Tentative hip replacement re-scheduled forApril 25. Hope, HOPE, doesn't make a mistake.
Soros not happy either.
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I fear him because he is a disaster.
No One Fears Biden
By Kyle Smith
Posted By Ruth King
Long before our president invited a Ukrainian invasion by suggesting a ‘minor incursion’ would be fine, Vladimir Putin had his number.
Last June, ahead of a Russia–U.S. meeting, Time magazine conjured up a piece of embarrassing cover-art propaganda featuring Joe Biden’s aviator glasses reflecting Vladimir Putin. At last, a U.S. president had Putin in his sights! Finally we’d get back to putting Russia in its place.
“How Biden Plans to Get Tough on Putin During Their Geneva Summit,” promised a breathless story by Brian Bennett. A senior administration official suggested Biden, despite the “chaos” that President Trump had supposedly unleashed in the world, would use a combination of unity talk — everyone in Europe was on the same page about Russia, supposedly — and thinly veiled threats about retaliatory cyberattacks to show Putin who’s boss. “The whole goal is to have [Putin] come away saying, ‘The Americans are onto us and have us encircled,’” the official told Bennett. The writer editorialized that, “Biden is qualified to lead the approach. He’s spent decades in debates on U.S.-Russian relations as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.” Whew, then.
So how’d everything work out? Well, according to Bennett himself, in a follow-up piece that sounded a bit less like a fangirl transcribing a press release and more like someone who had actually observed Biden up close, noted that Putin seemed somehow to have been the one who came out on top. “The stagecraft,” Bennett noted glumly, “played to Putin’s personal vanity and his long-standing desire for Russia to be taken seriously as a major rival to the U.S. . . . Putin seemed to relish the platform in Geneva” because it placed the two countries on an equal footing. Oh, and the “White House said it did not expect any deliverables to come out of the meeting,” despite Biden doing a very Joe Biden version of laying down the law: He handed Putin a list of 16 kinds of cyberattacks that he considered to be off limits. Did that mean all other kinds were okay? Putin may have been forgiven if he went back to his dacha and spent the following 24 hours giggling.
“What ever [sic] happens in Ukraine we shouldn’t underestimate the fact the United States has retaken the adult chair in the world,” claimed former Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart on Twitter yesterday. “Biden has restored American leadership so damaged by Trump. The world needs us and we have a President who can and does lead.” The grownups are back in charge? Granted that Trump behaved, and behaves, like a toddler. But is a woke undergraduate a grownup?
Biden and whoever is giving him orders about what he’s allowed to do are running the administration like a woke blog. After gathering half a century of experience, supposedly mastering the intricacies of Washington, D.C., and using that expertise to be wrong on more or less every big foreign-policy question over that period, Biden’s focus is primarily on issuing dumb young-adult taunts to his detractors by, for instance, appointing Merrick Garland attorney general (then watching Garland treat angry parents at school-board meetings like al-Qaeda), nominating for comptroller of the currency a woman who expressly argued for driving fossil-fuel companies out of business, and nominating to the Fed another woman who said much the same thing. Biden tried to use executive action to hamstring fossil fuels by imposing a “social cost” calculation on their actions, then, when a court struck this down, froze (again) new drilling on federal lands.
Imagine what all of this self-sabotaging looks like to Vladimir Putin. Here we have a man whose continued relevance, hence his worldview, is dependent on understanding that fossil fuel is king. The idea of Putin weakening his own hand on the geopolitical stage is absurd. But then again, Putin, unlike the average Swarthmore climate-justice obsessive or senior White House official, lives in a world in which hard power determines outcomes. Putin has gas and oil, and these become more valuable every day Biden schemes to handicap U.S. gas and oil. Putin is like the playground bully manhandling a little kid who keeps asking, “Why do you keep hitting yourself?” Except Biden’s America keeps hitting itself even when Putin is far away.
Putin has an image of Biden’s capabilities that goes back a long way. In 2011, Biden was the leader of Barack Obama’s Great Reset, polishing Putin’s boots with his tongue in order to troll Republicans in a summit during which the then–vice president “got punk’d,” says a White House stenographer, when Putin turned the sound and lights off when Biden was in the middle of a sentence.
