Tag Archives: #ForeignPolicy

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Is the “spy balloon’s” mission just to make President Biden look bad? If so, mission accomplished!

I will admit it: I have been reluctant to comment on the purported Chinese spy balloon story, because it seemed like so much of a set-up. Really? A nation with the capacity to launch its own spy satellites, needing to send an easily-shot-down spy balloon over Montana? But, with even the Grey Lady treating it as something serious, I suppose that I should as well. From The New York Times:

Suspected Spy Balloon Hampers China’s Efforts to Ease Tensions With U.S.

Beijing said it was looking into reports about an object seen flying over Montana. “Speculation and hype will not help,” a Chinese government spokeswoman said.

by Chris Buckley | Friday, February 3, 2023 | 8:39 AM EST

A balloon suspected to have come from China and seen floating over Montana has suddenly upstaged a long-anticipated visit to Beijing by the American secretary of state and threatens to undercut efforts to reduce the simmering antagonism between Beijing and Washington.

Pentagon officials disclosed on Thursday that they had detected the “intelligence-gathering balloon, most certainly launched by the People’s Republic of China,” over the state that is home to about 150 intercontinental ballistic missile silos.

While the Pentagon played down the potential value of the balloon for acquiring intelligence, the public reaction by Biden administration officials underscored how brittle and delicate relations with Beijing have become, even over one balloon. The defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, held a meeting about the balloon with senior U.S. defense officials while he was in the Philippines, and President Biden “was briefed and asked for military options,” a Pentagon official told reporters.

The balloon threatens to become a very public irritant looming over the planned two-day visit to Beijing starting Sunday by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Drew Thompson, a former Pentagon official who is now a visiting senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said the timing of the balloon flight was at least maladroit.

Guffaws! “(M)aladroit“? It could actually be very clever. Secretary Blinken has now cancelled his trip. That’ll show them commies how tough we are!

Also see: William Teach, “China Sends Spy Balloon Over U.S., Biden Admin Doesn’t Shoot It Down“

Consider just what has been happening over the past couple of years. The negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan — and the negotiations began under President Trump — was handled, at the very end, in a wholly FUBARed way, a way which made President Biden and the top military leaders look incompetent. Thirteen Marines and around a hundred Afghanis were killed by a terrorist bomb at the very end of the pullout, and the US did nothing about it. Then, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Biden has decided, in fits and starts, to send over $100 billion in assistance to Ukraine, much of it the form of existing American weapons and munitions, which draws down from our stockpiles. Mr Biden reversed President Trump’s order, and is now allowing openly ‘transgender’ persons to serve in the military.

To the Chinese, all of this demonstrates a real weakening of our armed forces.

That we could shoot down this stupid balloon is obvious. What flows from that is that, if this truly is what it has been claimed, the Chinese would not have included any truly revolutionary technology that could fall into the hands of the United States if it is shot down, and whatever is in this thing is probably booby-trapped.

China is also smarting over the United States’ announcement on Thursday that it would expand its military presence in the Philippines, gaining access to four more sites that potentially could be used to marshal forces to deter or respond to Chinese military threats to Taiwan.

“This balloon surveillance mission really demonstrates that even when Xi is trying to improve the tone of the relationship and the rhetoric softens,” Mr. Thompson said of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, “there is no interest on Beijing’s part to act with restraint or amend its behavior in ways that actually contribute to genuinely improving the condition of the relationship.”

But it just might be gathering intelligence in a different manner. No, not technical intelligence, but intelligence on President Biden’s strength of will and resolve. If we didn’t shoot the thing down when it was over sparsely-populated Montana, there isn’t any less populated area of the US which it might overfly that would be safer.

The first official reaction from Beijing to the Pentagon’s accusations about the balloon was muted. Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, did not confirm that the balloon was China’s.

“We’ve noted the reports and are checking the situation,” she said, “and I want to emphasize that before the facts are clear, speculation and hype will not help to bring about an appropriate solution to the issues.” Asked again about the balloon, Ms. Mao said that both the U.S. and Chinese governments should stay calm and “handle this with prudence.”

“China is a responsible country, always strictly abides by international law, and has no intention of violating any sovereign country’s territory or airspace,” she said.

Oh, well, yeah, I certainly believe her! https://i0.wp.com/www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_wacko.gif?w=612&ssl=1

There’s more at the Times original.

If the balloon is truly from China, it’s purpose could simply be to make President Biden look bad. If that was part of its mission, it has already accomplished that! Even if he orders the thing shot down, his hesitance in doing so has already made him look weak. And if air currents push it out of American airspace and over Canada, we’ll lose the opportunity to shoot it down.

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Have we learned nothing?

At what point do we ask: why are we doing this?

Perhaps you haven’t heard of this, because it only rarely makes the credentialed media, but The Wall Street Journal finally covered it.

U.S. Builds New Firewall to Stop Spread of Militant Islamists

Hundreds of American troops join Western allies in Niger to block al Qaeda and Islamic State from advancing violence and influence in West Africa

by Michael M Phillips | Sunday, December 11, 2022 | 10:15 AM EST

OUALLAM, Niger—The front lines in the war between the West and militant Islamists have shifted to Africa, from Somalia on the continent’s eastern tip to the West African Sahel, a semidesert strip south of the Sahara.

In the Sahel, the U.S. and its allies are betting that Niger, the worst-off country in the world by a U.N. measure, offers the best hope of stopping the seemingly inexorable spread of al Qaeda and Islamic State.

Here’s where the Journal’s paywall begins. I’d say that I subscribe so that you don’t have to, but really, it’s the best newspaper in the world, and you should subscribe!

In the heart of the region, the nations of Mali and Burkina Faso are losing ground, roiled by militant attacks and military coups. In contrast, the elected civilian government in neighboring Niger is making slow headway against insurgents with the help of Western forces, U.S. and Nigerien officials said. Mali’s ruling junta has hired Kremlin-linked mercenaries to provide security, while Niger has shunned Russian intervention and welcomed U.S. and French forces.

“We’ve invested a lot with the Nigeriens, and we’re seeing a payoff from that,” said Lt. Col. Chris Couch, commander of U.S. special-operations troops in West Africa. Niger, he said, is emerging as a cornerstone of regional security.

