a job that requires a college degree (or, increasingly, an advanced degree), what do they expect?

I suggest doing more local manufacturing and reducing interstate transport. Better yet hyperlocal. We should be doing a lot more with additive manufacturing. Do more local deliveries with autonomous vehicles.

I genuinely wish that those heaping praise on Sidney Poitier after his death would consider what they’re saying more carefully. Much of what is being said could also be said of Harry Belafonte and Harry Belafonte is still alive. First black-white romance? That would be 1959’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil with Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens, and Mel Ferrer (A Patch of Blue was in 1965).

A group of parents of Chicago Public Schools students, not content to wait for the CPS to take action, have filed suit against the Chicago Teachers Union. WTTW reports:

A group of Chicago Public Schools parents are suing the Chicago Teachers Union, seeking an immediate return to in-person learning after classes have been repeatedly canceled this week during the union’s COVID-19 standoff with the city.

Seven CPS parents filed a lawsuit against the CTU on Friday, which also marked the third consecutive day without classes during a union labor action that has seen its 25,000 members working remotely until the city agrees to stricter health and safety protocols.

In the lawsuit, which was filed in Cook County Chancery Court, the parents claim the union’s action is actually an “illegal strike” — language that’s also been used by Mayor Lori Lightfoot. They want a judge to immediately order teachers to return to their schools and resume in-person learning.

“CTU’s resolution calling members to not show up for work in-person is a strike regardless of what CTU calls it and violates both the collective bargaining agreement with CPS and Illinois law,” Jeffrey Schwab, an attorney with the Liberty Justice Center, which filed the suit, said in a statement. “CTU cannot unilaterally decide what actions should be taken to keep public schools safe, completely silencing parents’ input about what is best for the health, safety, and well-being of their children.”

Rank-and-file CTU members on Tuesday voted in favor of the labor action, claiming CPS has not done enough to protect students and staff inside schools from surging COVID-19 cases, driven largely by the omicron variant.

In an ideal world the CPS and the CTU would collaborate in getting the schools open. Facilities and protective measures would be reviewed on a case by case basis and corrected to the satisfaction of both parties. As a regular commenter astutely observed, the easy solution for the teachers is remote learning while the easy solution for parents and children is in-person learning. IMO ease is likely to prevail over the expensive and arduous work required to take the necessary remediative steps.

There is one mistake I hope will be avoided: trying to tar these parents as MAGA hat-wearing Trump supporters. They’re undoubtedly all or nearly all Democrats. This is Chicago. But it would be consistent with the predisposition these days to seek heretics rather than allies.

I found this interview of Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko by Adam O’Neal in the Wall Street Journal very throught-provoking. What first caught my attention was the surname Radchenko. Although the surname occurs in Russia it is more common in Ukraine. As it turns out Dr. Radchenko was born on the island of Sakhalin. Sakhalin, as you presumably are aware, is in the Pacific ocean, sandwiched between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. It must be a lonely, even boring existence there. However, I’ll accept him as a Russian.

This is the part of the interview that caught my attention:

Consider the Berlin crisis (1958-61). Khrushchev perceived the balance of power shifting as the Soviet nuclear arsenal grew, and he believed he could bluff away some of his country’s foreign-policy dilemmas. “He would say, ‘OK, we’ll squeeze the Americans out of Berlin.’ Obviously Berlin was a big sore point for Khrushchev, much as Ukraine is for Putin today,” Mr. Radchenko says. “He presented an ultimatum to the Americans—that you have to sign a peace treaty with Germany, paving the way to a withdrawal from Berlin. And if you don’t, he implied, then the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, and they’ll kick the U.S. out of Berlin.”

The archives show that Khrushchev “thought that the Americans were unlikely to go to war over Berlin, and he made the calculation that it was a 95% chance that they would not go to war,” Mr. Radchenko continues. Still, that was a 5% chance of “an absolutely destructive, suicidal war. And that was too much for him. So he decided to back down and quietly wind down the whole Berlin thing by building a Berlin Wall.”

Today Mr. Putin seeks an agreement that would limit the size and activities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, effectively restoring Russian dominion over much of Central and Eastern Europe—a nonstarter for Washington and the alliance’s leadership. “I’m not trying to suggest that Putin is Khrushchev or Khrushchev is Putin,” Mr. Radchenko says. “What I’m saying is that Putin cannot be blind to this general perception—that’s not just in Russia but around the world—that there’s a changing correlation of forces.”

Let’s consider the two situations. Was Berlin as important to Khrushchev as Ukraine is to Putin? Is Ukraine as important to Biden as Berlin was to Eisenhower? I think the answer to both of those questions is “No”. Khrushchev backed down at least in a sense. He built a wall. Based on that understanding what do you think is likely to happen with respect to Ukraine?

There is also an issue of relative strength. Don’t make the mistake that the U. S. made for 40 years and overestimate the Soviet Union’s postwar strength. Putin’s tactical position with respect to Ukraine is enormously stronger than Khrushchev’s with respect to Berlin and his strategic interest are far stronger. The situation is the reverse for the U. S.

Interestingly, Dr. Radchenko ends on an optimistic note which is worth considering:

If Mr. Putin is hell-bent on incorporating Eastern Ukraine into the Russian Federation, he has the military capability to do so. But Mr. Radchenko sees some space for optimism. “I feel that Putin is an opportunist,” he says. “If he is an opportunist, then it’s likely that he can be convinced, with the proper inducement and proper application of sticks and carrots, to pursue a different policy. But you also have to then consider what to give him, and how to give it, in order not to potentially encourage further encroachment and further aggression.”