Time’s Bennett painted this pathetic picture after the Geneva summit last June, noting that when Biden spoke, “holding a notecard in his hands,” he described Russia and the United States as “two great powers.” Weak, inept, confused, tired, clutching a note card like an unprepared student: That’s how Biden is, and that’s certainly how Putin sees him. Long before our president invited a Ukrainian invasion by suggesting a “minor incursion” would be fine, Vladimir Putin had his number. If anything stops him, it won’t be fear of the wrath of Joe Biden.
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Throw in the entire Western World.
I do not believe it is because of Isolationism but because we have lost the will to do what it takes to win and that causes isolationism.
When you feed bullies you simply increase their appetite.
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America Is Afraid of War. Putin Knows It.
The invasion of Ukraine and the rise of America’s isolationists.
By Zoe Strimpel
A poster of Putin is used as target practice along a trench on the frontline with Russia-backed separatists in the Lugansk region. (Photo by Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)
Early Thursday morning, Russia began invading Ukraine. There have been reports of airstrikes in Kiev, the capital, and more than a dozen other cities. The 190,000 Russian troops that had been stationed around the Ukrainian border are now streaming over it. Ukraine has declared martial law.
The invasion, Putin explained just before it began, was not really an invasion but a defensive maneuver meant to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine. The West, Putin suggested, was making a lot of noise about Ukrainian independence, because it was looking for an excuse to admit Ukraine into NATO and invade Russia. “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood,” Putin said Monday. He added that, “if Ukraine were to join NATO, it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia.”
The Kremlin views this conflict as part of a much bigger showdown between Russia and the West. If that sounds like the Cold War, that’s because in the eyes of the former KGB agent in charge of Russia, the Soviet collapse was a catastrophe, and this is part of righting that wrong. It is a relitigation of a titanic struggle we thought was over.
There is only one country that can bring this relitigation to an immediate end and restore order not only to Ukraine but the whole of Europe. To do that, the United States would have to convince Putin that it is willing to go to war to protect Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. But no one believes it is.
“Deterrence is a simple equation: capability times will,” former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told me. “I think that many of our adversaries today think our will is about zero. I think we’re set up for a cascading crisis now in large measure because of the perception that our will is diminished.”
The problem is not just that the United States has, over the past two decades, waged two unsuccessful wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor is it just that Americans are tired of fighting and don’t care about the former Soviet Union, although there’s some of that. (In a poll just released by the Associated Press, just 26 percent of Americans say the U.S. should play a major role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.) Nor is it just that Joe Biden is a weak president who lacks the energy needed to do battle with the likes of Vladimir Putin. (See, for example, the statement Biden put out shortly after the invasion was announced.)
It’s that the United States seems to have forgotten the point of waging, or threatening to wage, war. Peace is earned through strength. We can’t ask for it. We can’t talk our way into it. We can’t simply impose (or lift) sanctions. We have to achieve it by threatening—credibly—to pummel into oblivion anyone who gets in the way.
There is a reason that Teddy Roosevelt’s famous 1901 pronouncement—“Speak softly, and carry a big stick”—has become something of a cliché. It’s because it works.
This used to be understood, or taken for granted, not only in Washington but in London, Paris and every other NATO capital. That is no longer the case—in no small part because both left and right, while moving further apart from each other in almost every other respect, have converged on a shared neo-isolationism. Today, almost no one in any position of authority is willing to make a moral argument for going to war.
If you grew up in the second half of the 20th century, during the Cold War or immediately after, you heard often about America being the world’s policeman. During this time, Britain watched its empire collapse and the American empire, which the Americans never called an empire, rise. America promised to respect freedom, democracy and minority rights, and it backed that up with force: a sprawling conventional army, a vast navy, thousands of fighter jets, a nuclear umbrella that extended across the West.
I felt the safety of this promise keenly as a child in London. Most of my extended family had been decimated by the Third Reich, and the idea of a liberal and humane controlling authority was enormously reassuring.