The next few paragraphs describe how Nigerien — as opposed to Nigerian, which would mean troops from Nigeria, not from Niger — troops have been trained by United States Army Special Forces troops, are deployed from French aircraft, but our troops monitor from a “safe distance”.

U.S. commandos accompanied Nigerien forces on combat missions until a 2017 Islamic State ambush killed four American soldiers from the Special Forces outpost in Ouallam. The Green Berets now supervise from a safe distance, while local commandos they train carry out the raids.

I will admit it: it was after reading the previous paragraph that I decided to write about this. Am I the only one who has a difficult time believing that our most highly trained soldiers would actually stand by, monitoring, but not getting involved in the fighting?

Niger is proving a test ground for the U.S. strategy of deploying relatively small numbers of American troops—there are around 800 now in the country—to train local forces.

Historically, the strategy has yielded uneven results. U.S.-trained militaries in Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea overthrew civilian governments. After U.S. troops left Afghanistan in 2020, local forces collapsed under Taliban offensives, despite U.S.-supplied weapons and two decades of training.

“Uneven results,” huh?

Who knows, perhaps the US wanted those civilian governments overthrown. It’s not like we wouldn’t have ever supported military coup d’etat’s before.

But at some point, it has to be asked why we are doing this. Rule by Islamic State is a pretty horrible thing, but is it really any of our business if the Muslim fundamentalists rule in resource-starved Niger?

The Nigeriens will wind up like every other client state we’ve supported: doing things their own way, in accordance with their own culture. They won’t be somehow transformed into Americans or Westerners; they will develop their own society and culture based on how they think, not how we think.

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There can be no negotiated peace with the ‘Palestinians’

For a devout Catholic, it’s the (too short) trip of a lifetime. My older daughter, an Army Reservist currently deployed to the Middle East, has a four-day out-of-country pass, and I’m meeting her in Jerusalem. I told a couple of my fellow parishioners that I’d miss Mass next Sunday, but that actually means I’ll miss Mass at my home parish; my plan is to attend Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre!

That only brought my attention more to this article which appeared on my feed this morning, in which the activists said the quiet part out loud.

‘Defeating Israel means defeating the US,’ Canada, EU -Brussels activists

by Michael Starr | Monday, November 7, 2022 | 9:09 AM

Defeating Israel is part of a process to defeating the United States of America, the European Union and Canada, the leader of a Palestinian protest in Brussels declared in new footage released on Thursday by the NGO Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.

“Defeating Israel means defeating the US. Defeating Israel means defeating Canada, these settlements who [sic] exist on the backs of the indigenous and the black people. Defeating Israel means defeating this colonial institution [European Parliament], means payback for all Africans, Algerians, Moroccans, Sahraoui,” said Samidoun Europe coordinator and Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement (Masar Badil) member Mohammed Khatib at the March for Return and Liberation for Palestine last Saturday.

Translation: the “Palestinians” don’t just hate Israel and the Jews, they hate all of Western civilization.

Khatib — who previously lead the organization of protests against the 125th anniversary of the first Zionist Congress event in Basel, Switzerland in late August — has also been described by Palestinian and Arab media as a spokesman and activist for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.

“Second and third generations are in Brussels,” Khatib said in front of the EU parliament. “We’ve built this city and we still face fascism and racism. So we will say no to this not only in Palestine but here in Europe, there in the United States and in all Arab countries. Together, as comrade Georges Abdallah said, ‘we must gather together and we will win only together.'”

Abdallah is an imprisoned PFLP member and Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions, co-founder. Protestors called for the release of several terrorist organization members and raised posters of dead terrorist figureheads.

I have said it before: Israel faced two logical choices at the end of the Six Day War in 1967:

  1. Israel could return the land it captured to Jordan, Syria and Egypt quickly; or
  2. Israel could expel the entire Arab population of those lands, and annex the territory.

Instead, the Israelis chose a third alternative: keeping the lands under military occupation, hoping that the unpleasant conditions would ‘encourage’ the Arabs to emigrate. The Israelis should have learned from their own history in Europe: regardless of how tough the Nazis made staying put in their homes in Germany, and then occupied France and Poland, few chose to emigrate, choosing instead to just tough it out, as most Jews had done before them in the many pogrami that they had borne in the past, because things would get better eventually. What the Nazis did them was so far out of human experience that no one in Europe, Jew or Gentile, could conceive of it.

The Israelis of 1967-68 should have realized it: if Jews for generations had decided to stay in their homes and tough out the bad times, the Arabs in Judea and Samaria could do that as well.

The result? Fifty-five years of occupation have created three generation of angry Arabs, and sympathy among the liberal dolts in the West for their poor, poor plight.

Terrorist paraphernalia was readily apparent in previously released footage. Some marchers wore headbands showing allegiance to Lions’ Den, a terrorist group that has been responsible for several recent terrorist attacks and battles with IDF soldiers. One prominently displayed banner depicted the launch of rockets, and another poster depicted a gunman with a Carlo submachine pistol, a firearm favored by Palestinian terrorists.

“Participants saluted the Palestinian resistance, including Mohammed Deif, leader of the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza,” Samidoun declared last Sunday. Deif is a leader of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.

Khatib urged protest participants to join Masar Badil, Samidoun or similarly-minded organizations. The two groups organized the march.

“We will not accept any more, as Palestinians, this rhetoric of a two-state solution as a way to support Palestine,” said Khatib. “Only one free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

Let’s tell the truth here: many “Palestinians” have never accepted the “rhetoric of a two-state solution”, as evidenced by Yassir Arafat’s angry rejection of the supposed compromise he negotiated with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton. Mr Clinton later said that it was the biggest mistake Mr Arafat could make, a “colossal historical blunder,” because he’d never be able to negotiate a treaty more favorable to the “Palestinians” than the one he had before him.

Of course, Yassir Arafat knew that if he had signed a peace agreement with Israel, the irredentists would kill him.

And nothing has changed. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came up with a plan to simply evacuate all Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip, which was done in August and September of 2005. Israel said to the “Palestinians”, in effect, ‘Here it is; do with it what you will.’

Gaza is resource-poor, and it depends upon Israel for public utilities, but it also has the best beachfront property in the entire region, and the “Palestinians” could have turned it into the greatest beach resort for well-to-do Europeans, bringing in tons of money. Instead, they chose Hamas to lead them, to create just more poverty, and a base from which to occasionally lob rockets into Israel. The Israel Defence Force responds, with bombing and artillery strikes against the suspected terrorist hideouts, which are blended in with the civilian population, and Western leftists then blame Israel, because leftists are just plain stupid.

