David Warsh: Sachs, Ukraine and the Harvard caper

Jeffrey Sachs

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

It is hard to feel much sympathy for Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman from North Dighton, Mass., who is accused of sharing top-secret U.S. government documents with his obscure online gaming group. It was from there that, predictably, the secrets gradually slipped out into the larger world. Still, the news story that caught my attention was one in which a friend from the original game-group explained to a Washington Post reporter what he understood to have been the 21-year-old guardsman’s motivation.

The friend recalled that Teixeira started sharing classified documents on the Discord server around February 2022, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, which he saw as a “depressing” battle between “two countries that should have more in common than keeping them apart.” Sharing the classified documents was meant “to educate people who he thought were his friends and could be trusted” free from the propaganda swirling outside, the friend said. The men and boys on the server agreed never to share the documents outside the server, since they might harm U.S. interests.

The opinion of a callow 21-year-old scarcely matters, at least on the surface of it. Discussions will quickly shift to the significance of the leaked information itself.  Comparisons will be made of Teixeira’s standing as a witness to government policy, and judge of it, relative to others of similar ilk: Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Reality Winner.

But Teixeira’s opinion interested me mainly because it mirrored views increasingly under discussion at all levels of American civil society. I thought immediately, for instance, of Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.  Sachs is not widely understood to be involved in the story of the war in Ukraine.  But since 2020, and the death of Stephen F. Cohen, of New York University, Sachs has become the leading university-based  critic of America’s role in fomenting the war.

On Feb. 21, Sachs appeared before a United Nations session to present a review of the mysteries surrounding the destruction of Russia’s nearly complete Nord Stream 2 pipeline last September. The consequences were “enormous,” he  said, before calling attention to an account by independent journalist Seymour Hersh that ascribed the sabotage to a secret American mission authorized by President Biden.

Despite a history of previous investigative-reporting successes (My Lai massacre, Watergate details, Abu Graib prison), Hersh’s somewhat hazily sourced story was not taken up by leading American dailies. In an apparent response to the attention given to Sachs’s endorsement of it, however, national-security sources in Washington and Berlin soon surfaced stories of their investigation of a mysterious yacht, charted from a Polish port, possibly by Ukrainian nationals, that might have carried out the difficult mission. Hersh responded forcefully to the “ghost ship” stories in due course.  

Then on Feb. 28, at a time when English-language newspapers were writing about the year since Russia had boldly launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine, Sachs published on his Web site his own version of the story. “The Ninth Anniversary of the Ukraine War’’ is a concise account of Ukrainian politics since 2010.  Especially interesting is Sachs’s analysis of U.S. involvement:

During his presidency {of Ukraine} (2010-2014), {Viktor} Yanukovych sought military neutrality, precisely to avoid a civil war or proxy war in Ukraine. This was a very wise and prudent choice for Ukraine, but it stood in the way of the U.S. neoconservative obsession with NATO enlargement. When protests broke out against Yanukovych at the end of 2013 upon the delay of the signing of an accession roadmap with the EU, the United States took the opportunity to escalate the protests into a coup, which culminated in Yanukovych’s overthrow in February 2014. 

The US meddled relentlessly and covertly in the protests, urging them onward even as right-wing Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries entered the scene.  US NGOs spent vast sums to finance the protests and the eventual overthrow.  This NGO financing has never come to light. 

Three people intimately involved in the US effort to overthrow Yanukovych were Victoria Nuland, then the Assistant Secretary of State, now Under-Secretary of State; Jake Sullivan, then the security advisor to VP Joe Biden, and now the US National Security Advisor to President Biden; and VP Biden, now President.  Nuland was famously caught on the phone with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, planning the next government in Ukraine, and without allowing any second thoughts by the Europeans (“Fuck the EU,” in Nuland’s crude phrase caught on tape).

So, who is Jeffrey Sachs, anyway, and what does he know? It’s a long story. His Wikipedia entry tell you some of it. What follows is a part of the story Wiki leaves out.

Sachs was born in 1954. Having grown up in Michigan, the son of a labor lawyer and a full-time mother, he graduated from Harvard College in 1976.  As a Harvard graduate student, he soon found a rival in Lawrence Summers, the nephew of two Nobel-laureate economists, who had graduated the year before from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 Sachs completed his PhD in three years, after being appointed a Junior Fellow, 1978-81. Harvard Prof. Martin Feldstein supervised his dissertation, and, three years later, supervised Summers as well. Both were appointed full professors in 1983, at 28, among the youngest ever to achieve that position at Harvard. Sachs collaborated with economic historian Barry Eichengreen on a famous study of the gold standard and exchange rates during the Great Depression. Summers was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1985, Sachs the following year.

Summers went to Washington in 1982, to serve for a year in the Council of Economic Advisers under CEA chairman Feldstein; in 1985, Sachs was invite to advise the government of Bolivia on its stabilization program.  After success there, he was hired by the government of Poland to do the same thing: he was generally considered to have succeeded. In 1988, Summers advised Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign; in 1992, he joined Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Sachs became director of the Harvard Institute for International Development.

In the early 1990s, Sachs was invited by Boris Yeltsin to advise the government of the soon-to-be-former Soviet Union on its transition to market economy.  Here the details are hazy.  Clinton was elected in November 1992. During the transfer of power, another young Harvard professor, Andrei Shleifer, was appointed to run a USAID contract awarded to Harvard to formally offer advice, thus elbowing aside Sachs, his titular boss.  Shleifer had been born in the Soviet Union, in 1962; arriving with his scientist parents in the US in 1977. As a Harvard sophomore, he met Summers first in 1980, becoming Summers’ protégé, and, later, his best friend.

In 1997, USAID suspended Harvard’s contract, alleging that Shleifer, two of his deputies, and his bond-trader wife, Nancy Zimmerman, had abused their official positions to seek private gain. Specifically, they had become the first to receive a license from their Russian counterparts to enter the Russian mutual fund business, at a critical moment, as Yeltsin campaign for election to a second term.  A week later Sachs fired Shleifer, and the project collapsed. Stories in The Wall Street Journal played a key role. And two years later, the U.S. Department of Justice file suit against Harvard and Shleifer, seeking treble damages for breach of contract. All this is describe in Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Enlargement) after Twenty-Five Years, a book I dashed off after 2016 as I was turning my hand from one project to another.

Soon after the government file its suit, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in the “hanging chad” election of 2000, and a few months after that, Harvard hired former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers as its president. Harvard lost is case in 2004 in 2005, and Summers’s defense under oath of Schleifer’s conduct played a role – who knows how great? – in Summers’s overdetermined decision to resign his presidency in 2006.  By then, Sachs had long since decided to leave Harvard. In 2002, after 25 years in Cambridge, he became director of Columbia University’s newly established Earth Institute, uprooting the pediatric practice of his physician wife as part of the move.

Sachs was always reluctant to talk about Harvard’s Russia caper. I haven’t spoken to him in 27 years. At Columbia, he enjoyed four-star rank, both in Manhattan, and in much of the rest of the world, serving for 16 years as a special adviser to the UN’s Secretary General, beginning with Kofi Annan.  Time put his book, The End of Poverty,: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, on its cover; Vanity Fair’s Nina Munk published The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, in 2013; glowing blurbs, from Harvard’s University’s Dani Rodrik and Amartya Sen, attested to his standing in the meliorist wing of the profession. In 2020, Sachs became involved, with a virologist colleague, in the COVID “lab-link” controversy, first on one side, then on the other.  His stance on the Ukraine war had earned him plenty of criticism.

Sachs will turn 70 next year. He stepped down from the Earth Institute in 2016.  As a university professor at Columbia, he teaches whatever he pleases. He writes mainly on his own web page, where he is always worth reading. But he is spread too thin there to influence more than occasionally the on-going newspaper story of the war.  As a life-long dopplegänger to Larry Summers, however, Sachs casts a very long shadow indeed.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

Linda Gasparello: Painting in solidarity with Ukraine

“Ukraine Wheat and Sky,’’ by Lloyd Kelly.

When war, such as the one in Ukraine, breaks out, writers and artists are never impotent. Writers have the power of the pen and artists have the power of the brush.

Through the centuries to today, they have used their creative talents as war propagandists or protestors. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has inspired works in protest worldwide.

In Louisville, Ky., renowned artist Lloyd Kelly has painted in solidarity with Ukraine.

“When I saw Ukrainian children being bombed by the Russians, I felt I had to do something that shows support for the Ukrainian people,” Kelly said.

His picture titled “Ukraine Wheat and Sky” is small, but not its message.

From a distance, it depicts the flag of Ukraine. But moving closer, you can see what Kelly called “its tension and motion.”

“I underpainted it with complimentary colors — blue on orange and yellow on violet — to create a tension. And the diagonal lines [from the blue sky to the golden yellow wheat of the flag’s colors] show a motion, a fluidity, like the wind blowing the fabric of the flag,” he explained.

Kelly said that he didn’t want the flag to be sentimental — a dreamy, wispy image. “I underpainted it because I wanted it to be substantial.” A painting of solidarity.

He has felt so strongly about the suffering in Ukraine that he couldn’t sell it. “Selling it just didn’t feel right. So I gifted it to people who support Ukraine in a very concrete way.”

Kelly’s painting captures on canvas what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said so poignantly in a television interview with David Letterman, “This blue color is a color of life; a color of the sky, space and freedom. The flag doesn’t have any images of planes or missiles in the sky, any traces of gunshots.

“These two colors are the country of where I was born, the country we are fighting for.”

Kelly exhibits at The Christina Gallery, in Edgartown, Mass. His studio address is www.lloydkelly.com.

Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, a weekly news and public affairs program that airs nationwide on PBS and elsewhere.

David Warsh: Ukraine and Iraq

Pink shows extent of Russian occupation now.

Bodies of civilians shot by Russian soldiers lie on a street in Bucha, Ukraine The hands of one of the victims are tied behind his back.

—- Ukrinform TV

A children's hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, after a Russian airstrike The city was mostly destroyed last year by Russian forces.