Of course, America had many faults. There were plenty of Vietnamese who did not regard it as a beacon of freedom. The same was true in large pockets of Latin America and Africa. And it was haunted still by slavery. It had gotten much wrong, at home and overseas.
But still. America was the crown jewel of the West, the culmination of a 2,500-year-old evolution that stretched back to the Athenian polis. It had hurtled human progress forward, created gleaming skylines and world-renowned universities and an American Dream that—amazingly—was open to the entire world. It was an invitation to everyone. At the heart of all this was a new kind of civilization that transcended ancient bloodlines and tribal affiliations. It was rooted in the Enlightenment, and its radical promise—that all men are created equal—offered dignity and hope. It was held together by a democratic tradition, an individualism that was rugged but tempered by a sense of community and duty, and the rule of law.
All of this is blindingly obvious but has become almost embarrassing to say out loud. That’s because we no longer know who we are or why it matters.
Instead, we have become consumed by a simple-minded dichotomy: fix America or fix the world. Repair America’s infrastructure, broken schools, heroin addicts and disappearing shorelines, or step in, with force, to protect countries, often ailing democracies, that look to us for security.
“Today, the United States is spending over $300 billion on defense,” Bernie Sanders, then mayor of Burlington, Vermont, said in 1988—giving voice to a worldview that has since become mainstream. “At the same time, the federal government this year will have a deficit of $150 billion, three million Americans will be sleeping out on the streets, tens of millions of Americans are unable to afford health insurance, and higher education is becoming an unobtainable dream.”
Tulsi Gabbard, running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, echoed Sanders. “We have spent trillions of your taxpayer dollars to pay for these wars, taking those dollars away from our communities and our people who need them right here at home,” she said in her campaign launch video.
Blake Masters, who is running for Senate in Arizona and is a prominent member of a rising generation of pro-Trump, America-first Republicans, says on his campaign website: “The American people have made clear that we need to end our pointless interventions abroad and focus on our problems at home.”
In a recent opinion piece, Republican Senator Josh Hawley echoed this sentiment: “The Washington elite have shelled out trillions on nation-building abroad while families and towns in this nation have languished, denied industry and good-paying jobs.”
On the right, neo-isolationism seems to spring from a desire to make America great again and a conviction that the country cannot be repaired—that it has already been swallowed up by a woke cabal that controls every important institution in American life. This is not just true of the base, but of right-wing intellectuals like Richard Hanania, the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.
“We went to Iraq and Afghanistan, left after 20 years, and the same people are in charge,” Hanania told me. He was critical of a foreign-policy establishment determined to portray Ukraine as a critical ally and Russia as an implacable foe of the United States. After the Cold War, he said, “the Russians, they did something that was historic and unprecedented. They basically gave up their empire. They woke up one day and said, ‘It’s not there anymore.’ And what the U.S. did was it started moving eastward, and it started making alliances with countries closer and closer to Russia’s borders.” In an interview with Tucker Carlson last week, Hanania said: “Who cares what happens in Eastern Europe? That’s none of our business.”
The left, meanwhile, has succumbed, once and for all, to a long-percolating moral relativism. This started in the late 1960s on campus, where the post-structuralists, and, later, the post-modernists, deconstructed traditional notions of truth and morality. In the ambit of this ascendent intellectual ecology, making assertions like “the West is a force for good” or “America is exceptional” betrays, at best, naiveté, or, more likely, a jingoistic and dangerous stupidity. In this view of the world, we are no better—and perhaps worse—than everyone else.
“Every war America has fought in our lifetimes has made the world worse,” Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and law at Yale University, said in an email. Moyn mocked the war on terrorism. “More people die slipping in the bathtub than from terrorism, and far more on the roads,” he said. “Now, we can add that orders of magnitude more perish when a pandemic reveals how little has been done to offer protection from harm in our unequal society and world.”
It took a long time to arrive at this cul de sac.