Well, in honor of my upcoming visit, the Israelis wisely voted the center-right Likud Party, along with its conservative allies, into a Knesset majority, meaning the return of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Mr Netanyahu knows the “Palestinians” for what they are: a population which hates Israel and the Jews and, if most of the people aren’t the guerrilla fighters, are still willing to be led by Hamas and the other hardline factions which are still pushing for military victory over Israel, and simply are not interested in any peace agreement. The demonstrators in Brussels, a wealthy city in a peaceful and prosperous country in which many of the Arabs live, simply proves the point once again. That Israeli voters gave Likud and its allies a 65-55 majority in the Knesset — and remember: Israel has two million Arab citizens, and approximately 54% of the adults voted, very few of whom would have voted for conservatives — meaning that Israeli Jews must have given the Likud bloc a tremendous majority of their votes. The Israeli Jews are showing now that they very much understand that there can be no negotiated peace with the Arabs, at least not with the “Palestinians” as they are now.

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Joe Biden has earned exactly what he’s getting from Saudi Arabia Are there no adults in the White House?

We have previously noted that the oil production cut by OPEC+ was primarily engineered by Russia and Saudi Arabia, and that President Biden’s statements condemning Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, might not have exactly persuaded that nation to work charitably with the United States. Now, from Business Insider:

The US and Saudi Arabia traded petty insults in an feud over oil after a reported secret deal fell apart

by Tom Porter | Thursday, October 27, 2022 | 7:00 AM EDT

A US official mocked a comment by a Saudi prince who claimed the White House was acting immaturely, the latest exchange in an embarrassing feud between the nations over oil.

“It’s not like some high school romance here,” John Kirby, the communications coordinator at the National Security Council, said when asked about a comment by Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman.

The prince had criticized the White House for releasing some of its vast oil reserves to reduce prices, painting the move as childish and describing Saudi Arabia as the “maturer” country.

Kirby was not happy. “We’re talking about a significant, important bilateral relationship, a partnership that has survived over 80 years,” he said. “I don’t think talking about it in terms like that necessarily lends the gravity of how important this relationship is, to the way that we’re considering it.”

The New York Times reported on it from a different angle:

U.S. Officials Had a Secret Oil Deal With the Saudis. Or So They Thought.

After Saudi leaders pushed to slash oil production despite a visit by President Biden, American officials have been left fuming that they were duped.

By Mark Mazzetti, Edward Wong and Adam Entous | Tuesday, October 25, 2022

WASHINGTON — As President Biden was planning a politically risky trip to Saudi Arabia this summer, his top aides thought they had struck a secret deal to boost oil production through the end of the year — an arrangement that could have helped justify breaking a campaign pledge to shun the kingdom and its crown prince.

It didn’t work out that way.

Mr. Biden went through with the trip. But earlier this month, Saudi Arabia and Russia steered a group of oil-producing countries in voting to slash oil production by two million barrels per day, the opposite of the outcome the administration thought it had secured as the Democratic Party struggles to deal with inflation and high gas prices heading into the November elections.

So, President Biden went through with what the Times called a “politically risky trip”, but while on that trip, raised the Jamal Khashoggi killing at the very beginning:

“I raised it at the top of the meeting, making clear what I thought at the time and what I think of it now,” Mr. Biden said. “I was straightforward and direct in discussing it. I made my view crystal clear. I said very straightforwardly for an American president to be silent on an issue of human rights is inconsistent with who we are and who I am. I always stand up for our values.”

He reported that Prince Mohammed, often known by his initials M.B.S., denied culpability.

“He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it,” Mr. Biden said. “I indicated that I thought he was.”

Somehow, some way. no one in the Biden Administration was adult enough to realize that the President’s supposedly private conversations with the Crown Prince, which Mr Biden then reiterated publicly, might just sabotage the deal that had been previously negotiated to help “justify breaking a campaign pledge to shun the kingdom and its crown prince.”

The move led angry Biden administration officials to reassess America’s relationship with the kingdom and produced a flurry of accusatory statements between the two governments — including a charge by the White House that Saudi Arabia was helping Russia in its war in Ukraine.

Lawmakers who had been told about the trip’s benefits in classified briefings and other conversations that included details of the oil deal — which has not been previously disclosed and was supposed to lead to a surge in production between September and December — have been left fuming that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman duped the administration.

An obvious point: the Arabs have a completely different culture than do Americans — yes, I know: we Americans do not really seem to have just one culture ourselves — and perhaps it shouldn’t have been expected that the Crown Prince would shrug off a little public insult the way Americans seem to believe he should have. Mr Khasoggi’s murder was arranged sometime after the Saudi exile, who wrote for The Washington Post, essentially called Mr bin Salman a liar. It was a political risk for the Crown Prince to arrange, order, or at least suggest — “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” — that Mr Khasoggi needed to be eliminated, but it happened anyway. A savvy foreign policy expert might have realized that Mr bin Salman took things, took criticism, personally.

Of course, when I look at the silliness, right before an election in which the Democrats are expected to lose control of the House of Representatives, in which the Biden Administration has engaged, I don’t see a lot of savviness evident.

Perhaps those congressmen “fuming that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman duped the administration” might start asking themselves: was it Mr bin Salman who duped the Biden Administration, or was that Mr Biden himself?
_________________________________
Cross-posted on American Free News Network.

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Max Boot, the neo-conservatives, and endless war

Max (Maxim?) Aleksandrovich Boot was born on September 12, 1969 in Moscow, the son of two Russian Jews. They were lucky: they were able to emigrate to the United States in 1976, bringing young Max with them. Mr Boot, whose parents fled a strongly antisemitic regime in the USSR under Leonid Brezhnev, once said, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump,” even though the USSR under Comrade Staling might well have sent Mr Boot and his family to a concentration camp; the Soviet leaders really didn’t like Jews very much.

In other words, Mr Boot has all of the intuitive judgement of a mud clod.

