Been awhile since I commented. I figured Ricochet needs all the help it can get, so here we are…

*Ahem*

“Trump wants to create his own Praetorian Guard, an armed force that answers only to him,” posted Tom Nichols, a staff writer at the Atlantic. “That has never ended well either for the military or for the civilians.”

Tom Nichols displays a couple of major errors in this brief quote. First, he misunderstands the historical role of the Praetorian Guard. The Roman emperor did not own the Praetorian Guard; rather, the Guard owned the emperor. You only wind up with a Praetorian Guard in the metaphorical sense when the senior officers of the military choose and control the president.

When commentators talk about whether the Russians or the Ukrainians are winning the war between their two countries, much attention is paid to the Russians gaining territory, even though Russia was only able to gain about 0.7 percent of Ukraine’s territory in the entire year of 2024, at an estimated cost of 420,000 Russian soldiers killed, wounded or captured.  But less attention has been paid to the engines of war, the economy.  At first, it seemed that economic sanctions placed on Russia by the United States, Europe and Japan were not having much impact on Russia’s economy.  In more recent times, however, Russia’s economy does seem to be having difficulties.

Here is the Financial Times with an article on this topic.