There have always been two poles in the American foreign-policy universe: the isolationists and the interventionists. After the Soviet collapse, the United States was free to wage war whenever and wherever it saw fit. Maybe a bit too free. After the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush launched the war in Afghanistan, which made sense to most Americans, and then the war in Iraq, which did not.
Then came Barack Obama, who ran against those wars, especially Iraq. Trump codified Obama’s foreign policy, transforming his predecessor’s opposition to these particular wars into all war. “America first will be the overriding theme of my administration,” Trump said in 2016, while laying out his thoughts about foreign policy in a speech in Washington, D.C. “Under a Trump administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of foreign countries.” He went on: “I will never send our finest into battle unless necessary, and I mean absolutely necessary, and will only do so if we have a plan for victory, with a capital V.”
That’s how we arrived at our current guns-versus-butter dichotomy, which posits that if you’re for a robust defense that seeks to preempt violence and authoritarianism, then you’re against doing anything about, say, America’s shrinking manufacturing sector.
There had been other voices who had bought into this—mostly peaceniks, like Sanders—but it wasn’t mainstreamed until Trump ran and won on it. (See, for example, his September 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, in which he asserted that he was against the Iraq War—a dubious claim—because he cared more about the economy.)
“I think this has to do with the collapse of confidence on the part of our leadership as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the forthcoming book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. “Iraq and Afghanistan broke the back of the Republican establishment. And it hasn’t recovered from that.”
By the time Joe Biden sleep-walked into the White House, the argument against interventionism had been fully digested and integrated into the political establishment. Hence, the Americans’ mindless, unstrategic withdrawal from Afghanistan and, of course, their inability or unwillingness to stand firm against the Russians.
“Putin is a much bigger threat than most Americans believe, because his anti-freedom agenda transcends ideology,” Garry Kasparov, the political activist and chess grandmaster, said. “He will support anyone and anything that can disrupt the liberal world order that has allowed the U.S. and other free nations to thrive.” In the absence of American hegemony, Kasparov said, we can expect the Russians or Chinese to step into the void: “The U.S. cannot afford to be isolationist, because American global leadership is a prerequisite for American democracy.”
But leadership demands knowing who we are, what our values are, and how those values distinguish us from others. That ability to recall why the West matters seems to have vanished. Recall what Trump told Joe Scarborough in 2015, when pressed to take a tougher line against Putin: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.” This week, Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential conservative in the country, suggested that all the Putin hate was misplaced. “Has Putin ever called me racist?” Carlson said. “Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?”
It’s easy to understand the impulse to underplay the severity of what is happening right now in Ukraine. No one decent or humane wants war. War means death, destruction and brutality. The idea that we might end it once and for all is understandable. It just happens to ignore history and human nature. Recall that Woodrow Wilson predicted, after the end of World War I, that his League of Nations would bring an end to war forever. Instead, that war was just a preamble to a much worse one. The longer we pursue policies of retrenchment and withdrawal, on either humane or self-interested grounds, the more ground we cede to our enemies—and the more blood that will be ultimately spilled.
When Putin announced that the war was starting in a televised address Thursday, he emphasized that any countries that interfered would face “consequences they have never seen.”
The question is: Will anyone test that threat? Will anyone interfere?
The Latvians, the Lithuanians, the Estonians—they’re wondering: What happens if Russian troops steamroll over us, too? If one of those countries was invaded by the Russians, it would, no doubt, invoke Article Five of the NATO treaty, which would compel all other NATO members, including the United States, to come to their defense. But would they? Or would they retreat and cower? Would they say what so many myopic and inward-looking voices have been saying for years: The Soviet Union is dead. Or, Putin just wants to control his sphere of influence, just as we do ours. Or, Who needs NATO?
What about China? The Chinese are watching the showdown between Russia and Ukraine, and they are thinking, If the Americans won’t defend Kiev, will they defend Taiwan? Will they?
“What we do now, these days, is we don’t project power and strength,” Gen. McMaster said. “What we are really good at these days is projecting weakness. We will only do something militarily after you invade.”