We have previously noted how Mr Boot specifically, and many of the neo-conservative in general, don’t think much of our individual liberties, or certainly didn’t when it came to mandating vaccinations against COVID-19. Mr Boot, who dearly loves having American troops all over the globe and has been a student of military history and strategic studies but has never served in the military himself, fretted that it would be a disaster for the United States to pull out of Afghanistan, though what more could be accomplished in that fetid and festering sewer that we hadn’t been able to accomplish in the 19½ years we had already been there he could not articulate.

And here he goes again!

We can’t let Ukraine lose. It needs a lot more aid, starting with artillery.

by Max Boot | Monday, June 13, 2022 | 7:00 AM EDT[1]If you are stymied by The Washington Post’s paywall, you can read the whole thing here, for free.

Max boot, trying to look all journalist-like in his fedora. From his Twitter biography.

The battle of Donbas — with momentous implications for the future of Ukraine and the entire postwar world — is poised on a knife edge.

The Ukrainians are resisting bravely, but they are suffering terrible casualties and slowly losing ground. They are able to fire only 5,000 to 6,000 artillery rounds a day, compared with 50,000 rounds a day from the Russians. The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition for their old Soviet artillery, and they don’t have enough Western artillery tubes to make up for the shortfall.

I am reminded of the old poem about how “for want of a nail a shoe was lost,” then a horse, then a rider, then a battle, then a kingdom. We cannot afford to see Donbas lost for want of artillery shells.

If Russian dictator Vladimir Putin captures this region, after having already secured a land corridor from Crimea to the Russian border, he will hold roughly a fourth of Ukraine, including its industrial heartland and most of its Black Sea coast. The Ukrainian economy is already in dire shape (estimated to shrink by 45 percent this year). Putin will then be in a position to further squeeze the rump state, while preparing a final offensive to finish it off.

Even a limited Russian victory will send a dangerous signal to the world that the West is weak and aggression pays. We must send lots more aid to Ukraine now to avert the loss of Donbas and to enable a counteroffensive to retake ground already occupied, but not yet fortified, by the invaders.

Emphasis in the original.

The most obvious Ukrainian need is for more artillery tubes and shells. The Biden administration has already provided 108 M777 155mm howitzers and more than 220,000 artillery rounds. More recently, it promised to send four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (Himars) and ammunition with a maximum range of roughly 45 miles. That is wholly insufficient; even the 220,000 rounds would not last five days at current rates of use.

Huh? If, as Mr Boot stated just a couple of paragraphs previously, that the Ukrainians are able to fire only 5.000 to 6,000 artillery rounds per day, 220,000 rounds would last a whole lot longer than 4½ days. He’s actually talking about the Russians’ rate of fire, not the Ukrainians’.

The West should be sending hundreds of howitzers and multi-launch rocket systems, thousands of rockets and hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds. This should include Excalibur GPS-guided rounds for the M177 (range: 24 miles) and Army Tactical Missile Systems for the Himars (range: 186 miles). Those longer-range munitions would enable the Ukrainians to target Russia’s artillery, rockets and supply lines without risking their new weapons close to the front lines. Of course, it will take time to train Ukrainians on these systems, but they have shown they are fast learners.

That, of course, is not all Mr Boot wants to send to Ukraine to fight the Russians: he also called for sending  MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones, F-16 fighter jets, A-10 “Warthog” ground-attack aircraft and Patriot air-defense systems.

An obvious question: if “we can’t let Ukraine lose,” as he claims in the column title, what does he want to do if Ukraine is about to lose even after such arms are sent to them?

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Max Boot and Allahpundit Are Very Worried About Our Friends in Ukraine

In 1939, President Roosevelt started sending military equipment to the United Kingdom, covertly at first, then more openly, to hold off the Third Reich. Following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, we started sending military aid to the USSR as well. There were worries that Adolf Hitler would see this as the United States being at war with Germany, and it was bandied about that that was exactly what the President wanted, for Germany to declare war on the United States. After all, we had 3,600 miles of deep, blue water between the United States and German-occupied France, so there was really nothing Der Führer could do to us!

But if we start sending more and more supplies and weapons to Ukraine, we will be putting American troops and contractors on the ground in Poland . . . and Russia has the weaponry to strike Poland. Perhaps Mr Boot thinks that Vladimir Putin would never dare to strike an American installation, especially one on the soil of a NATO member nation, and I will admit that it would seem to be a stupid, stupid move. But we need to remember: Mr Putin is perfectly capable of stupid moves!

Yes, I have a vested interest in this: my older daughter is, as I type, preparing for a year-long deployment to Kuwait with the Army Corps of Engineers. While it seems unlikely, increased American presence in Poland, to ship more weapons to Ukraine, could very well result in a change of orders; the first people needed for an American installation in Poland would be the Corps of Engineers, and surveyors, and my daughter is a surveyor!

Russia has thousands of battlefield range and short range nuclear weapons. Just how would the United States, and NATO, respond if, feeling his back against the wall, Mr Putin used one, just one, lower-yield nuke against a shipping point for American and NATO weapons to Ukraine? He might well believe that such a tactic would so scare the US and NATO about a potential all-out nuclear war that we’d just stop and back off.

And, quite frankly, that should be the response. Ukraine is not worth a nuclear war!

Mr Boot and the neoconservatives have spent a lot of time and ink and bandwidth arguing for an aggressive, muscular, and interventionist American foreign policy, with the second Persian Gulf War against Iraq being the most obvious example. The first was started by Saddam Hussein, and if the ender President Bush had not been so eager to limit that war, and just gone a couple of days more, we could have eliminated Saddam Hussein in 1991. Because we didn’t do that, his son got in his head to rectify that, and we had the debacle of the second Iraqi war, which did topple President Hussein, but Iraq today is hardly a democratic paradise. We went into Afghanistan because we had to, to respond to al Qaeda’s attack on the United States, but we stayed and stayed and stayed, far beyond the mission to destroy al Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden, stayed 10½ years after Mr bin Laden was sent to his eternal reward, and what was accomplished? Afghanistan is once again ruled by the Taliban, who have been reimposing the same policies that they had during their first reign.[2]Full disclosure: on my daughter’s previous deployment to Kuwait, she wound up in Afghanistan, though she was apparently in little danger.