— Photo from armyinform.com.ua

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The failures of Silicon Valley and Signature banks were an addictive story these last few days.  Humiliation for the start-up sector. Red meat for progressives. Field maneuvers for the financial press. A stress test for the bank-regulatory system, which failed, and for the Biden administration, which passed. It was not, however, the most important story of the week.

The bigger story was the news of the first shots fired in the battle that looms in next year’s presidential election over U.S.-led NATO support for Ukraine in its resistance to Russia’s invasion.

Protecting the independent nation from Russian absorption “is not a vital US interest,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a statement to Fox News host Tucker Carlson last week. A quartet of Washington Post (and their editors) promptly jumped on the news.  DeSantis’s position “firmly [put] the potential presidential candidate on the side of Donald Trump, and at odds with top Congressional Republicans.”

The presidential-contender continued,

“While the U.S. has many vital national interest – securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party – becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”

Two days later, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal headlined “DeSantis’s First Big Mistake.”  The two-term Florida governor enjoys a a reputation as “a fearless fighter for principle who ignores the polls,” the editorialists noted.  “Then how to explain his puzzling surrender this week to the Trumpian temptation of American retreat?” The editorialists answered their own question before providing an out:

“The argument goes that Mr. DeSantis is reading the political mood. About 40 percent of Republicans say that the U.S. is providing “too much support” for Ukraine, up from 9 percent in March last year. Yet some of this is a function of polarized U.S.p olitics.  Many Republicans oppose helping Ukraine because Mr. Biden is doing it, an the mirror image is Democrats from an anti-war left putting Ukrainian flag stickers on their electric cars…. Mr. DeSantis is clearly still refining his views and his remarks on Ukraine left some room to improve them later.”

The spectacle of the two American wings of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire disagreeing so sharply about a fundamental matter presage a far wider and more complicated battle next year.

I’ve criticized NATO enlargement for twenty-five years. I was therefore painfully conflicted by Vladimir Putin’s ham-handed invasion of Russian’s southern neighbor. It may have been understandable, but it was profoundly wrong. Still, I think of myself as center-left. How is it I now find myself allied with Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Keri Lake?

I can only dream that they finally listened to me. Or, more likely than that, to Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, a long-time center-left maverick (see his “The Ninth Anniversary of the Ukrainian War;”, to veteran antiwar-journalist Seymour Hersh (“Who’s your George Ball?”; or even to film-maker Oliver Stone (“Ukraine on Fire”).

I don’t have poll numbers to show it, but my hunch is that something like 40 percent of all Democrats also have begun to believe that the U.S. is spending too much money or risk on Ukraine’s defense of itself, though President Biden and Senate leaders of both parties continue to strongly support the funding the war. DeSantis, like Trump, may suspect as much himself.  He is an opportunist, as all politicians are, though less nimble than Trump.

I expect that Joe Biden and the Congressional leadership will have the advantage in 2024.  I disagree with Biden’s foreign policy but I will vote for him if he runs again.  Probably he will win – it won’t be easy for a Republican candidate to run on a call for retreat (never mind all the domestic issues!)

But a second term for the aging Biden would mean he will have to bear the burden if the defense of Ukraine ultimately fails. That depends on what happens on the battlefield, of course, where the advantages seems mostly to be Putin’s.   When the war ends, political realignment in America will begin.

.                                                  xxx

Twenty years ago today, the morning of March 19, 2003, a U.S.-dominated coalition of forces began bombing Baghdad.  The US had demanded that Saddam Hussein leave Iraq within 48 hours.  When he didn’t, coalition forces attempted to kill him and his sons in the first hour of their “shock and awe” invasion. They didn’t succeed. President George W. Bush went on television that evening to describe the purpose the war to follow: “to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.”

The invasion of Iraq was the fulcrum on which much has shifted since. In a speech to the Munich Conference on Security Policy, in February 2007, Vladimir Putin dissented sharply from Washington’s vision of a unipolar world and warned against further NATO expansion along Russia’s southern borders. It is worth noting that Putin borrowed heavily from the US playbook for his invasion of Ukraine last year, including the attempted decapitation of the Zelensky government leadership team.

It didn’t work any better in Kyiv than in Baghdad.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.

David Warsh: Support Ukraine but study the path to war

"The Chateau" at St. Basil College, in Stamford, Conn., was originally a college dormitory and now houses the Ukrainian Museum and Library of Stamford.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

I have lived with the possibility of war in Ukraine for a long time, first as a newspaper columnist, then as a newsletter writer (and a long-ago war correspondent). I wrote against further NATO enlargement soon after Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were admitted – gingerly at first, more firmly once I began covering the Harvard-Russia scandal in the mid-’90s.

Boris Yeltsin’s selection of Vladimir Putin to be his successor didn’t seem surprising. Unlike Hillary Clinton, I was not shocked when, in 2012, Putin took back the helm from Dimitri Medvedev. Putin wasn’t a czar, but by then he was steering Russia’s course.

The events of 2014 did alarm me – Putin’s plans for a gradual takeover of Ukraine, foiled by US-supported demonstrations in Kyiv’s Maiden Square, followed by Russia’ stealth repossession of the Crimean peninsula. In 2016, expecting that Clinton would be elected, I began writing Because They Could: The Harvard-Russia Scandal (And NATO Expansion) after Twenty-five Years (Create Space, 2018)

Instead Donald Trump was elected. His longstanding relationship with Russian government and various Russians put the matter on hold. Joe Biden defeated Trump four years later and the momentum of NATO expansion was seamlessly reasserted, notably with signing on Nov. 10, 2021 of a U.S.-Ukraine Charter of Strategic Partnership. Barely three months later, Putin attempted his ill-fated blitzkrieg. The subsequent invasion was mostly turned back, except in the eastern Donbass region.

What’s done is done.  The issue seems to me to have been decided, mostly by the citizens and soldiers of Ukraine. The U.S. may or may not bear responsibility for having fomented the war by pressing the boundaries – and the culture – of NATO ever closer to Russia, but having reached this point in Putin’s war on Ukraine, America has no honorable alternative but to stay the course until Putin stands down. He will do so only after more defeats on the battlefield; after taking account of the devastation he has caused, no less to his own country than to Ukraine; and to Russia’s reputation forever. His pursuit of restoration of Russian status as a superpower was a pipedream.

What is next?  Partition is apparently what the Pentagon expects, once Russia’s spring offensive grinds to a halt. That makes sense to me.  Russia gets to keep portions of Eastern Ukraine that it already possesses. Ukraine retains what it has already recaptured; remains independent; and gradually becomes a member of NATO and the European Union.

In the meantime, continued support for Ukraine is about to become a matter of partisan politics in the 2024 presidential election campaign. So much the better: it will be one more litmus test with which to separate the real Republican Party from Trumplican rear-guard. The war in Ukraine offers an opportunity to begin to put US politics together again.

It is time to begin to gather assessments of America’s behavior in world affairs during the last thirty years. Historian M. E. Sarotte has made an especially good start with her most recent book, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post- Cold War Stalemate (Yale, 2021), but, as she notes, her account covers  only the beginning; it ends in 1999. Her next volume presumably will cover the years to 2016.  By that time, today’s war will be over, and the saga of the post- Cold War world ripe for a third volume.

Frank Costigliola’s biography Kennan: A Life between Two Worlds (Princeton, 2023) adds some details to the story of diplomat George Kennan’s famous op-ed piece opposing NATO expansion, “A Fateful Error,” in The New York Times, in 1996, but we will have to wait some time for a dispassionate biography of Strobe Talbott, President Clinton’s old Oxford friend, the architect of NATO expansion.  Newspaper journalists, Peter Baker of The Times foremost among them, can be expected to begin to illuminate some shadows.

The change of heart about the war that I’m describing – putting aside for now the idea of joint responsibility in favor of rendering sufficient support to Ukraine, whatever it costs, until independence and peace are won – has been a long and painful time in coming.  America has not done well in its three major wars in my adulthood – Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  In Ukraine, it finally seems vital to stay the course.

                                          xxx

I caught a windjammer of a cold over the holidays and failed to post to EcononomicPrincipals.com in timely fashion what he had written before the storm.  He put it up when calm returned.   Apologies to those accustomed to reading it there.

More to the point, all good wishes to readers for the coming year.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.

Llewellyn King: 2022’s biggest crises will be 2023’s, too

The Apocalypse, depicted in Orthodox Christian traditional fresco scenes in Osogovo Monastery, North Macedonia.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

There are no new years, just new dates.

As the old year flees, I always have the feeling that it is doing so too fast; that I haven’t finished with it, even though the same troubles are in store on the first day of the new year.

Many things are hanging over the world this transition. None is subject to quick fixes.

Here are the three leading, intractable mega-issues:

First, the war in Ukraine. There is no resolution in sight as Ukrainians survive as best they can in the rubble of their country, subject to endless pounding by Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is as ugly and flagrant an aggression as Europe has seen since days of Hitler and Stalin.

Eventually, there will be a political solution or a Russian victory. Ukraine can’t go on for very long, despite its awesome gallantry, without the full engagement of NATO as a combatant. It isn’t possible that it can wear down Russia with the latter’s huge human advantage and Putin’s dodgy friends in Iran and China.

One scenario is that after winter has taken its toll on Ukraine, and the invading forces, a ceasefire-in-place is declared, costing Ukraine territory already held by Russia. This will be hard for Kyiv to accept -- huge losses and nothing won.

Kyiv’s position is that the only acceptable borders are those that were in place before the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. That almost certainly would be too high a price for Russia.

Henry Kissinger, writing in the British magazine “The Spectator,” has proposed a ceasefire along the borders that existed before the invasion of last February. Not ideal but perhaps acceptable in Moscow, especially if Putin falls. Otherwise, the war drags on, as does the suffering, and allies begin to distance themselves from Ukraine.

A second huge, continuing crisis is immigration. In the United States, we tend to think that this is unique to us. It isn’t. It is global.

Every country of relative peace and stability is facing surging, uncontrolled immigration. Britain pulled out of the European Union partly because of immigration. Nothing has helped.

This year 504,000 immigrants are reported to have made it to Britain. People crossing the English Channel in small boats, with periodic drownings, has worsened the problem.