Not long ago, I had a conversation about all this with M, a former platoon commander in the British Army who did tours in Afghanistan and Africa and is now an analyst at a security agency. For professional reasons, he said, it was important that he remain anonymous.
M said the current mess reminded him of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, which the artist painted in 1642. “When I look at it, I just see pure confidence and assuredness of a place in the world,” he said. “These people—they’re showing their wealth and their professional confidence. It’s a portrait that suggests success at all levels.” Then, he pivoted. “Everything that we don’t have, I would say, in the West is this kind of strength of belief in ourselves and our values. You can make adjustments and whatever, but it’s not going to do anything because that’s not the problem. The problem is way, way deeper, at a spiritual level.”
And:
An Unserious People Confront a Serious Man
By Erick-Woods Erickson
Call Vladimir Putin a dictator. Call him an autocrat. Call him a totalitarian. Call him whatever you want, but make sure you understand he is serious. He also knows the West is not. He has brought war to the West’s doorstep.
On December 5, 1989, Putin was running a KGB office for the Soviet Union in Dresden, Germany. The Berlin Wall had fallen and East German mobs were ransacking Stasi headquarters. They came for the KGB in Dresden. Putin called out to the approaching mob that he and his men would open fire. The mob held off. Putin called a Soviet military unit for help. The military could not come, reported the general, because “Moscow is silent.” It was a defining moment for Putin. He has prepared for years and now Moscow will no longer be silent.
Over the last two decades, Putin has taken advantage of the Western world’s grievous fixation with climate change. European nations have reduced their dependence on both fossil fuels and nuclear power. As they expanded wind and solar power, their ability to generate a sustainable base load of power declined. This fostered their dependence on Russian natural gas.
In the United States, Democrat politicians and judges have ended drilling permits and leases on federal land, curtailed and canceled pipelines, and reduced our capacity to be energy independent. Congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas notes we have gone from providing all our oil domestically a few years ago to importing 595,000 barrels of Russian oil a day. The Keystone XL pipeline, which Joe Biden killed, would have generated 830,000 barrels of oil a day. Concurrently, Biden got rid of Donald Trump’s sanctions placed on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a Russian project to supply even more gas to Europe.
Under Barack Obama, the United States got rid of its Two War Doctrine. The doctrine had sustained the United States military since World War II. It merely stated that the United States must have the defense capabilities to fight two wars on two fronts at the same time. The Obama Administration shortsightedly concluded it was no longer needed and, by downsizing the military, the United States would save costs and reduce the military’s carbon footprint. After all, according to the Obama Administration, climate change was a bigger national security issue than Russia or China...
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Kiev paid a price for trusting The West. Ever more reason for gun owners to hold onto theirs.
How Ukraine Was Betrayed in Budapest
Kyiv gave up its nuclear weapons in return for security assurances. So much for that.
By The Editorial Board
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Wars are seldom good for the market but added to that must be the psychological fact that investors have lost faith in Biden, America probably in themselves.
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Again I ask is the president the most powerful man in the world?
Me and our 4thgreat grandchild - Cameron
Me and our 3rd great grandchild, Collins and Cameron's big sister.
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| Putin's Predictabilities |
| by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness It is easy to predict what the Russian president will do in any given situation. Biden is making it easier for Putin to act with aggression. +++ Is Canada Lost? |
Is Canada lost? Dennis addresses Canada’s rapid descent into authoritarianism—suspending and violating basic human rights and freezing bank accounts of those supporting dissenters. Worst of all, many Canadians support this crackdown. Dennis explores whether there is still hope for our neighbors to the north.
This episode was pre-recorded before recent events with Russia/Ukraine.
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Not sure I want to come either.
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Yes, but how? Hass is a dreamer and Kasparov should stick to chess. This is what Kerry says:
I find it ironic that Putin allegedly says he wants to reunite Russia . When did Communism ever help Russians or anyone else? It is a bankrupt system.
Putin wants to reunite Russia because he is interested in one thing only, power. By presiding over an expanded Russia he would have more power because an expanded Russia, theoretically, would give him a larger, more protected nation.
Postings regarding Putin and his actions etc.