He thinks “freezing the situation on Donbas probably would be everyone’s preferred solution at this stage, because the alternative is unfreezing it and we don’t want to unfreeze it at this moment, because this would mean war. That is why advice would be, both to Kyiv and in fact to Moscow, to try to find some sort of compromise solution. And that, of course, means avoiding by all means a renewal of military hostilities on the actual line separating the two sides in Donbas.”

There are two key points there. First, Putin is very much a realist as well as an opportunist but Khrushchev was very much the idealist. He had played a role in the 1917 revolution and the subsequent civil war. That runs parallel to the difference between today’s Russia and the Soviet Union.

The other point is that such a settlement, while in the interests of both Russia and the U. S., will absolutely be opposed by both the unreconstructed Cold Warriors and the Poles and Ukrainians who have such great influence on U. S. policy. It’s a dangerous time and I hope that we maintain a firm eye on U. S. interests.

Although I materially agree with the observations in Matt Bai’s most recent Washington Post column, I don’t think he fully apprehends their implications. He states his thesis pretty clearly in his opening sentences:

Democrats, who nominally control Washington, are about to face a reckoning on covid-19.

At some point soon, they’re going to have to start treating the coronavirus not as the uncontrollable public health crisis it used to be, but as the public policy crisis it has now become.

After the obligatory sideswipe at Donald Trump he continues by dividing the American public into three groups:

The largest group is the fully vaccinated. For most of us, the new variant is a serious nuisance, like an especially virile flu, but not much more than that. It’s unpleasant (I know, because I have it), but if this were the version of covid that hit everyone who got infected in 2020, no school or business would have closed.

The second group is the immune-compromised, even if they are vaccinated — including people with underlying conditions and the elderly. The risk to them remains high, and the extra care they have to take can be isolating. But that’s the case with every contagion, including the flu. We don’t reorder the society around it.

The third group is, of course, the unvaccinated. (I’m not including children under 5, who are still not eligible for a coronavirus vaccine.) They’ve now had a year to absorb all the warnings and weigh all the arguments. They’ve seen high-profile vaccine deniers — talk show hosts, Trumpian candidates — needlessly dying from a virus they chose to exploit.

At this point, the unvaccinated are like unrepentant smokers. We’ve spent decades telling them they might get lung cancer. We’ve plastered warnings everywhere.

But you know what? All of us get to make our own idiotic choices — that’s the American way.

which brings to mind Robert Benchley’s observation about people who divide other people into groups. And it’s where I think Mr. Bai hasn’t thought things through. The definition of the first group is, shall we say, emergent. Yesterday it was people who’d received two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine; today it’s people who’ve also received a booster. Tomorrow? Who knows?

The second group is equally fluid. How does one distinguish between the first and second groups? Presumably, if you’ve been fully inoculated and you still contract COVID-19, are you in that second group? Is there a real empirical distinction between the two? I don’t think so.

His remarks about the unvaccinated are equally problematic. People who smoke don’t provide as great a risk to those who don’t as people who are not inoculated against COVID-19 pose. Consider President Biden’s recent remarks:

All these people who have not been vaccinated, you have an obligation to yourselves, to your family, and, quite frankly — I know I’ll get criticized for this — to your country.

Get vaccinated now. It’s free. It’s convenient. I promise you, it saves lives. And I, honest to God, believe it’s your patriotic duty.

Does that sound like an acknowledgement that people have a right to make their “own idiotic choices” to you? Me, neither. Is that position reconcilable with mandates? How?

The reality is that those who are unwilling to accept a heightened level of risk, regardless of cost-benefit, will not be persuaded. That’s playing out right now in the work stoppage being carried on by Chicago’s teachers.

Mr. Bai goes on to make a valuable observation:

Sure, you can argue that the virus still overwhelms hospitals and is costing us a ton of money. But that’s a capacity problem, not an existential crisis. You don’t solve technical shortages by shuttering schools and keeping nurses at home with draconian quarantine policies.

There are a couple of things we need to come to terms with. Failing to expand capacity permanently is predicated on the assumption of “Zero COVID” and that assumption is decreasingly supportable. Reasonable people may have different views of that but I think it reflects a basic problem with our whole healthcare system.

After that lengthy exposition he finally gets to the point:

If Biden is going to beat the pandemic rather than be undone by it, he is going to have to acknowledge the new reality, which is that our public policy is way too weighted toward a bunch of people who made the wrong choice.

Biden said as much in remarks at the White House Tuesday, addressing his comments to the unvaccinated. That’s fine.

But it’s his own Democratic constituencies — teachers unions, local governments, ultra-leftist Trump haters who refuse to let go of the culture war over the virus — who would continue to hold the country hostage to what now is a manageable public health risk. In Montgomery County, a group of parents and teachers who want to close the schools issued a call this week for children to stay home in protest.

Biden needs to take these people on and steer his party toward a more sensible course.

There is an old phrase used to characterize such advice: whistling past a graveyard. President Biden can’t “take these people on”. Not only has he failed to do so throughout his lengthy political career, he depends on them.

There’s another reality that we’ll need to come to terms with soon. As the number of “fully vaccinated” people (whatever that means at the time) rises as it undoubtedly will the percentage of “fully vaccinated” people hospitalized for COVID-19 and who die of it will rise. That’s just mathematics. Look at any study, any infographic on those hospitalized with COVID-19 and those who died of it. The percentage of “fully vaccinated” in their number is non-zero. That mathematical fact alone will provide all of the ammunition those Democratic constituencies Mr. Bai calls out need to continue the “culture war” over the pandemic into the indefinite future.