All of Europe is awash with people on the move. This year tens of thousands have crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa and landed in Malta, Spain, Greece and Italy. It is changing the politics of Europe: Witness the new right-wing government in Italy.

Other migrant masses are fleeing eastern Europe for western Europe. Ukraine has a migrant population in the millions seeking peace and survival in Poland and other nearby countries.

The Middle East is inundated with refugees from Syria and Yemen. These millions follow a pattern of desperate people wanting shelter and services, but eventually destabilizing their host lands.

Much of Africa is on the move. South Africa has millions of migrants, many from Zimbabwe, where drought has worsened chaotic government, and economic activity has come to a halt because of electricity shortages.

Venezuelans are flooding into neighboring Latin American countries, and many are journeying on to the southern border of the United States.

The enormous movement of people worldwide in this decade will have long-lasting effects on politics and cultures. Conquest by immigration is a fear in many places.                                 

My final mega-issue is energy. Just when we thought the energy crisis that shaped the 1970s and 1980s was firmly behind us, it is back -- and is as meddlesome as ever.

Much of what will happen in Ukraine depends on energy. Will NATO hold together or be seduced by Russian gas? Will Ukrainians survive the frigid winter without gas and often without electricity? Will the United States become a dependable global supplier of oil and gas, or will domestic climate concerns curb oil and gas exports? Will small modular reactors begin to meet their promise? Ditto new storage technologies for electricity and green hydrogen?

Energy will still be a driver of inflation, a driver of geopolitical realignments, and a driver of instability in 2023.

Add to worsening weather and the need to curb carbon emissions, and energy is as volatile, political, and controversial as it has ever been. And that may have started when English King Edward I banned the burning of coal in 1304 to curb air pollution in the cities.

Happy New Year, anyway.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

whchronicle.com

David Warsh: About ‘The Untold Story of Russiagate’

Trump campaign manager and pro-Russia operator at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

In the summer of 2016, somebody, perhaps Vladimir Putin himself, sketched a peace plan for Ukraine. The provenance of the proposal remains deliberately vague. Had the suggestion been accepted, it would have avoided Russia’s war on its neighbor five years later. The so-called “Mariupol plan,” named for eastern Ukraine’s largest industrial city, would have split off four prosperous Donbass counties to form an autonomous republic, to be led by Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine who had fled Kyiv for Russia two years before. In effect: East and West Ukraine

The trouble is, the proposal was conveyed, via intermediaries, amid elaborate secrecy, to just one man, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.  Rival candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, would certainly reject the plan were she to be elected. So the loosely worded proffer was said to be enhanced by a sweetener: Russia would take a hand in the American election, denigrating Clinton through a massive hacking campaign.

That’s the burden of a Sunday magazine article in Nov. 6 The New York Times Magazine: “The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine,” by reporter Jim Rutenberg.  It is a long and complicated tale, and sticks closely the NYT’s editorial position: that Russia’s war was unprovoked by NATO expansion.

In fact, the story of the  “Grand Havana Room meeting,” atop 666 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan,  between Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort , and Konstantin Kilimnik, manager of Manafort’s international consulting office in Kyiv, has been told before, though never as  concisely as has Rutenberg:  by the Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the thousand-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, and by The Atlantic’s George Packer in his review of Andrew Weissmann’s book about his service as a top aide to former FBI director Robert Mueller, Where the Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.

Ruteberg drew on these accounts, and on his own reporting, in a mostly successful attempt to connect two narratives. “Thrumming below the whole (U.S.) election saga was another story – about Ukraine’s efforts to establish a modern democracy….”

From the platform battles of the Republican National Convention to the turmoil of the transition to the first impeachment, the main business of the Trump presidency all had to do with Ukraine. “Even now” he writes, “some influential voices in American politics, mostly but not entirely on the right, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik’s plan, which the nation’s leaders categorically reject.”

I was especially struck when I came across this passage:

As [Paul] Manafort rose to become Trump’s campaign chairman – and as Russian operatives were hacking Democratic Party servers – the candidate took stances on the region that were advantageous to Putin’s ambitions for Ukraine. Ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Trump shocked the American foreign-policy establishment by voicing only tepid support for NATO. He also told aides that he didn’t believe it was worth risking “World War III” to defend Ukraine against Russia, according to the Senate intelligence report released in the summer of 2020.

That was, I thought, Trump in a nutshell. Candid, shrewd, perhaps even wise… and profoundly dishonest. After all, Manafort was a veteran political operative, who had served in the Reagan administration until leaving to form a foreign-relations consulting firm with his friend Roger Stone. He had been deeply involved in Ukrainian politics, mostly with pro-Russian factions, for more than a decade.  What in the world was he doing suddenly showing up as Trump’s campaign manager barely two months before the election?

Three weeks after the convention, Manafort was forced to resign, after his name turned up on a suspicious Ukrainian payroll ledger. Starting in 2017, he was charged with multiple felonies, and convicted of many of them, Trump pardoned him in December 2020.

Rutenberg’s story reinforced my conviction that the endless harping of the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal on “the Steele dossier” and Special Counsel John Durham’s lengthy investigation of FBI methods in dealing with it were red herrings of the first order.  The investigations that began even before Trump took office had almost nothing to do with the discredited campaign documents. The various probes were motivated by suspicions of extensive conflicts of interest, and the fact that his campaign and presidency were chock-full of persons who had done business with Russia.

It matters because, not for the only time, Trump’s political instincts were canny, reflecting the unarticulated preferences of many American voters, perhaps a majority, to live in a peaceful, if imperfect world. Had Trump been able to do a deal with Putin along the lines of the Mariupol plan, many Ukrainian and Russian lives would have been saved. Trump almost certainly would have been re-elected, American democracy would have been further damaged, perhaps irreparably. Things turned out as they should have, at least until Russia invaded Ukraine. .

That is emphatically not to say that peace negotiations shouldn’t be pursued in this dreadful war.  Republican opposition to continuing high levels of aid to Ukraine is growing, according to recent polls. Fifty-seven Republican congressmen and eleven senators voted against Biden’s $40 billion aid package earlier this year. New positions in both parties will take shape after the mid-term elections.

Meanwhile, Axios reports that Trump is eager to announce a third run for the presidency.  Bring it on!  American democracy learned a great deal about its weaknesses and strengths during the five years it was enrolled in Trump University. The experience produced a close call, but dangerous times make for lasting lessons. Two or three years of post-graduate education will produce still more insight into the inner workings of a strong democracy.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay originated.

Llewellyn King: Sites of mass murder past and present; ‘what would I do?’

Memorial of the Distomo Massacre

— Photo by Dawetie

ERETRIA, Greece

The sites of horror -- the places where mass murder happened -- are seared into my memory. Holocaust sites such as the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz or Kigali, where the Hutus butchered the Tutus, or the Falls Road in Belfast, where many died over the decades of strife.

A new one has just been fixed firmly in my memory: Distomo.

These sites of slaughter trigger the sense of how fragile human society is – and such slaughter is taking place this day, this hour, this minute in Ukraine.

I am not enthralled by history per se. My lens is mostly confined to what happened in my lifetime, whether as a small child during World War II or in the years since.

But the horrors of the past aren’t confined in the past. They leak into the present as new bleak chapters on human conduct are written.

I say this because I have just visited Distomo, where barbarity reached a crescendo on June 10, 1944. There, for two hours, the Waffen-SS killed villagers with machine guns, bayonets and any other handy weapons. They killed the unborn, infants and older children, women and men. They beheaded the village priest.

If they paused, it was to rape.

The Association of European Journalists, the 60-year-old organization with sections spread across Europe, had invited me to its annual congress in central Greece. After two busloads of delegates had visited the Oracle at Delphi, we stopped at Distomo: a trip from the celestial to the bestial.

My mind is set afire with questions at these World War II sites. If I had been a young Jew, swept up by the Nazis, would I have been killed in a camp? If I had been a young German guard, would I have participated in the killing, and how much enthusiasm would I have brought to the work?

I wonder how the young men who did the butchery at Distomo lived with themselves afterward. Did they dream of bayonetting pregnant women, of old people begging to be killed instead of their spouses, children and grandchildren?

In the end, few were spared -- only those who were left for dead. Conservative estimates are that 238 people died in the massacre.

My journalistic colleagues and I went from the foibles of the Greek gods of antiquity to the horrors of humans in the 20th Century.

I was just a child during World War II, but I feel especially connected because this and other Nazi atrocities happened in my lifetime.

When I visited Auschwitz and saw the hair, the shoes, the toys and other jetsam of children, my thought wasn’t that it could have been me, but that those could have been my friends, my playmates and every Jew I have been close to, and there have been many.

At the Distomo museum, they show a graphic film with eyewitness accounts of those who survived, those who bore witness, such as the woman who describes scooping the brains back into her dead toddler’s head and carrying his corpse home -- but her house, and nearly all those in the village, was burned by the SS. That is what she did and lived to tell -- to tell of that butchered child. She said in the film that she couldn’t forgive. Who with that memory could?

The young men who carried out the Distomo killings, under their 26-year-old leader, SS-Hauptsturmfurer Fritz Lautenbach, did so in reprisal for partisan attacks on German troops.

After visiting many killing fields – and I don’t seek them out -- I wonder what I would have done? Would I have followed orders? Would I, in seconds, persuade myself that what I was doing was right?

What would I do if I were on the Russian frontlines in Ukraine today? There is savagery equal to Distomo going on right now in wars in many places, carried out  by people just like us.                                        

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Linda Gasparello

Co-host and Producer

"White House Chronicle" on PBS

Mobile: (202) 441-2703

Website: whchronicle.com

ReplyReply allForward

David Warsh: 3 cheers for Ukraine and 2 cheers for The West

SOMERVIILLE, Mass.

World opinion seems to have turned, pretty conclusively, against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A combination of Ukraine’s army’s success in defending its sovereignty, the Russian army’s flight from regions previously occupied, and Vladimir Putin’s reluctance to attempt to mobilize his populace for full war, have led China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi to publicly express reservations about his attempt to annex his neighbor.