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The West Must Show Putin How Wrong He Is to Choose War
Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Richard N. Haass
Mr. Haass is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The moment, after a standoff stretching for months, has arrived. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is underway.
On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin said that he has decided to carry out a “special military operation” in eastern Ukraine. Earlier this week, he had ordered his military into two regions in eastern Ukraine, giving the lie to the claim — often repeated by Russian officials — that he had no intention of invading. As well as an act of aggression, it’s a blatant violation of the basic legal principle that international borders are not to be changed by force and that sovereign countries are free to make their own decisions.
It is also unwarranted. There are two types of war: wars of necessity, to protect vital national interests and involving the use of military force as a last resort, such as World War II and the Persian Gulf war of 1991; and wars of choice — armed interventions taken either in the absence of vital national interests or despite the availability of options not involving military force. Into this category fall the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and, after a limited initial phase, Afghanistan.
Mr. Putin’s conflict is, decidedly, a war of choice. The Russian president’s justifications hold no water: There was and is no consensus about bringing Ukraine into NATO in the next decade or later. There was and is no threat to ethnic Russians in Ukraine. And the United States and NATO have voiced their openness to discussing European security arrangements that take legitimate Russian interests into account.
Instead, Mr. Putin is choosing the path of war. This calls for a determined, comprehensive reply from the West. Mr. Putin’s war of choice demands a response of necessity.
The West should aim to penalize Russia and to discourage it from further aggression. Germany’s suspension of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a strong start, as are the financial sanctions targeting two Russian banks and Russia’s sovereign debt announced by President Biden on Tuesday. Additional targeted measures ought to follow, and the military capacities of both Ukraine and NATO, particularly in countries close to Russia, should continue to be enhanced. Mr. Putin must be made to understand that the moves he’s already made will have meaningful consequences.
But if the Russian intervention is a prelude to an attempt to assert control over the entirety of Ukraine and oust its government, as it’s likely to be, the United States and its NATO allies must go much further. The aim then should be to expand support to Ukraine — military, intelligence, economic and diplomatic — to such an extent as to significantly raise the costs of any Russian occupation.
That should be possible, not least because Russia’s approximately 190,000 troops and Russian-backed separatist forces that are in or near Ukraine are unlikely to be able to readily pacify a country of Ukraine’s size and population. For Russia, the costs will already be high. Though far from a panacea, sanctions against a wider set of people and financial institutions close to Mr. Putin and critical for Russia’s economy can raise them higher still — as would increasing oil and gas production in the United States and the Middle East. Removing the Kremlin’s cushion of high energy prices, which have long been a windfall for the government, would be the best sanction.
The United States should also continue to make public its intelligence that sheds light on Russian intentions to spoil surprises. Traditional and social media with the potential to reach Russian journalists and civil society should counter the Kremlin’s narrative. And images of what is taking place inside Ukraine should reach the world, leaving no doubt about the toll in innocent lives caused by Mr. Putin’s adventurism.
On a more strategic level, the United States should try to build some distance between China and Russia. That won’t happen overnight, but the Biden administration should step up its private diplomacy with China, highlighting the economic and strategic risks — including financial punishment and increasing anti-China sentiment in the West — of it being closely associated with an aggressive Russia. Now would also be a good time to restart a high-level strategic dialogue with China and search for issues, on Afghanistan, say, and climate change, where the two governments might cooperate.
On the international stage, governments everywhere ought to be discouraged from following Russia’s lead in recognizing the independence of the two Ukrainian regions. And Ukraine and its friends should make their case not just to the United Nations Security Council but also to the General Assembly, where Russia has no veto. What’s more, European governments need to prepare their publics for major increases in refugees fleeing Ukraine and make the case for why they must be supported. And citizens of both Europe and the United States need to be warned about the potential for cyberattacks and energy shortages. Facing down Russia will not be painless.
