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Selling Ukraine by the Hryvnia
So Russia “recognized” two “breakaway” segments of Ukraine and is now eating them. He is consolidating his Sudetenland adventure. What’s next? Something is.
Quite a pickle now. By rights, this should be the beginning of a new cold war. Or more likely, the manly recognition that the old one never really went away — it was just kippin’.
I could wax on about how bad things are going to be, or how we oughta this, and we oughta that. Yes, yes, I agree, academically.
But in reality, we aren’t going to do a damned thing, and that’s the best outcome we may realistically hope for. I’ve said since the first term of the Obama administration that we are no longer capable of doing things, because we are always just one election away from internal Marxist sabotage at the top. And now that the deep state shenanigans are plain for all to see, they are emboldened, rather than cowed by the sunlight.
We have no business engaging in any intervention, nation-building, alliance-forming — anything — until we win a fight to regain control of this country. I do not care one fig for any border anywhere in the world until we get our own border under control. Why should I? It is obscene to spend a damned dollar somewhere else if we are unwilling to do the deed at home.
This is bad. It’s bad for Ukraine, and it’s bad for Europe. My prescription for Europe is Be Like Poland. Man up, buckle in, and speak plainly. America isn’t coming to help, and you’d hate it if we did.
It’s not as though I’m advocating some new useless position for America — we’re already there! Wake up and smell the cat box.
“To the shores of Tripoli, but not to Mississippili” indeed.
Until we get our house in order, it’s Vietnam, Afghanistan, and ISIS as far as the eye can see. Everything else is just belling the cat.
Published in General
Truth. If our borders don’t matter, why should theirs?
Right. I don’t mean to minimize or “not care” about the bad that is happening now, and that which is yet to come. Their borders matter and have fallen. So have ours, but we’re not supposed to say our own borders matter, even just to ourselves.
We spent a lot of money and risk securing Afghanistan’s borders, too. I’m not singling out Ukraine for apathy — they’re just leading BillBoard Bad News charts this week.
By the way, I’ve declared myself out of the prediction business on this Ukraine thing, but I do suspect it will go about like South Ossetia did: Gulp. BURP. Awkward silence.
Based on how the Crimea saga played out, “nothing” is smart expectation. Germany put on hold a pipeline that they already put on hold. That is like “double secret probation”. A joke. Germany submitted to Russia long ago under that East German, Merkel. Biden wags his finger at Putin, while everyday creating an energy policy that enriches Russia.
I didn’t want to like this post. No help for it. Had to. /:
I went from liking the post based on the first two graphs, then wanting to unlike it, and then you quoted Tom Lehrer so, the like stayed.
My quibble, or rather disagreement is that sometimes the internal divisions can unify around an external threat. It helps when the leadership of one party isn’t financially entwined with our global opponents, but even that can be overcome by popular sentiment that the US needs to fix a problem.
Kuwait being taken over by Iraq wasn’t really a huge deal to the US, and not only did we signal to Iraq that it would be OK, we didn’t really seem too upset afterwards. After all, we had decent relations with Saddam and saw him as a foil for Iran. Yes, he did things we didn’t like, but he was more aligned with us then Iran was. When he invaded Kuwait, it was Margaret Thatcher who ended up pushing Bush to be more aggressive, and his administration built a case to do something. The people agreed that we shouldn’t allow a county to just invade its neighbor and annex it. The end result was a unified US with remarkable number of people who supported action and we saw that in the record high job approval rating that Bush had at the end of the conflict 89% (surpassed by his son just after 9/11 with a 90%, as the US unified against an external foe). We should never underestimate the ability of a common foe to unify public opinion.
In a way it is another example of just how inept that Biden is that he, and his staff seem to not realize this.
For the record, @instugator called it:
I do not want us to rally and ruck up overseas. I want us to rally fix the problems here. Everything overseas is literally not our problem. Naturally, to make this work, we would need a credible “mess about and find out” policy, but what we have is already not working. It’s still a net positive for us to stop treating the world like a kindergarten.
And in general, since America is such a horrible place, let’s get out of the World Police business. It’s a gigantic “put” that distorts the decisions others would make. A moral hazard, our status as global cop sees us treated like a commons. I don’t just mean that other countries should fund and field their own forces — I mean that every country should act as if their survival depended on not being stupid. Let the socialist wkope refugee pens deal with their own problems. When we are serious on others’ behalf, they become less serious, as we have seen.