Thus Moscow bureau chief Robyn Dixon said a couple of days ago in The Washington Post:

Putin and Xi each harbor resentments over past humiliations by the West. They dream of cutting the United States down to size, then taking what they see as their rightful places among several dominant world leaders. They are dictators, ruling “democracies” that lack any meaningful democratic features. And they both want to reshape global rules to suit themselves.

But Putin’s chaotic, tear-it-all-down approach, kicking down the territorial sovereignty of neighboring Ukraine and perpetrating the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, could not be more different from Xi’s careful, steady moves to bend global institutions to Chinese values.

The war has roiled global supply chains and set off global economic instability, impacting China, along with most of the world. It has irreparably harmed Putin’s reputation, exposed his country’s military weakness and triggered punishing sanctions, without producing a single notable benefit.

Columnist Janan Ganesh, in the Financial Times:

I don’t pretend that the average Westerner has read their Hume and Spinoza. I don’t even pretend they deal in such abstractions as “The West”. But there is a way of life – to do with personal autonomy – for which people have consistently endured hardship, up to and including a blood price. Believing otherwise is not just bad analysis. It leads to more conflict than might otherwise exist.

Kremlinologists report that Vladimir Putin saw the U.S. exit from Afghanistan last year as proof of Western dilettantism. From there, it was a short step to testing the will of the West in Ukraine. You would think that U.S. forces had rolled up to Kabul in 2001, poked around for an afternoon, deplored the lack of a Bed Bath & Beyond, and flounced off. They were there for 20 years. Whatever the mission was – technically inept, culturally uncomprehending – it wasn’t decadent.

How much carnage has this misperception of the west triggered? The [1930’s] Empire of Japan couldn’t believe the hermit republic that America then was, would send armed multitudes 5,000 miles away in response to one day of infamy. (And, remember, never leave.) The Kaiser in 1914 and Saddam Hussein in 1990 made similar assessments of the liberal temper. It is not out of vanity or machismo that The West should insist on recognition of its fighting spunk, then. It is to avert the fighting

Two cheers, then, for “The West.”  The American republic is deeply divided, England a mess, Scotland on the verge of more devolution, the old British Commonwealth of Nations coming apart, NATO reduced as a moral force. Yet Ganesh is right; the global community of Western liberalism is here to stay. In its ongoing competition with Russia, China, and Iran, the Free World abides.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this columnist originated.

David Warsh: In Ukraine, echoes of Vietnam

— Map by Amitchell125

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The most interesting news around in August was the debut of a major series in The Washington Post about the beginnings of the war in Ukraine. Clearly it is intended to be an entry in next year’s contest for a Pulitzer Prize.

The first installment, “Road to war: U.S. struggled to convince allies, and Zelensky, of risk of invasion,” was a ten-thousand-word blockbuster.

The second, “Russia’s spies misread Ukraine and misled Kremlin as war loomed,” ran another  six thousand words.

The third, “Battle for Kyiv: Ukrainian valor, Russian blunders combined to save the capital,” was similarly substantial.

And  yesterday, a story appeared, not part of the series, about a disaffected Russian soldier who fled the war, featuring lengthy excerpts from his journal. “‘I will not participate in this madness.’”

Plenty of news, but the most striking aspect of the series is its architecture. The Post so far has mostly omitted the Russian side of the story. This is, to put it mildly, surprising.  It is always possible that much more background narrative is yet to come. “Begin toward the end” is a story-telling recipe frequently employed in novels and films, but the ploy is not common in newspaper series. On the other hand, given the customary wind-up of important series in December, it is entirely possible that eight or even ten more installments are on  the way.

For simplicity’s sake, the analytic foundations of the Russian version of the story rest mainly on three documents.  The first is U.S. Ambassador William Burns’s Feb. 1, 2008 cable from Moscow, “Nyet means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines’’.  We know about this thanks to Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

Burns reported that RussianForeign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other senior officials had expressed strong opposition to Ukraine’s announced intention to seek NATO membership, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as “a potential military threat.” President George W. Bush ignored Burns’s advice and President Obama pressed ahead, backing a second pro-NATO “Orange Revolution” in 2014 that caused a pro-Putin Ukrainian president to seek safety in Russia., Putin annexed the Crimean peninsula in response.

The second is Putin’s long word essay from August, 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’’. That, Angela Stent and Fiona Hill argue differently in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, may matter much to citizens of NATO nations and, especially, the leadership of Ukraine,  but Putin’s argument matters more to most Russians and some Ukrainians.

The third is the little-publicized and scarcely noticed U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership of November 10, 2021. After that, there could be no reasonable doubt among the well-informed on any side that the invasion would take place.

The real news had to do with maneuvering between the US diplomats and military commanders and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky that took place on the eve of the war. The U.S. emphasized the near certainty of invasion and sketched three alternative possibilities the Ukrainian might pursue: move his government to western Ukraine, presumably Lvov; to Poland, a member of NATO; or remain in place.

Zelensky chose to remain in Kyiv, while discounting the likelihood of invasion to his fellow citizens, seeking to avoid panic. In an interview with Post reporters, he was candid about his reasoning.  A  follow-up story, “Zelensky faces outpouring of criticism over failure to warn of war,” described the political turmoil that erupted thereafter in Ukraine.  A full transcript of the interview followed four days later.

The subtext so far of The Post’s series reminded me of a little-remembered year or two in the early ‘60’s, before the dramatic escalation of the war in Vietnam took place, an episode usually glossed over, but well documented in Reporting Vietnam, Part One: American Journalism, 1959-1969 (LOA, 1998). The world was more mysterious in those days; there were fewer players on the stage.

Three correspondents for U.S. newspapers stood out for their short-lived enthusiasm for the fight against the Communists: David Halberstam, of The New York Times; Neil Sheehan, of the Associated Press; and Malcolm Browne, of United Press International. Feeding them tips were CIA agent Edward Lansdale, battlefield commander John Paul Vann, and, perhaps, RAND consultant Daniel Ellsberg, then himself a hawk. These three charismatic leaders and others on the outskirts of what was then a U.S. advisory group believed that the war against the insurgents could be won if only it were better fought. As Lansdale put it:

It’s pure hell to be on the sidelines and seeing so conventional and unimaginative an approach being tried. About all I can do is continue putting in my two-bits worth every chance I get to add a bit of spark to the concepts. I’m afraid that these aren’t always welcome.

In South Vietnam, the alliance between Catholics and Buddhist broke down after 1963, and before long the U.S. military took over the war itself. Ten more years and millions of lives were required to lose it to North Vietnam.

No such option exists in Ukraine: Ukrainians must fight the war on their own, however powerful are the weapons they are given. Domestic support for the admirable Zelensky may turn out to to be no more durable over the long haul than consensus among his NATO backers.  Putin is a bully, but he seems no less formidable than was Ho Chi Minh. And though Putin is angry, he is not mad.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.

David Warsh: What Putin had hoped in assaulting Ukraine

St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Boston.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Two days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the dispatch from Russia’s state-owned news service seemed to reflect Vladimir Putin’s innermost reasoning.

A new world is coming into being before our very eyes. Russia’s military operation has opened a new epoch…. Russia is recovering its unity – the tragedy of 1991, this horrendous catastrophe in our history, its unnatural caesura, has been overcome. Yes, at a great price, yes through the tragic events of what amounts to a civil war, because now for the time being brothers are shooting one another… but Ukraine as anti-Russia will no longer exist.

Instead, the Novosti account continued, the Great Russians, the Belarusians and the Little Russians (Ukrainians) would come together as a whole – a reconstituted Russian Empire. Putin had undertaken the “historic responsibility” of reunification upon himself “rather than leaving the Ukrainian question to future generations.”

The pronouncement was quickly taken down, according to Jonathan Haslam, Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., describing Putin’s Premature Victory Roll in early March.  It wasn’t just the over-optimism that rendered it embarrassing.  It was too transparent. The goal of reunification superseded Putin’s usual complaint about the threat to Russia posed by NATO expansion.

I was broadly sympathetic to Putin after 1999, when he published his essay on Russia in the Twenty-First Century as an appendix to his First Person interview in 2000, upon taking office. I overlooked the Second Chechen War.  I began paying attention after he criticized the U.S. for its invasion of Iraq in a speech in Munich, in 2007. Even after Putin’s seizure of the Crimean Peninsula, in 2014, he seemed to be within his rights, though barely.  Russia had a historic claim on the peninsula on which its Black Sea naval base in Sebastopol in situated, I reasoned.

No more. Last week I re-read Putin’s article from last August, On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.  Then I read When history is weaponized for war, historian Simon Schama’s scathing criticism of it, When the Pope sought to give Putin an excuse for his invasion, in an interview with an Italian newspaper earlier this month, asserting that NATO had been “barking at Russia’s door,” it rang hollow. Nobody is talking about a Morgenthau Plan for Russia after the war in Ukraine, but nobody is talking about a Marshall Plan, either.  It has options – a stronger alliance with India? But regaining its reputation in Europe looks harder than ever.

NATO’s long-term strategy of “leaning-in” seems to have worked. Putin may or may not have cancer, as a report suggested yesterday in The Times of London, but something has seriously wrong gone wrong with the man. Haslam cites Shakespeare. Putin has waged a war he cannot win. He is cementing in place the fence around him of which he complained.

Consider that his war on Ukraine has persuaded Finland and Sweden to seek to join NATO.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran. He’s the author of, among other books, Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Enlargement) after Twenty-Five Years.

Don Pesci: Give the Ukrainians back their skies

The Black Madonna of Czestochowa

VERNON, Conn.

Just before the joy of Easter broke upon us, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, far from Russian bombardments in Ukraine.

In an interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Nehammer said that Putin thinks he is winning the war in Ukraine despite heavy military losses and the fruitless non-stop bombing of Ukrainian cities. Putin certainly has left his mark on Ukrainian cities, and will continue to do so as long as Ukraine’s military cannot close Ukrainian air space to what can only be called urban carpet bombing.