I get it: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was very wrong, and almost everyone wants to see Ukraine win against the Russians. But I, at least, do not think it is worth risking what Major Kong called “nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies.” The neo-cons, most of whom never spent a day in uniform, seem to have a romantic vision of the combat which they’ve only seen in the movies. If Mr Boot wants to see more American and NATO equipment sent to Ukraine to fight the Russians, then he needs to be on one of those convoys, in uniform, carrying an M4 rifle, and ready to fight himself. After all, he did note that there are “foreign volunteers” fighting with Ukraine’s ground forces. He needs to sign up himself.

References

References
↑1 If you are stymied by The Washington Post’s paywall, you can read the whole thing here, for free.
↑2 Full disclosure: on my daughter’s previous deployment to Kuwait, she wound up in Afghanistan, though she was apparently in little danger.
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The war mongers keep beating the drums Do you want to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia?

I get it: almost everyone wants to help Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion. Helping Ukraine is good and noble, and something people just want to do. But there are some good and noble things which might not be all that wise.

My good friend, and contributor to this poor site on days when I cannot, William Teach, noted that there are some people who want the United States to get much, much more involved in the war in Ukraine:

Good Grief, Now They’re Advocating Giving Ukraine Three Squadrons Of A-10s

By William Teach March 4, 2022 – 6:45 am

There have been lots of memes about the coming WWIII. We’ve had people, such as Excitable Adam Kinzinger, push for a no fly zone. I certainly agree with Vox that it would be a monumentally bad idea. Thankfully, NATO and Let’s Go Brandon agree. Sending all those troops over to Europe isn’t the brightest idea. What are a few thousand going to do, when the U.S. already has over 50k in the European theater? Here’s another staggeringly foolish idea:

Transfer three A-10 aircraft squadrons to Ukraine now

“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,“ spoke U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill in February 1941. Following this powerful speech, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed and Congress approved the lend-lease program. This provided the U.K. equipment and access to United States production capacity. This action was essential to stopping the Nazi advances.

Zelenskyy has been asking for planes. So far, NATO nations have said “nope.”

Sanctions must be accompanied by military success.

Zelenskyy has requested weapons and support in line with Churchill’s philosophy. Ukrainian soldiers have proved their courage and bravery. There is one more step that could be decisive: the transfer of three squadrons of A-10 aircraft to the Ukrainian Air Force.

This aircraft and its gun system were designed to counter an armored assault in Europe. They proved effective in Desert Storm’s target-rich environment, quite similar to the current advancing Russian force. They also became the infantry’s friend in close-air support missions.

The United States Air Force has deployment packages ready to go. The whole transfer to the Ukrainian Air Force could be completed in days after congressional authorization.

If you want to start WWIII, this would be a good way to do so. How do you get the planes there? Who flies them in? How does Russia react when A10’s which were the property of the United States just days before start blowing up Russian military equipment and troops? Furthermore, who will fly the planes? American pilots? WWIII. Ukrainian pilots? Are any trained on them? They aren’t bicycles. What about all the armaments? Shooting American made depleted uranium slugs would be WWIII.

Mr Teach then cited Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District) and his tweeted series as to why he has not supported the resolutions moving through the House to support Ukraine.

Mr Massie’s twitter thread is seven tweets long:

  • (2 of 7)The resolution contains an open ended call for additional and immediate “defensive security assistance.” This term is so broad that it could include American boots on the ground or, as some of my colleagues have already requested, US enforcement of a no-fly zone.
  • (3/7) It expands the geographic scope of the US commitment to the conflict in Ukraine by condemning the country of Belarus. We should not be seeking to name new enemies or committing to overturning other governments.
  • (4/7) It calls for “fully isolating” Russia economically. This would hurt low-income US citizens who are already reeling from inflation. Innocent people in Russia, many of whom oppose Putin’s aggression, would suffer under crippling sanctions, possibly turning them against us.
  • (5/7) Crippling sanctions could also drive Putin to become more desperate, inciting him to resort to drastic measures such as escalating the weapons employed or the people targeted.
  • (6/7) The resolution contains a gratuitous statement that Ukraine and NATO will determine the relationship between the two of them. Of course this is true, but why should Congress assert this now when the goal is to de-escalate the conflict?
  • (7/7) It calls for continuing support “as long as the Russian Federation continues to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty.” Depending on the definition of “violate,” this could be a US commitment to forever be actively engaged in a conflict with another nuclear country.

Mr Massie is, alas! not my district’s representative — I live in the 6th District — but he’s one of the best men in Congress. He understands that, emotion aside, starting a war with nuclear-armed Russia isn’t exactly the brightest idea in the world.[1]Representative Massie also voted against the virtue signaling ‘anti-lynching’ bill, noting that the crimes involved in lynching — murder, assault, and kidnapping — are already … Continue reading

As World War II raged in Europe, but before we entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States engaged in some pretty blatant war moves against the Third Reich, sending war materiel to His Majesty’s Government, and later, even to Comrade Stalin’s. Our neutrality was hardly neutral!

It didn’t matter: there was nothing der Führer could do about it. His U-boats went after the convoys, and sent a lot of American Lend-lease largesse to the bottom of the Atlantic. President Roosevelt began “neutrality patrols” to convoy the cargo ships as far as Iceland, and for a while, Germany was deterred from attacking US Navy ships.

Following Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan . . . but not on Germany. Adolf Hitler, in yet another moment of his madness, decided that, on December 11, 1941, Germany would declare war on the United States, a colossal mistake, at a time in which the US, then at war only with Japan, could have concentrated our might in the Pacific.

But, just as the United Kingdom and France, despite their guarantees, could do nothing to help Poland, Germany could do nothing to strike at the United States. When Prime Minister Churchill said, “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,” he was speaking to a nation untouched, and untouchable, by war, a nation which risked little by ramping up its factories to build tanks and airplanes and rifles.

That isn’t the situation today. Unlike 1939, unlike 1941, the enemy can strike us, can literally kill hundreds of millions of Americans in less than an hour, can destroy every one of our major cities and irradiate our rural areas with a deadly fallout. Yes, that would mean that Russia was destroyed in turn, as the US could and almost certainly would launch an equally devastating nuclear response against the Soviet Union Russia, meaning that Russia would not somehow ‘win’ the nuclear war, but we would just as certainly lose. It would seem most probable that President Putin wouldn’t be insane enough to order a nuclear strike, but, then again, it would seem most probable that he wouldn’t have his troops fire on a Ukrainian nuclear power plant, but that’s exactly what happened. It wound up being a bold and successful move, because after Russian artillery started fires at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians rushed to put out the fires, and Russian troops then occupied the plant, but it was a plan that could easily have gone very, very wrong. Counting on the former подполковник in the Комитет государственной безопасности to see things the way Westerners do is not a particularly wise strategy. What a man with a strategic nuclear arsenal, if pushed to the brink of military defeat in Ukraine, might do is something which ought to worry us.