But the history of wars of choice offers some useful perspective. While many start well, most — particularly those that are ambitious — end badly. Intervening countries tend to underestimate the difficulty of prevailing or of translating battlefield successes into lasting gains. Gradually, those at home tend to grow weary of shouldering the mounting costs tied to the pursuit of elusive objectives. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, which began in 1979, dragged on for a decade and badly damaged the state’s authority, is a case in point.
Yet Mr. Putin is determined to upend European stability. Like others before him, he is initiating a war of choice in the belief that the benefits will outweigh the costs. It is up to the United States and its partners to prove he got his calculations badly wrong.
And:
From Greg Jaron
Here's how to checkmate Putin -
By Chess Grandmaster, Garry Kasparov
1. Support Ukraine militarily, 2. Bankrupt Putin's war machine, 3. Freeze & seize Russia's finances, 4. Kick Russia out of every financial institution.
Widely considered history’s all-time greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov, who is a veteran expert on the psyche of Russian President Vladimir Putin, delivered on Thursday a series of messages detailing how to isolate and ultimately defeat Putin on Twitter.
Kasparov's commentary comes in response to Putin's military invasion of Ukraine.
Kasparov wrote: “Since I answered so many of the questions I'm getting today on Putin and Ukraine, and more, in my book Winter Is Coming, I'm pinning it. I hoped it would be history by now, but thanks to Putin and free world apathy, it's still a current event.
"Support Ukraine militarily, immediately, everything but boots on the ground. All weapons, intel, cyber. Bankrupt Putin's war machine. Freeze & seize Russia's finances & those of him and his gang. Kick Russia out of every intl & financial institution. PACE, Interpol, etc.," he continued.
He added that the international community should “Recall all ambassadors from Russia. There is no point in talking. The new unified message is ‘stop or be isolated completely.’ -Ban all elements of Putin's global propaganda machine. Turn them off, shut them down, send them home. Stop helping the dictator spread lies & hate.”
Kasparov wrote further that there is a need to “Expose and act against Putin's lackeys in the free world. If [Gerhard] Schröder and his ilk continue to work for Putin, bring charges. Ask the owners & advertisers of networks platforming Putin propagandists like [Tucker] Carlson why they allow it.”
Lastly, he wrote that the global community must “Russian oil & gas. Pressure OPEC, increase production, reopen Keystone. You can't save the planet if you don't save the people on it. -Acknowledge there will be costs, sacrifices. We waited too long, the price is high, but it will only get higher. It's time to fight.”
He tweeted the five messages to his over-699,600 followers on Twitter. The tweets went viral straight away.
Kasparov also wrote: “Since I answered so many of the questions I'm getting today on Putin and Ukraine, and more, in my book Winter Is Coming, I'm pinning it. I hoped it would be history by now, but thanks to Putin and free world apathy, it's still current events.”
Kasparov said on Wednesday that "Putin's invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014 ended any reasonable doubts as to his nature and threat. Any attempts to negotiate with Putin since then were corruption, cowardice, and cynicism. He should have been isolated instantly. Instead, here we are."
Kasparov, a Russian dissident and human rights advocate, has been one of the lone voices warning Western leaders over the decades not to appease Putin. He said on Thursday that "Western leaders rarely listened to Russian opposition leaders, and rarely acted when they did listen to us. Is it too much to ask for them to listen to Ukrainian leaders now?."
When asked by one person on Twitter if Russians will revolt against Putin, Kasparov answered: "There is always a chance. Dictatorships are hard but brittle. If the blitzkrieg fails and Putin is faced with too many casualties to hide and more information gets through, the 1000s protesting today could become a million. But after 21 years it is hard.
"I wonder what the American tech giants could do to help get the truth to the Russian people. Most get news from state TV, unfortunately, but Apple, Facebook, Google, and the rest still have considerable reach. But courage, usually none."
The chess grandmaster took Germany to task for its alleged appeasement of Putin: "Germany still refusing to send weapons to Ukraine after funding Putin's war machine for years, or even to remove Russia from SWIFT. Neutrality between good and evil sides with evil, always."
And:
Retired Lt. Gen. Kellogg appeared on “Fox & Friends” and made strong comments about how he would advise Biden... +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
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