More bombing in Bucha and Mariupol, for instance, can do little more than disturb the rubble of Putin’s carefully chosen targets.

There is not a single military man in Connecticut, from private first class to general, who would not tell you that whoever controls the skies in a war also controls ground offenses, however brave and resolute the resistance.

 “We have to confront him [Putin] with that, what we have seen in Ukraine,” said Nehammer.

What the entire world has seen in Ukraine are corpses. According to an Associated Press  report, Nehammer “also said he confronted Putin with what he saw during a visit to the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where more than 350 bodies have been found along with evidence of killings and torture under Russian occupation, and ‘it was not a friendly conversation.’"

A noble Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s terror regime is lost on Putin, who calculates that nobility, honor and patriotism can be sufficiently answered by more frequent remote bombing and deadly trip wire devices placed after strategic withdrawals in refrigerators, the trunks of cars and under corpses his troops have left behind in Bucha and Mariupol.

“In the Kyiv region,” the AP reported, “authorities have reported finding the bodies of more than 900 civilians, most shot dead, since Russian troops retreated two weeks ago.”

President Biden and other Democrats continue to tout the efficacy of sanctions, much appreciated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But both presidents know that sanctions are neither offensive nor defensive weapons of a kind Ukraine needs to stop the Russian assault on Mariupol, for weeks Putin’s terrorist playground. Should Mariupo completly fall to Russia, Putin will be able to construct a land bridge from Russia to Crimea, surrendered to Russia during the administration of President Obama and Vice President Biden with hardly a whimper.

Even U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, believes that Ukraine may not be able to survive Putin’s latest attentions unless the United States is willing to supply the country with air power that will allow Ukraine to recover its skies from the Russians.

Newly returned from Poland, Blumenthal recently told New Britain Polish-American and Ukrainian American leaders, “If I have one plea to the president of the United States, it is provide more air defense to the people and the brave freedom fighters of Ukraine. The anguish and grief in their eyes is heartbreaking and harrowing. It was one of the most moving moments of my life to talk with them -- we spent the whole day at the border crossing where just hours before the Russians bombed the town just 12 miles away.”

There are many Ukrainian churches in Connecticut. Two weeks before Easter, my wife, Andree, and I visited a Ukrainian church in Hartford and after Mass had a brief talk with a priest who hails from Lviv, a city in western Ukraine that has not yet been entirely leveled by Putin, whom the priest likely regards, somewhat charitably, as the Judas of Christian Orthodoxy.

Diplomacy is fine, but it has not saved a single Ukrainian life, we were given to understand. Ukrainians are hopeful believers in the promises of God.

We spent Easter – Holy Saturday actually – in a church in Vernon my wife sometimes calls “the Polish church.” There the choir seems to call us from Heaven itself, and a representation of Poland's most well-known icon, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, hangs just to the left of Christ on the cross.

When Mary, here portrayed sorrowfully near the cross, presented Jesus in the temple, she was told that, however joyful the moment, a sword one day would pierce her heart.

Simon clasped Jesus in his arms and, recognizing his divinity, said “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.”

And then Simon, turning to Mary, said, “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” 

There are forebodings of despair everywhere in the testimony of the Apostles and the Fathers of the Christian Church. Over and against them all, my Ukrainian priest reminded us, stands the towering promises of God that we Christians celebrate at Easter.

Christ meets Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb and asks, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?”

Supposing Him to be the gardener, she pleads, “Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary!”

She then recognizes Him.

“Rabboni!”

“Do not cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.’ Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that He had spoken these things to her.”

Later, the first word the risen Christ brings to his disciples, cowering as usual in fear, is “Peace be with you.”

But His is not peace “as the world knows peace. These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation.  But be of good cheer -- I have overcome the world.”

A sword cleaves my priest’s heart. In Ukraine, the streets flow with blood and tears. My Ukrainians, the priest tells us, forget nothing, remember everything, and live in hope.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Fine art to benefit Ukrainians

Left: work by Jennifer Okumura; middle: Vicki Kocher Paret; right: Nora Charney Rosenbaum

Artists at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, have come together to offer works for sale to benefit the Ukrainian people.

Hit this link:

The gallery says:

“Let our degrees of hope and peace become legitimizing solidarity banners for Ukraine and 'anyone' who suffers in any corner of the world. A sense of unity reassures us that the world is a pleasant place underneath human complication. All profits are going toward Ukrainian relief.’’

Llewellyn King: We must face the fact that world crises in food, inflation and energy require tough decisions and new thinking

Messengers going to Job, each with bad news.

— 1860 woodcut by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

There is a rough road ahead for the world and our political class isn’t leveling with us.

As Steve Odland, president and CEO of The Conference Board, one of the nation’s premier business-research organizations, said in a television interview, serious inflation will continue at least until 2024, and longer if things continue to deteriorate with supply-chain crises and the war in Ukraine.

Particularly, Odland, who also serves as a director of General Mills Inc., fears a global food crisis with famine in Africa and many other vulnerable places if Ukrainian farmers don’t start seeding spring crops to start this year’s harvest. Already, Ukraine – once known as one of the world’s breadbaskets -- has cut off exports to make sure that there is enough food for their own people, as war rages.

Odland sees U.S. inflation continuing at 7 to 8 percent for several years at best. But his primary worry is global food supplies, as countries face a crisis of new and frightening proportions.

His second worry is stagflation. If the rate of productivity falls below 3 percent, “then we will have stagflation,” Odland told me during a recording of White House Chronicle, on PBS, the weekly news and public affairs program I produce and host.

Odland faults the Federal Reserve for being timid in raising interest rates to counter inflation.

I fault the political class for not leveling with us – both parties. As we are in a state of perpetual election fervor, we are also in a state of perpetual happy talk. “Get the rascals out, and all will be well when my band of happy angels will fix things.” That is what the political class says, and it is a lie.

We are in for a long and difficult period which began with the pandemic that disrupted supply chains and set off inflation, and now the war in Ukraine has compounded that. Supply chains won’t magically return to where they were before COVID-19 struck, and more likely they will have further constrictions because of the war. New supply chains need to be forged and that will take time.

For example, nickel, which is used in the batteries that are reshaping the worlds of electricity and transportation and for stainless steel, will have to  come from places other than Russia. At present, Russia supplies 20 percent of the world’s voracious appetite for high-purity nickel. Opening new mines and expanding old ones will take time.

The world’s largest challenge is going to be food: starvation in many poor countries and high prices at the supermarkets in the rich ones, including the United States. There are technological and alternative supply fixes for everything else, but they will take time. Food shortages will hit early and will continue while the world’s farms adjust. There will be suffering and death from famine.

The curtailing of Russian exports will affect the United States in multiple ways, some of which might eventually turn out to be beneficial as the creative muscle is flexed.

In the utility industry, someone who is thinking big and boldly is Duane Highley, president and CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association in Denver.

Highley told Digital 360, the weekly webinar that emanates from Texas State University in San Marcos, the challenging problem of electricity storage could be solved not with lithium-ion batteries, but with iron-air batteries.

In its simplest form, an iron-air battery harnesses the process of rusting to store electricity. The process of rusting is used to produce power when it is exposed to oxygen captured on site. To charge the battery, an electric current reverses the process and returns the rust to iron.

Clearly, as Highley said, this won’t work for electric vehicles because of the weight of iron. But in utility operations, these batteries could offer the possibility of very long drawdown times --not just  four hours, as with current lithium-ion batteries. And there is plenty of iron stateside.

Another Highley concept is that instead of dealing with all the complexities of transporting hydrogen, it should be stored as ammonia, which is more easily handled.

This isn’t magical thinking, but the kind of thinking which will lead us back to normal -- someday.

Politicians should stop the happy talk and tell us what we are facing.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C

whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Helping America by helping Ukrainian refugees resettle in U.S. counties that could use more people

Wheat field in Idaho. Ukraine, like the U.S., is a very big wheat producer.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The Ukrainian diaspora is upon the world. Of the millions who are dispossessed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is wishful thinking that on some glorious day they will all go home. In reality, the world will have to accommodate them. They can’t all stay in Poland and Romania.

One by one, the countries of Europe falteringly are stepping up to their moral and humanitarian duty. Most countries say they will take some Ukrainian refugees.

The Biden administration, without clarity, has indicated that some refugees will be welcomed. What the administration is hoping is that these will be glommed onto existing Ukrainian communities in several cities.

This might be a mistake. The cities with large Ukrainian communities are New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland and Indianapolis. In all these cities, housing is expensive and in very short supply; and there are many social problems for those at the bottom, where refugees traditionally find themselves.

Now comes an extraordinary proposal for refugee resettlement from an attorney, Christopher Smith, who practices in Macon, Ga. He is also the honorary consul there for Denmark, but he tells me his proposal is in no way a reflection of that office and is entirely his own as a private citizen.

Smith’s sweeping and enticing proposal is that refugees from Ukraine should be settled, with federal and state assistance and with the participation of local government, not in crowded cities but in American counties which have been losing population for decades. “Those include counties here in south Georgia,” Smith told me by telephone. 

You may think, from anecdotal reporting, that there is a major move from cities to the country, spurred by COVID. But Smith tells me that movement is small and doesn’t reverse the decades-long trend of county depopulation.

My own observation of this COVID-induced trend is that it applies to such places as New York and Boston, where the outward movement has been to garden locales where virtual commuting can be accomplished, for example, people who have moved from Boston and New York to Rhode Island and Connecticut, and from Los Angeles to smaller outposts, or north to Washington and Oregon.

Smith said in a position paper: “There are 3,143 counties in the United States. From 2010 to 2020, approximately 1,660 (53 percent) of American counties lost population. Here in Georgia, 67 (42 percent) of 159 counties saw a reduction in population during that time span. Most but not all American counties that lost population during this 10-year period are located in rural areas.”

While counties tend to have a higher apartment and rental home vacancy rate and a lower cost of living than the national average, many of these communities have job shortages, Smith said.

“Logic would suggest that these communities would be an ideal location to host Ukrainian refugees,” he said.