Wanting to do more, wanting to do what we can to help Ukraine is not the same thing as wanting to help the United Kingdom, and later the Soviet Union, against Germany, because what we were doing in 1939 and 1940 and 1941 was with little risk to us. It took no real courage for us to give assistance to the UK and USSR then.

Now, it does. But there is a point at which courage stops being courage, and devolves into pure madness, and that point is when you go to war with an enemy with a strategic nuclear arsenal. Just one Soviet Russian Проект 955 Борей SSBN could obliterate every major city on our east coast.

In the movie War Games, the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) computer, initially tricked into starting a Global Thermonuclear War, analyzes all of the variants, and finally says, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Yup, that’s right!

References

References
↑1 Representative Massie also voted against the virtue signaling ‘anti-lynching’ bill, noting that the crimes involved in lynching — murder, assault, and kidnapping — are already against the law in every state in the union.

I am reminded of the federal ‘hate crimes’ trial against the three men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. The georgia state court had already sentenced them to life in prison, two without the possibility of parole, and the third ineligible for parole for thirty years. How much more punishment could we give these guys with the federal hate crimes convictions? It’s not like we can keep their corpses in prison for years and years after they’ve already died.
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The new complaint from the left: we are treating Ukrainian refugees differently from Middle Eastern ones

Robert Stacy McCain noticed this before I did, but I have an excuse: I was working in my shop, finally repairing a small sidewall workbench in my shop. It’s narrow, primarily used as a sanding station — and too often, a flat surface on which to stack things — and had been damaged and sagging due to last year’s floods. The bench is narrow because I had to leave room for vehicles to pull into the garage. I added support where the plywood bench was sagging, leveling it out, and then added some edge banding using scrap hardwood I had, and if you really care, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

Mr McCain noticed that Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times was making the Russian invasion of Ukraine about race, because that’s just what she does.

    Infamous Race Hustler Uses Ukraine War to — You Guessed It — Hustle Race

    by Robert Stacy McCain | March 2, 2022

    The brilliance of Critical Race Theory is that it enables practitioners to see racism literally everywhere:

      Left-wing New York Times reporter and controversial 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones was slammed online after accusing journalists covering the Russian invasion into Ukraine of “racialized analysis and language” in their reporting, indicating their “sympathy” for white victims of conflict and refugees in particular while claiming Europe is a fictional continent intended to separate it from non-“civilized” nations.

      On Sunday, Hannah-Jones, author of the debunked New York Times 1619 Project, called on fellow journalists to “look internally” regarding acknowledging their racial biases in their coverage of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      “Every journalist covering Ukraine should really, really look internally. This is why I say we should stop pretending we have objectivity and in instead acknowledge our biases so that we can report against them,” she wrote. “Many of us see the racialized analysis and language.”

      She added, “And honestly, these admissions of shock that this is happening in a European country are ahistorical and also serve to justify the lack of sympathy for other invasions, other occupations and other refugee crisis involving peoples not considered white.”

      Later in the day, Hannah-Jones called the European continent a “geopolitical fiction” intended to separate it from Asia and which led to the “alarm” over an invasion of people who “are like us.”

Further down:

    Would you like me to tell you the most perfect thing here? The author of this Breitbart article is Joshua Klein. You know that this race-hustling stuff has become a losing game for the Left when you see Jews calling it out. And while we’re on the subject of ethnic politics, why do you think there was such a shift of Latino voters to the GOP in 2020? It’s because they are likewise getting fed up with this BLM/CRT nonsense.

    Keep in mind that it’s not as if prejudice against Jews and Latinos doesn’t exist in America, or in the Republican Party for that matter. It’s just that sensible people, whatever their ethnicity or position within the Universal Oppression Matrix, can recognize a scam as obvious as the one being foisted upon us by such “intellectuals” as Nikole Hannah-Jones.

    At a time when we’re teetering on the brink of World War III, nobody wants to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling.

Well, it seems that Mr McCain was wrong: at least the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer thought people would want to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling:

    Infuriated, not shocked: People from the Middle East are noticing that now you care about war in Ukraine | Opinion

    A Syrian refugee and Palestinian in Philadelphia hope the Russian invasion to Ukraine will make people care about their people’s suffering.

    by Abraham Gutman | Thursday, February 3, 2022 | 9:24 AM EST

    The horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to an outpouring of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. But Ukrainians are not the only people who suffer under oppression. And people from the Middle East, who are used to their plight for justice going ignored, are noticing the difference.

    Moumena Saradar, now 45, was born and raised in Damascus. In 2011, when a brutal civil war started, she was too worried about the safety of her five children to stay. One morning, a sniper started shooting in her neighborhood. “The bullets were just a few feet away from my kids when they were going to school,” she recalled over the phone this week. “We are lucky that they are still alive.”

    Her family went to Egypt in 2012. It was hard starting a new life, especially after they left everything back home. They registered as refugees with the United Nations, and were chosen to come to the United States. But her struggle was not over. “It wasn’t easy at all. We were going through one year of interviews with different agents, officers, background checks — but luckily we made it and we came here in summer 2016.”

    Philadelphia has been her home ever since. She works as a medical translator and as a part-time Global Guide in the Penn Museum, walking visitors through the Middle East exhibit.

    While Saradar waited for refuge, people didn’t talk about Syrian refugees the way they talk about the people leaving Ukraine. On the campaign trail in 2015, Donald Trump suggested Syrian refugees might be terrorists in disguise, and promised, “If I win, they’re going back.” The sentiment wasn’t his alone. By November 2015, governors in 30 states publicly demanded that resettlement of Syrian refugees halt, and the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution — with the not-so-subtle title American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act — to limit the number of refugees from Syria.