In a sane world, one immediate policy change the Biden administration could effectively make in light of Putin’s moves in Ukraine would be to reverse its war on US energy producers, to waive for a while all the environmental restrictions and to re-build American production of oil and natural gas as rapidly as possible. Sales to European allies whose domestic economies will be roiled by loss of Russian energy will aid our friends and disadvantage Putin. Plus, our own domestic markets will benefit.
But it’s Biden and his merry Marxists, so I doubt anything so sensible can even be imagined.
Which regions did he annex?
My wager is that Russia wants to advance to at least the Dneiper River. The Dneiper is the source for over 80% of Crimea’s fresh water via the North Crimean Canal, and Ukraine has dammed up the canal since the annexation of Crimea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Crimean_Canal
In other words, my wager is that Putin wants to eventually annex at least the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts, if not all the oblasts that border the river.
I didn’t think it through all that much, but this thought flitted through my mind as well.
The two are not mutually exclusive, and one can lead to the other. It likely won’t as we saw Bush’s popularity didn’t get him re-elected, but we lack an ability to govern in our current form. Some of that is due to institutional reforms that made gov’t more transparent. When you take away ear marks, you remove a bargaining tool to get votes. When you get rid of caucuses and use primaries, then the party has less control over who gets nominated, and it tends to encourage people who can win primaries as opposed to work with both parties to accomplish goals. Of course, this assumes that the two parties even agree on the direction of the country, which currently doesn’t appear to be true. But, if the two parties cannot govern, and the system is encouraging more and more people at the edges to get elected, and compromise is going to get you primaried from further away from the middle, how do we ever resolve anything? We won’t get 67 of the GOP or the Dems to win seats in the Senate. Nor will we get 292 seats for either party anytime soon. The last time that happened was in 1977, but by the end of that session the Dems only held 275 seats.
Take a gander at the Map below of Ukraine courtesy of the Armstrong Economic Blog.90%+ of Donetsk and Crimea are native Russian speakers. Over 70% of Luhansk is also. Ya, borders mean something, but Ukraine borders are a relic of the Cold War where those 3 provinces were “Russsified” under Soviet rule and they still have an overwhelming Russian influence, plus as a result the populace overwhelmingly sides with Russia. This is a problem. How are we to side with the “Freedom Fighters” when those same “Freedom Fighters” are siding with the other side? In a better world those three provinces should be allowed to decide their own fate without outside influence, particularly since this issue has been around ever since Ukraine got it’s freedom from Russia.
Furthermore the idea that Russia will invade and take all the provinces up to the Dnieper is highly unlikely. Ukraine is a mess; why would Russia want it? It really does have the resources to hold hostile territory. Putin has much bigger fish to f ry.
Russia needs to control the Dnieper or else Crimea starves. Crimea does not have enough fresh water to grow crops without control of the North Crimea Canal.
Russia needs to control the Dnieper or else Crimea starves. Crimea does not have enough fresh water to grow crops without control of the North Crimea Canal.
That could be a bit of a problem. For both sides.
But never fear, we have the corrupt and senile Supreme Leader but always so honest Leader to lead us! Surely nothing could go wrong!
Biden already promised the opposite. Pain at the pump that he will not reverse. He’ll just blame Putin for his inability to renew domestic American energy production. Yeah, it’s Putin’s fault. That’s the ticket. The working class won’t fall for it, but our friends at the World Economic Forum have already signaled their approval. We’re trying to kill off the working class anyway.
So, who looks like Putin’s puppet now?
Now would that be one election away in the past or in the future?
Remember all those generals who swore they were prepared to step in and remove President Trump via military coup because they thought he was going to get us into a war?
Where the hell are they now?
Yes.
So we’ve always been at war with Eurasia?
At least in the book, Big Bro wasn’t trying to take on Eurasia and Eastasia at the same time.
I think that we’re in broad agreement, BDB. We’re not going to stop Putin from doing what he wants in Ukraine, because it doesn’t matter to us.
I do think that he’d be a fool to get bogged down in western Ukraine. Mis may be on to something about the other eastern regions, which are somewhat pro-Russian anyway.
I vote to Dnieper for Crimea’s water supply and then the Russophone port city Odessa. That was Russia has control of both of Ukraine’s sea ports.
Edit: Also unlikely to officially annexe. Recognise them, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but give them Russian passports as a humanitarian thing when no other country recognises theirs.