The thing that struck me about Smith’s proposal is how thoroughly he has researched it. He hasn’t just sprouted an idea, he has worked out a plan and enshrined it in a draft act of Congress, which lays out the federal, state and county responsibilities and the issuance of work permits and residence certificates -- and, of course, the all-important issue of funding. He has sent it to his congressman, Austin Scott, a Republican. 

Smith told me that it is worth noting that Scandinavians were encouraged to populate the Midwest -- as anyone who listened to Prairie Home Companion, on NPR knows.

I don’t know whether America’s wheat farmers need help, but certainly there will be pressure to grow more wheat. The chances that wheat will be sown in the middle of Russia’s war on Ukraine are unlikely. Ukraine is a huge wheat producer. Canada brought in Ukrainian immigrants in the 1890s to help boost wheat production. It was a great success.

It seems to me that Smith’s well-conceived proposal has merit and deserves attention. It has the prima facie merit of helping a part of America that needs help, and giving succor to the most desperate of people, those uprooted by war.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

--

Co-host and Producer

"White

Llewellyn King: Putin’s diabolical romanticism is sinking the global economy; deconstructing the NATO as threat myth

Face of evil: Vladimir Putin in the KGB in 1980

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The barbarity of the Russian assault on Ukraine is neither mitigated by the ineptitude of the Russian Army nor can hearts be uplifted by the bravery of the Ukrainians. Murder on a colossal scale is taking place in plain sight on television day after day.

At this writing, there are 3.5 million refugees and thousands of civilian casualties reported. This is killing, killing, killing without respite. The Russian economy is destroyed, and the consequence of this bloody slaughter is affecting the world economy.

Even pusillanimous nations like India and Brazil feel the hot breath of the crazed organ grinder Vladimir Putin and his Russian bear.

The invasion of Ukraine was folly and a criminal act, but its continuation has become pure and sustained evil.

Some in the U.S. commentariat have suggested with amazing thought gymnastics that all this is because of the expansion of NATO. But if NATO hadn’t expanded after the fall of the Berlin Wall, then Russia wouldn’t have felt threatened and wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. Nonsense. Russia has felt threatened in Europe since the days of the tsar. If NATO hadn’t expanded to include the Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, Russian troops would be billeted there right now.

Had Ukraine joined NATO, the United States wouldn’t be paying the price at the pump and Europe wouldn’t be shivering out the last days of winter, wondering how it will get through the coming months without enough fuel to produce electricity. 

Security is the abiding fault line in Russia’s thinking about the West. Sure, St. Petersburg is close to the rest of Europe and could be overrun. And Moscow isn’t so far from European neighbors that it couldn’t be reached easily by an invader: Napoleon got there, and Hitler could have if he had been a better strategist. But most of Russia with its 11 time zones is geographically out of reach. That makes it hard to swallow the security argument.

Putin wants to restore Imperial Russia and the empire that reached even farther under communism -- which makes him a diabolical romanticist. He wants to restore Russian hegemony over its former states: Ukraine is the biggest.

Larry O’Donnell, the MSNBC host, correctly postulated that for NATO, or the United States alone, to intervene to help Ukraine, nuclear war could result; war not just in Europe, but also between the United States and Russia -- the very thing that dominated the world from 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union.

O’Donnell’s argument reveals the impotence that comes with nuclear weapons and sets up this question: Can we never challenge Russia, China or any other country with a substantial nuclear arsenal and the ability to deliver its weapons into the United States and our European and other democratic allies?

If that is so, does it inoculate Russia from invading the Baltic states?

We know the reality that lurks behind China’s ambitions for Taiwan. Is that more inevitable than ever? President George W. Bush said we would do “whatever it takes to defend Taiwan.” That is very unlikely now, if it ever was.

It isn’t that the reality of the international scene has changed so much as it has come into a clear and harsh light. However, one thing has changed: The slaughter, the unspeakable suffering in Ukraine will change the attitude of a generation to Russia in Europe. Russia will be a pariah, not a partner.

The United States fears war with Russia, but Russia, much weaker in every way, must fear war with NATO and the United States.

On a visit to Moscow, toward the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, I heard a four-star Russian general say, “Never again.” But the Ukraine invasion is again. Will Russia and other aggressors be deterred long after the last of the dead are buried in Ukraine, and long after the last body bag has gone back to Russia? Maybe for a generation, which is about how long it will take to rebuild the global economy after the Russian invasion of Ukraine has run its ghastly course.

Llewellyn King is executive  producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Web site: whchronicle.com

Don Pesci: ‘Cheap tears’ about Putin’s rape of Ukraine

Result of Russian terror shelling of residential areas in the Chernihiv district of Ukraine.

"The Chateau" at St. Basil College Seminary in Stamford, Conn. It was originally a college dormitory and now houses the Ukrainian Museum and Library of Stamford.

VERNON, Conn.

People in the United States, some of them foreign-policy “experts,” were surprised, surprised when the Ukrainian military has pushed back against Putin’s merciless invasion of the country for many days on end. Ukrainians in Connecticut were not surprised. Neither will they be surprised at the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian resistance.

Nor will U.S. intelligence services or politicians in the United States sympathetic to Ukraine, the Alamo of Europe, be surprised. There have been no surprises, and there should in the near future be no surprises.

Putin’s 40-mile Russian convoy is approaching Kiev. The Russian military already is in possession of the largest nuclear plant in the world, having bombed it first. Not to worry, it appears that no one in NATO, putatively a defense corridor against Russian aggression, will be harmed by Chernobyl ll.

Putin is using cluster bombs, outlawed by virtually all Western nations years ago, to terrorize the civilian population of Ukraine which – no big surprise – will over the course of the coming days be efficiently and effectively bombed into submission. What we are witnessing on a global scale is a new “trail of tears,” and an Alamo defense by Ukrainians. The Alamo, it should be recalled, surrounded by Santa Ana’s superior Mexican army, was also given up as lost by the intelligence services of Davy Crockett’s day.

So, what’s next for Ukraine? There is not a single general in the Pentagon who does not know that the spoils of war will go to Putin.

Ukraine is being abducted, and the United States has already more or less written off the corpses and captives as NATO’s collateral damage. Moldova, which managed to struggle free of Stalin’s chains, is likely next on Putin’s checkoff list. Moldova, like Ukraine, is not affiliated with NATO, nor is Finland. And when it too falls, one may expect lots of bedroom slipper analysis (see Camus on Hungary here) and tears flowing like rivers from the reddened eyes of politicians in Congress empathetic to Ukraine.

Theologians sometimes speak of “cheap grace.” These are cheap tears.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose courage under fire has been widely praised by President Biden and the entire Connecticut U.S. congressional delegation, has repeatedly said he needed many more armor-piercing weapons to stop the 40- mile convoy of Russian tanks and missile launchers methodically preparing to overrun Kiev, not American boots on the ground or – Heaven forefend! – an effective boots on the ground resistance from cowed NATO countries.

The United States, still cursed by former President Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign-policy timidity, has followed – sort of – Britain’s lead in supplying Ukraine with minimal defensive munitions in an attempt to prevent Ukraine from toppling back into a Russian-controlled police state of the sort that Putin also wishes to reconstruct in the Baltic States that he falsely supposes threaten Russia’s sovereignty.

Apparently NATO is to be a new “red line” that Putin and his 40-mile long military convoy will not be permitted to cross with impunity — without an effective military response. In bygone days, the U.S. southern border sometimes was a red line that border-jumpers were not permitted to cross with impunity. But the red lines laid down by U.S. presidents in the have tended to be drawn with disappearing ink and resolve.  

The copious congressional tears and nods of “solidarity” with Ukraine are little more than political bitcoins to purchase votes. There has been no shortage of empathy for Ukraine issuing from Connecticut’s congressional delegation.

One thinks of U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, whose veins are filled with tears rather than blood. Blumenthal, who has long accustomed himself to bleed tears from every political stump in Connecticut at the slightest provocation, has yet to explain to Connecticut Ukrainian-Americans he has visited in churches why U.S. intelligence services (see “US delays real-time intel to Ukraine, officials say”) have been reluctant to share with Ukrainian leaders information in their possession that would aid the country’s military in its defense of a civilian population against which Putin, not beloved of Democrats, has declared total war.

The news item cited above appeared on Saturday, March 5 in The Hartford Courant, a paper Blumenthal’s staff frequently consults.  Blumenthal, accustomed to ventilating his domestic- and foreign-policy views wherever and whenever he wishes, is on the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

Though Zelenskyy has several times vividly portrayed Ukraine’s vulnerability to Russian assaults operating in airspace that remains open in the midst of pulverizing bomb and missile strikes, his multiple requests to close off the airspace have been turned aside by the United States and all other NATO countries on the grounds that acceding to the request would require the destruction of Russian aircraft violating closed air space. And this, it has been whispered by Russian invaders, could theoretically precipitate a declared war with nuclear-armed Russia.

If Putin is successful in occupying Ukraine, he will have achieved a tactical and strategic victory that will move the border of Russia west so that it will impinge on all the Baltic States, as well as Poland and Finland, NATO countries that had wrested their freedom from Russian domination when Eastern Bloc nations had cast off their chains starting in 1989. Putin’s nuclear blackmail would then apply not just to Ukraine but to all nations, NATO or not, facing a future 40-mile, menacing Russian caravan.  

The nuclear blackmail that has intimidated Western free states from supplying intelligence and war material necessary for the survival of an independent Ukraine is a constant of Putin’s terrorist policy. Putin has no intention of disarming Russia of nuclear weapons. He now says that even sanctions are a declaration of war. The weapons remaining a live option, the threat will remain a live option, however many civilians Putin chooses to murder in Ukraine -- or in any other country he wishes to incorporate into his new visionary map of Europe.

Ukraine having been imprisoned behind a refabricated Iron Curtain, what will Blumenthal say to the congregants of Ukrainian churches in Connecticut with whom he has expressed “solidarity”? How solid is a solidarity that stands aside, watching in horror the methodical destruction of an independent democracy, twisting its fingers while bravely inveighing against “Son Of Stalin” Putin, bleeding tears, and  churning with useless chatter, while Putin reassembles a new Eastern Bloc corridor of states subservient to terrorist Russia?