    Today, the refugee discourse feels completely different. A recent Data for Progress poll found that 63% of voters — including half of Republican voters — believe the United States should accept Ukrainian refugees. When the White House announced that it was prepared to do that, right-wing politicians and media didn’t pounce — as many did just a few months ago, when the refugees the United States was preparing to accept were from Afghanistan.

There’s more at the original, but the article fails to consider the obvious: the invasion of Ukraine is categorically different from the internal strike that has afflicted so many nations in the Middle East. Ukraine is a sovereign nation, that was invaded by the military forces of another sovereign nation, and the nearest equivalent we have to that was the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

Ukraine, though there were Russian separatists in control of parts of two eastern provinces, was not an internal civil war, marked by multiple groups, using terrorism against civilians as one of their primary weapons, and Ukraine didn’t have an equivalent of Da’ish, more commonly known as the Islamic State, trying to impose a radically harsh version of Shari’a, Islamic religious law, on the lands it controlled.

Syria, from where Moumena Saradar came? That was a civil war, encouraged at least in part by the United States during the Obama Administration, and its then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as part of the Arab Spring. The Arabic revolts toppled many authoritarian rulers, only to see them mostly replaced by other authoritarian rulers, but Bashir al-Assad managed to hang on to power in Damascus, leading eventually to the Syrian Civil War, which is still going on today, eleven years after it began. Given the chaos of the civil war, the poor record-keeping in the country, and the difficulties in getting records from the Syrian government, is it any particular surprise that the United States was being cautious concerning the Syrian refugees allowed to enter?

Of course, the United States was involved: the US had several units in Syria, troops sent in under President Obama, though it was supposedly a secret, a secret that isn’t a secret any longer. President Trump wanted to pull all American forces out of Syria, but met with some resistance by the Pentagon, and he didn’t get all American troops out by the time he left office.

Ukraine is part of Europe — the Europe that Miss Hannah-Jones claims is a fictional entity — and Ukraine is right next door to Poland. When the refugees escape Ukraine, they are directly escaping into a NATO nation. If the European nations don’t accept the Ukrainian refugees, they would be bottling them up in Ukraine, in the path of Russian troops.

    One reason for the difference, Saradar says, is the way the crisis is covered by the media. And she has a point. Pundits and reporters have drawn a racist contrast between Ukraine and places in the Middle East that suffered war. News viewers have heard that Kyiv is a “civilized city” and that the civilians at risk have “blue eyes and blond hair.” An article in the British newspaper the Telegraph about the war in Ukraine opened with: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts.”

Kyiv absolutely was a civilized city, a European civilized city, in ways that Damascus and other Middle Eastern capitals simply are not. Many of the European nations which have accepted Middle Eastern refugees are experiencing significant cultural shocks, as Arab Middle Easterners are bringing in customs and morés which are far more different from those of Europeans than would be those from Ukrainian refugees.

    Jude Hussein, 24, has also noticed the difference. She is a member of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Millennial Advisory Commission who was born in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the territory of the West Bank that is under Israeli occupation. I asked her how it felt to see an outpouring of support to Ukrainians after the Russian invasion. “It wasn’t shocking, but it was infuriating,” Hussein responded. “The same human-rights violations that are happening now in Ukraine have been happening for decades in Palestine.”

    This is a dynamic Hussein has gotten used to. “When Europe is on the line, whether it is a violation of human rights or international law, the world has their eyes wide open and they are willing to act on such violations. But when it comes to the Middle East, and Palestine, especially as brown people, the world always shies away.”

The Inquirer article included a photo of Miss Hussein, who certainly doesn’t look all that “brown” to me! The caption on the photo shows Miss Hussein, “a Palestinian American, celebrating International Palestinian Solidarity Day in Philadelphia on November 29, 2021.” In other words, she was demonstrating against Israel, an American ally, and the only truly democratic and civilized nation in the Middle East.

    She’s right: Less than a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pennsylvania started looking at ways to divest from Russian companies — including removing Russian vodkas from state liquor stores. Gov. Tom Wolf called the removal of Russian products “a show of solidarity and support for the people of Ukraine, and an expression of our collective revulsion with the unprovoked actions of the Russian state.”

    This was the same Tom Wolf who in 2016 signed a bill that prevents the state from contracting with businesses that boycott Israel. At the time, the governor said that Pennsylvania “will not encourage economic punishment in place of peaceful solutions to challenging conflicts.”

Let me be frank here: the United States does, and should, favor Israel, and ought to disfavor her enemies. The Arab nations and cultures sponsor terrorism and anti-Americanism, as part of their cultures, and we ought to be much more suspicious about admitting refugees from those nations — were I President, the number of such refugees admitted to the United States would be zero — into the United States. They do not add to our nation, but increase division, just as Miss Hussein was doing when she was demonstrating against Israel.

Ukraine is not our enemy, and Ukrainians don’t hate the United States and the West. The Ukrainian refugees ought to be settled in Europe, not the United States, and this ought to be seen as a European problem, not ours. But I have no problem at all with Western democratic governments, and people, recognizing that Ukrainian and Middle Eastern refugees are not identical.

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Los gringos estan locos!

I had to take a screenshot of this tweet, in case Dana Houle deletes it, and I can only say that I am highly disappointed that someone named Dana could be so boneheadedly stupid. You can click on the image to get to the original tweet . . . if it still exists.

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Lost Kos, tweeted something similarly stupid.

The bombs are falling, people are trying to flee — at least as of this writing, the roads out of Kyiv are jammed — and the American snowflakes are worried about whether the Ukrainians are wearing masks. https://i0.wp.com/www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_wacko.gif?w=612&ssl=1 Los gringos estan locos!

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The neo-conservatives beat the drum for war Are you willing to face nuclear annihilation over Ukraine?

It ought to be an established truth: if Bill Kristol and his gaggle of ‘neo-conservatives’ at The Bulwark support something, you just know that it’s wrong:

    The Right’s Argument Against Aiding Ukraine Is Wrong—and Dangerous

    A Russian conquest of Ukraine would be perilous for America and our allies.

    by Reuben Johnson | Friday, February 11, 2022 | 5:18 AM EST

    Kyiv – Conservative opinion in America seems to be hardening around opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine. The United States, the logic goes, has no stake in whether or not Russia invades Ukraine. Ukraine is a European nation and that makes it Europe’s problem.

