There is a common thread joining all of the posts and articles that caught my eye this morning. More about that later. But let’s turn to the first of those articles, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens’s terse analysis of the present state of Russia’s war against Ukraine:
The Russians are running out of precision-guided weapons. The Ukrainians are running out of Soviet-era munitions. The world is running out of patience for the war. The Biden administration is running out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chinese are watching.
He goes on to explain the implications of each of those sentences and they’re not nice. Here’s his prescription:
What more can the Biden administration do? It needs to take two calculated risks, based on one conceptual breakthrough.
The calculated risks: First, as retired Adm. James Stavridis has proposed, the U.S. should be prepared to challenge the Russian maritime blockade of Odesa by escorting cargo ships to and from the port.
That will first mean getting Turkey to allow NATO warships to transit the Turkish straits to the Black Sea, which could entail some uncomfortable diplomatic concessions to Ankara. More dangerously, it could result in close encounters between NATO and Russian warships. But Russia has no legal right to blockade Ukraine’s last major port, no moral right to keep Ukrainian farm products from reaching global markets, and not enough maritime might to take on the U.S. Navy.
Second, the U.S. should seize the estimated $300 billion in Russian central bank assets held abroad to fund Ukraine’s military and reconstruction needs.
What are the risks of those calculations? The calculation in the first case is that Putin is willing to lose the war rather than confront the U. S. directly in the first case. Not to mention that it’s a violation of President Biden’s commitment not to engage Russia directly or the risk of thermonuclear war. The calculation in the second case is the risk is that no other country will retaliate in kind. Need I point out that the U. S. is far more exposed to that risk than any other country?
I’m not as confident as Mr. Stephens is in our ability to accomplish the first calculated risk or in Mr. Putin’s hesitancy. And I don’t believe he has actually assessed the risks of his second calculated risk at all. Basically, it’s risking a complete collapse in global trade.