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: May we be worthy of the brave Ukrainians

Albert Camus

VERNON, Conn.

In March, 1957, the French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960) published an essay, at great cost to himself, titled “{Janos} Kadar Had His Day Of Fear.” His epitaph on the Soviet-suppressed Hungarian Revolution, in the fall of 1956, may serve as well as an epitaph on the Ukraine’s democratic revolution, which Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is now trying to destroy. Kadar (1912-1989) was the Communist boss of Hungary, reporting to his Soviet bosses.

The Hungarian Revolution was suppressed at the order of the Kremlin, run by its then boss, Nikita Khrushchev, after Stalin had installed in Hungary a Communist dictatorship after World War II. Camus regarded the takeover of Hungary by totalitarian Stalinists as a counter-revolution.

His essay was costly to Camus for a number of reasons. It was an epistle of liberty and a resolute, unambiguous disparagement of totalitarianism.

The essay began on a defiant note: “The Hungarian Minister of State Marosan, whose name sounds like a program, declared a few days ago that there would be no further counter-revolution in Hungary. For once, one of Kadar's Ministers has told the truth. How could there be a counter-revolution since it has already seized power? There can be no other revolution in Hungary.”

And the second paragraph likely was considered in France by what we might call its philosophical establishment as an awakening slap in the face: “I am not one of those who long for the Hungarian people to take up arms again in an uprising doomed to be crushed under the eyes of an international society that will spare neither applause nor virtuous tears before returning to their slippers like football enthusiasts on Saturday evening after a big game. There are already too many dead in the stadium, and we can be generous only with our own blood. Hungarian blood has proved to be so valuable to Europe and to freedom that we must try to spare every drop of it.”

And then France’s apostle of liberty let loose the following thunderbolt: “But I am not one to think there can be even a resigned or provisional compromise with a reign of terror that has as much right to be called socialist as the executioners of the Inquisition had to be called Christians. And, on this anniversary of liberty, I hope with all my strength that the mute resistance of the Hungarian people will continue, grow stronger, and, echoed by all the voices we can give it, get unanimous international opinion to boycott its oppressors. And if that opinion is too flabby or selfish to do justice to a martyred people, if our voices also are too weak, I hope that the Hungarian resistance will continue until the counter-revolutionary state collapses everywhere in the East under the weight of its lies and its contradictions.”

Camus himself was both an atheist and a socialist fully prepared to take to the ramparts, in fine French fashion: “For it [the Stalinist false front] is indeed a counter-revolutionary state. What else can we call a regime that forces the father to inform on his son, the son to demand the supreme punishment for his father, the wife to bear witness against her husband —that has raised denunciation to the level of a virtue? Foreign tanks, police, twenty-year-old girls hanged, committees of workers decapitated and gagged, scaffolds, writers deported and imprisoned, the lying press, camps, censorship, judges arrested, criminals legislating, and the scaffold again—is this socialism, the great celebration of liberty and justice?”

Here at last was a man who knew how to draw proper distinctions. The essay was bound to tread on tender toes.

In Hungary, a Joshua horn had been sounded, and walls had begun to tumble: “Thus, with the first shout of insurrection in free Budapest, learned and shortsighted philosophies, miles of false reasonings and deceptively beautiful doctrines were scattered like dust. And the truth, the naked truth, so long outraged, burst upon the eyes of the world.

“Contemptuous teachers, unaware that they were thereby insulting the working classes, had assured us that the masses could readily get along without liberty if only they were given bread. And the masses themselves suddenly replied that they didn't have bread but that, even if they did, they would still like something else. For it was not a learned professor but a Budapest blacksmith who wrote: ‘I want to be considered an adult eager to think and capable of thought. I want to be able to express my thoughts without having anything to fear and I want, also, to be listened to.’"

It was an essay too far for many stern socialists in France, some of whom were prepared to avert their eyes so long as the Soviet experiment in Russia moved forward unimpeded.

Camus stood in the way of totalitarian progress. He was of the party of liberty and just revolt. As such, he ended his essay: “Our faith is that throughout the world, beside the impulse toward coercion and death that is darkening history, there is a growing impulse toward persuasion and life, a vast emancipatory movement called culture that is made up both of free creation and of free work.

“Our daily task, our long vocation is to add to that culture by our labors and not to subtract, even temporarily, anything from it. But our proudest duty is to defend personally to the very end, against the impulse toward coercion and death, the freedom of that culture—in other words, the freedom of work and of creation.

“The Hungarian workers and intellectuals, beside whom we stand today with so much impotent grief, realized that and made us realize it. This is why, if their suffering is ours, their hope belongs to us too. Despite their destitution, their exile, their chains, it took them but a single day to transmit to us the royal legacy of liberty. May we be worthy of it!”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

David Warsh: Putin wants to get his foes thinking

Vladimir Putin in 2018

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The first bright light on the murky  situation  in Ukraine shone Jan. 28, when Ukraine officials “sharply criticized” the Biden administration, according to The New York Times in its Jan. 29 edition, “for its ominous warnings of an imminent Russian attack,” saying that the U.S. was spreading unnecessary alarm.

Since those warnings have been front-page news for weeks in The Times and  The Washington Post. Ukrainian President Volodynyr Zelensky implicitly rebuked the American press as well. As the lead story in The Post indignantly put it, he “ [took] aim at his most important security partners as his own military  braced for a potential security attack.”

Meanwhile, Yaroslav Trofimov, The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent, writing Jan. 27 in the paper’s news pages, identified a well-camouflaged off-ramp to the present stand-off, in the form of an agreement signed in the wake of the Russian-backed offensive in eastern Ukraine in February 2015. The so-called Minsk-2 had since remained dormant, he wrote, until recently.

Now, after a long freeze, senior Ukrainian and Russian officials are talking about implementing the Minsk-2 accords once again, with France and Germany seeing this process as a possible off-ramp that would allow Russian President Vladimir Putin a face-saving way to de-escalate.

I have had a long-standing interest in this story.  In 2016, in the expectation that Hillary Clinton would be elected U.S. president, I began a small book with a view to warning about the ill consequences of the willy-nilly expansion of the NATO alliance that President Bill Clinton had begun in 1993, which was pursued, despite escalating Russian objections, by successors George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The election of Donald Trump intervened.  Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years appeared in 2018.

I was relieved when Joe Biden defeated Trump, in 2020, but alarmed in 2021 when Biden installed a senior member of Mrs. Clinton’s foreign-policy team in the State Department, as undersecretary for political affairs.  Seven years before, as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, Victoria Nuland had directed U.S. policy towards Russia and Ukraine and passed out cookies to Ukrainian protestors during the anti-Russian Maidan demonstrations in February 2014. At their climax, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally, fled to exile in southern Russia, and, in short order, Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that, when it came to interpreting the situation in Ukraine, it would be wise to pay attention to a more diverse medley of voices than the chorus of administration sources uncritically amplified by The Times  and The Post.  David Johnson, proprietor of Johnson’s Russia List, told readers he didn’t think there would be an invasion.  Neither did I. Russian and Ukrainian citizens seemed to agree; according to reports in the WSJ and the Financial Times, they were going about their business normally.

Why? Presumably because most locals understood Russian maneuvers on their borders to be a show of force, intended to affect negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow.

As for what Putin may be thinking and privately saying – his strategic aims and his tactics – I pay particular attention to Harvard historian Timothy Colton. His nuanced biography of Boris Yeltsin makes him an especially interesting interpreter of the man Yeltsin in 1999 designated his successor.

Colton, a Canadian, is a member of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think-tank, established in 2004 and closely linked to Putin. Its annual meetings have been patterned on those of Klaus Schwab’s better-known World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. Membership consists mainly of research scholars, East and West.  A little essay by Colton surfaced 10 days ago on the club’s site, as What Does Putin’s Conservatism Seek to Conserve?

Colton observed that Putin’s personal ideas and goals, as opposed to his exercise of power as a political leader, are seldom discussed.  That is not surprising, he wrote, as Putin had relatively little to say about his own convictions during his first two terms in office, aside from First Person, a book of interviews published just as he took office in 2000.  That reticence diminished in his third term, Colton continued, especially now as his fourth term begins.  In a speech to a Valdai conference last autumn, whose theme was “The Individual, Values, and the State,” Putin borrowed a foreign term – conservatism – and used it four times, each time with a slightly different modifier, to describe his own fundamental views.  Colton wrote:

Putin noted at Valdai that he started speaking about conservativism a while back, but had doubled down on it in response not to internal Russian developments but to the fraught international situation. “Now, when the world is going through a structural crisis, reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed in importance, precisely because of the proliferating risks and dangers and the fragility of the reality around us.”

“This conservative approach,” he stated, “is not about an ignorant traditionalism, dread of change, or a game of hold, much less about withdrawing into our own shell.” Instead, it was something positive: “It is primarily about reliance on time-tested tradition, the preservation and increase of the population, realistic assessment of oneself and others, an accurate alignment of priorities, correlation of necessity and possibility, prudent formulation of goals, and a principled rejection of extremism as a means of action.”

What of the wellsprings of Putin’s conservatism? Perhaps nothing more fundamental than the preservation of his own power. “Two decades in the Kremlin, and the prospect of years more, may incline him increasingly toward rationalizations of the status quo as principled conservatism.”  An alternative explanation would emphasize life experience. The fragility that Putin was talking about at Valdai was that of the present moment, Colton wrote, but, he continued,

Putin has commented more than once on the inherent volatility of human affairs. “Often there are things that seem impossible to us,” he said in the First Person interviews, “but then all of a sudden — bang!” He gave as his illustration the event that by all accounts traumatized him more than any other — the implosion of the USSR. “That is the way it was with the Soviet Union. Who could have imagined that it would have up and collapsed? Even in your worst nightmares no one could have foretold this.” Sticking with “time-tested” formulas would suit such a temperament [Colton wrote].

What sorts of time-tested formulas might the Russian leader adopt?  Colton, a player in many venues, is constrained to speak and write so carefully that it is hard for an outsider to know what with any confidence what point he was making to insiders in his recent essay. As journalist, I am not.