    This argument is wrong and reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of what is at stake in Ukraine’s confrontations with Russia.

    For starters, modern Europe has never been able to handle its own military confrontations. The only nation in the NATO alliance that can lead the Europeans in a major multinational endeavor is the United States. There is a simple explanation for this imbalance: Because a European state strong enough to lead a coalition against a threat such as Russia would also be strong enough to dominate Western Europe. Which is not a state of affairs helpful to America’s interests.

Ignoring for the moment the pitiful grammar of the final sentence, the obvious question is: so what? At a certain point, it has to be asked what is to be gained here.

On March 31, 1939, finally realizing that Adolf Hitler’s word was worthless, the United Kingdom and France offered guarantees of Polish sovereignty. Two days after the Wehrmacht rolled in, on September 1, 1939, the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany.

But they could do nothing about the invasion: they hadn’t the men or equipment in place, and when it came to actual war, in the spring of 1940, the two nations’ militaries reeled before an attack by Germany on their forces on French soil. In the end, Poland was ‘liberated’ not by the United Kingdom, not by France, but by the Red Army, and that ‘liberation’ meant not freedom, but 45 years of Communist domination.

    Next, what happens in Ukraine does not necessarily stay in Ukraine. Previous invasions of Ukraine by Russia have devastated the Donbas region and the cost has been tremendous. If Russia invades again, the cost of rebuilding Ukrainian infrastructure Russian forces destroy could, in the words of the former Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, “turn Ukraine into a failed state.”

Well, that would then be Russia’s problem, wouldn’t it?

    Finally, tolerating a militaristic expansion of this kind would mean that “European security and stability” is a myth. There is every reason to believe that failing to stop Russia from continuing to try and destroy its much-smaller neighbor does not prevent war with Moscow, but rather makes likely a much larger, wider war in Europe in the future.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, as the Western democracies were worried that the huge Red Army could roll right in and conquer what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany more colloquially, and the Europeans hadn’t the strength to stop it. NATO’s guarantee was that an attack on one was an attack on all, which was, in effect, a guarantee that the United States, with its large forces and its nuclear weapons, would come to West Germany’s defense.

The USSR detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, far earlier than it was estimated they could.

NATO was a military alliance, including the nuclear-armed United States, against the wholly conventionally-armed Soviet Union; that lasted for 4½ months.

Of course, the Soviets had no way of delivering atomic bombs to targets at the time, and only a few of the devices, but they kept building, and building, and building. By 1951, the USSR tested an air-dropped atomic bomb, which meant that the USSR now had deliverable nuclear weapons.

If NATO had kept to itself, and not expanded following the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, NATO might still be a credible deterrent. But NATO expanded into Poland, and the Baltic States, right on Russia’s doorstep. Russia now has the nuclear arsenal to completely destroy the United States; does anyone seriously believe that Joe Biden, or any American President, would put the lives of 330 million Americans in danger of nuclear incineration to defend Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia?

There is a part of the calculation that is going unsaid: while Western sanctions could impose some real costs on the Soviet Union Russian Federation, those sanctions would inevitably be temporary, while conquering Ukraine would be a permanent addition to Russia. Byelorussia is already approaching vassal state status. Xi Jinping is making the same calculations when it comes to conquering Taiwan.

Reuben Johnson, the article author, after several paragraphs on the history of Russian adventurism and the inability of NATO to stop them, got one thing absolutely right:

    All of which means that if Ukraine receives no help from NATO because they are not a full-fledged member, it will send an ominous signal. It would say that decades of partnering with our alliance, participating in its missions, and contributing personnel and equipment to its operations counts for nothing. If you are attacked by the Russians, there will be no boots on the ground coming to your aid. Which would make the status of being any kind of NATO partner nation worth nothing—and could cripple, if not destroy, the alliance.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is just as aware of that as Mr Johnson, and it is an incentive for President Putin to go ahead and act. More, he has an incentive to strike sooner rather than later:

    Which European Countries Depend on Russian Gas?

    by Katharina Buchholz | February 3, 2022

    As the United States and the EU are working on a strategy to replace natural gas supply to Europe should Russia turn off the tap in a standoff with Western powers over Ukraine, Qatar has said that it sees no way that it could replace the needed amount by itself. If new sanctions were to be introduced against Russian President Vladimir Putin personally or his country, this could trigger an energy crisis on the continent due to much of Europe’s reliance on Russian gas, which arrives on the continent via pipelines.

    According to Reuters, close U.S. ally Qatar wants guarantees that natural gas diverted to Europe would not be resold and has urged European countries to resolve their investigation into Qatari gas contracts in order to become a regular customer themselves – which could more permanently shift gas dependencies in Europe.

    Data from the European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators shows which countries’ energy supply would be most at risk in the case of a Russian gas freeze. Among Europe’s major economies, Germany imports around half of its gas from Russia, while France only obtains a quarter of its supply from the country, according to the latest available data. The biggest source of French gas was Norway, supplying 35 percent. Italy would also be among the most impacted at a 46 percent reliance on Russian gas.

    The UK is in a different position, drawing half of its gas supply from domestic sources and importing mostly from Norway and also Qatar. Spain is also not on the list of Russia’s major customers, the biggest trade partners of the country being Algeria and the U.S.

    Some smaller European countries rely exclusively on Russian gas, namely North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Moldova. Dependence also was above 90 percent of gas supply in Finland and Latvia and at 89 percent in Serbia, as per the latest available data.

It’s the middle of February, and cutting off Russian gas to Europe would mean that many Europeans could freeze to death. Any sanctions that the West could impose on Russia for invading Ukraine would take time to work, and, to be brutally honest about it, Russia could withstand a loss of euros coming in for a lot longer than Europeans could survive without heat during the winter. More, alternate sources of fuel coming in would be coming in by liquified natural gas tankers, and sinking just one of them would probably mean that no future shipments would be made; the LNG tankers are privately-owned, no insurance companies would cover subsequent shipments, and many crew would simply refuse to become targets for Russian submarines.

More, as Western Europe tries to move away from fossil fuels, Russia’s position as the primary gas supplier becomes weaker every passing year; it is to President Putin’s advantage to move sooner rather than later.

It seems difficult to blame this on President Biden, because there’s really nothing serious he could do about it, but it is worth noting that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping weren’t putting this kind of pressure on President Trump.

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