One time-tested formula Putin has employed frequently, to the point of habit, is a tradition I think of as having evolved in the West. This is the practice of setting out a frank public account of public-policy views. It is a rhetorical tactic set out with especial felicity by the framers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, to the effect that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” requires those undertaking dramatic actions to declare the causes that impel them to act. In general, this Putin has done.

There was, for instance, his frank appraisal of the situation of Russia at the Turn of the Millennium, published as one of those First Person interviews in 2000. After he failed to dissuade George Bush from invading Iraq, Putin lambasted the U.S. in 2007 in a widely publicized speech to a security conference in in Munich.  In 2014, after annexing Crimea, he delivered another blistering speech, this time to the both houses of the Russian parliament. And last summer, he published a long essay asserting his conviction that Ukrainians and Russians share “the same historical and spiritual space.

What might he do if his army goes home, having made its rhetorical point without firing a shot? My hunch is that he will give another speech.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay originated.

Spiridon Putin, Vladimir Putin’s paternal grandfather, a personal cook of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin

David Warsh: Hillary in ‘24 and a second Yalta agreement?!

— Photo by Niele

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  William Faulkner’s well- remembered adage (from Requiem for a Nun) was underscored last week when John Ellis, a vigorous second-presidential-generation member of the Bush clan, published a special edition of his six-days-a-week newsletter describing an “invisible primary” that has begun unfolding among the Democrats.

Whatever may be in the offing among the Republicans for 2024, Ellis said, Hillary Clinton is preparing a possible run for the Democratic presidential nomination then.  Biden will be too old to run again, he averred; the Democrats’ Plan B has become a “jump ball.” Hence the shadow-boxing that Clinton has begun, most recently in the form of a subscription “Masterclass” in which she performed the speech she planned to deliver in 2020 had she won. “She can win the nomination [in 2024],” Ellis wrote. “She might not. But don’t for a minute think she can’t.”

It is against this background that the current Ukraine “crisis” should be understood – those 100,000 Russian troops practicing war games nears the Ukrainian border.  In keeping with Putin’s long-standing habit of setting out policies in a series of documents and speeches, Russia last week set forth an elaborate series of proposals for a post-Cold War national-security agreement between Russia, the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Putin first called for a “a new Yalta” after annexing Crimea in 2014, The old Yalta Conference  (code-named Argonaut!) took place on the Crimean peninsula  in the waning days of  World War II.  It was there that Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin,  Winston Churchill and their deputies carved Europe into spheres of influence along lines ratified a few months later in Potsdam, Germany.

What to make of all this?   When Biden came into office, imagine Putin’s surprise to find Victoria Nuland newly installed as undersecretary of state for political affairs.   Nuland, you may remember, is the former Hillary Clinton press secretary who, as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration, was taped by Russian security agents instructing the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine to “fuck the E.U.” during Ukraine’s 2014  “Snow Revolution.” Earlier, she and former GOP presidential candidate John McCain had passed out cookies to demonstrators in Kyiv’s Maiden Square.  Last week Nuland was threatening to throw Russia out of the international payments system known as SWIFT if its army invaded Ukraine, while Biden weighed proposals to send left-over helicopters intended for Afghanistan to Ukraine.

Why did Biden nominate Nuland? That’s for The Washington Post to find out and explain. But from Putin’s point of view, the American president’s overreach on foreign policy must have seemed as striking as did Biden’s domestic policy plans to congressional Republics and a couple of moderate Democrats in the Senate.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that Russia was a nation in economic decline. Putin clearly thinks the U.S. itself is declining, lacking cohesion.  Presumably, the Russian leader is posturing, waiting for the results of the next U.S. presidential election to emerge.  He may want a “new Yalta agreement,” but until a few years ago, a slow-motion, wide-ranging face-saving maneuver seemed more likely on the part of the West with respect to NATO expansion. Something analogous to the little-noticed concessions President Kennedy gave Russia in exchange for its high-profile retreat from the Cuban Missile Crisis might have served. Today it seems likely that Putin may be able to extract more than that with his bullying threats.

It all depends on the next presidential election. A re-run of the 2016 contest would clearly be a disaster. The past may always be with us, but the future is unclear because it hasn’t happened yet.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.

Warren Getler: This most uncertain winter

Luce Hall (1884) at the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, R.I. The institution is a center of the U.S. military’s war-gaming work.

—U.S. Navy photo by Jaima Fogg

Ukrainian troops in the threatened country’s Donbas region. Russia has been massively increasing its troop strength nearby in what some observers fear is a precursor to an all-out invasion.

America faces its most challenging year-end since its formal entry into the Second World War, in December 1941.

While we have been internally grappling with COVID for nearly two years, dark clouds have gathered on the geopolitical map.

Russia is mobilizing some 175,000 troops on its border with Ukraine; China is flying repeated bomber test-runs near Taiwan; Iran is using its proxies to hit its Arab neighbors as well as Israel and U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria with drones and missiles. Russia and China are exhibiting their closest military collaboration – in joint-training exercises and bilateral arms sales – in decades. And both have signed military and economic pacts with Iran in recent years.

Will there be war, indeed, continental war, on several fronts?

The risk may be  greater than at any time since World War II.

Authoritarian rulers-for-life in Moscow and in Beijing are testing the waters. Specifically, they are testing the mettle of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first-year administration. They’re gauging a Biden preoccupied with internal debates around vaccination policies, inflation, crime, supply-chain bottlenecks and other largely domestic, massively time-consuming matters.

And they perceive vulnerability in the Oval Office – with Biden, who just turned 79, coming off a grueling multi-year presidential campaign against incumbent Donald Trump and then seeing his approval ratings drop for months. What’s more, they sense a country deeply divided -- an American superpower at growing risk of civil unrest.

Are these  Russian and Chinese military maneuvers   mere provocations, mere signals of what could happen if  the West challenges their geopolitical  ambitions?

Or are these up-tempo deployments by Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi meant merely for domestic Russian and Chinese consumption? Possibly not.

This time, the activity around such large-scale mobilizations appears alarmingly furtive, and therefore open to wide interpretation, particularly regarding Moscow’s intentions toward Ukraine. These maneuvers (including rumors of a planned assault on eastern Ukraine in late January or early February) may invite retaliation and potential “miscalculations” by both sides. Putin and Xi may not appreciate the seriousness of  possible "kinetic" responses by NATO allies and our friends in Asia. Israel, meanwhile, uncertain of backing from Washington, is leaning toward taking things into its own hands to stop -- with direct military action from the air -- a nuclear-armed Iran from emerging.

America, as the world’s leading democracy, is slow to anger, which is a good thing. Yet we are also at times too slow in  confronting harsh realities beyond our borders. As a nation, we must focus on the  large-scale  threat scenarios developing in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East…with level-headed coolness and  a serious, sustained focus.

John F. Kennedy, in his Harvard thesis-turned book, Why England Slept, pointed out the danger of Britain ignoring for too long Nazi Germany’s growing war machine and the bellicosity of its totalitarian dictator, Adolf Hitler.

“We can't escape the fact that democracy in America, like democracy in England, has been asleep at the switch. If we had not been surrounded by oceans three and five thousand miles wide, we ourselves might be caving in at some Munich of the Western World,” writes Kennedy, the then 22-year-old future president of the United States.

“To say that democracy has been awakened by the events of the last few weeks is not enough. Any person will awaken when the house is burning down. What we need is an armed guard that will wake up when the fire first starts, or, better yet, one that will not permit a fire to start at all. We should profit by the lesson of England and make our democracy work. We must make it work right now. Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It's the system that functions in the pinches that survives.” 

To prevent  tipping into something recalling the 1939-45 cataclysm, we must show resolve – an unquestioned firmness that lets our real and potential adversaries know that we stand united --  at home and  with our key allies abroad. Such resolve deters dangerous opportunism among our foes,   setting up a bulwark against a lurch into regional war, indeed, into seemingly unthinkable inter-continental war below the nuclear threshold.

We must recognize that both China and Russia have been developing advanced missile systems – notably conventional-use hypersonic weapons – that could put us at risk in the same manner (or more at risk) as the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Back then, at least, we could surge into a mass production of armaments as never-before seen; today, given supply-chain restrictions and other factors, such an achievement would  perhaps be less certain after any potentially devastating attack on our military bases, ports and other critical infrastructure.

Lest we forget, while Britain slept in those years before the outbreak of WWII, Germany was able to secretly develop its , first-of-their-kind V-2 rockets  that would eventually rain down on London and cause widespread damage and terror. Today, Pentagon chiefs are repeatedly sounding the alarm about the yawning gap in U.S. vs. Chinese/Russian advanced hypersonic-missile capabilities, not to mention recently demonstrated Russian capabilities of destroying satellites in orbit with missiles fired from its territory.

To its credit, the Biden administration is slowly but surely turning its strategic military assessments and its inner-circle Pentagon planning toward our  China challenge, thus pivoting away from the “forever wars” of Afghanistan, Iraq and, going further back, Vietnam. And, just last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had this to say about the massive Russian troop buildup, including more than 1,000 tanks, on the border of Ukraine. “We don’t know whether President Putin has made the decision to invade. We do know that he’s putting in place the capacity to do so in short order should he so decide.” 

As we approach the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor this week -- not to mention the 250th anniversary as a nation in less than five years -- America cannot afford to be ill-prepared for tectonic convulsions on the geopolitical landscape. We can not, as a society, spend too much time navel-gazing or being preoccupied with the likes of the latest crazes on Instagram, Tik-Tok or the Metaverse.

These times demand extraordinary leadership, no matter the internal challenges and pre-occupations of the world’s greatest democracy. As Americans, we will be roundly tested during this most uncertain winter -- and not merely by inflationary pressures or a new surge of the Delta and Omicron COVID-19 variants, which are eroding the fabric of civil society both here and abroad. 

Warren Getler, based in Washington, D.C., writes on international affairs. He’s a former journalist with Foreign Affairs Magazine,  International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News. His two sons serve in the U.S. military.