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We have been reminded, by a sage commenter, that it isn’t over until it’s over. He was speaking about the war in Ukraine. It is always good to have a diversity of analyses of the situation, but more and more it’s looking as though it is over. It is looking as though the United States is trying to find for itself a face saving way out of the crisis.
Considering that prior assessments aimed at providing Vladimir Putin with a face saving way out, this must count as a bad sign.
We have relied on David Goldman, of the Asia Times, for some of the most cogent analysis of the situation, so here is his view, from this morning’s site:
The Biden Administration faces a double disaster after its Ukraine miscalculation, namely a US recession and a second strategic humiliation in the space of a year.
The United States economy is almost certainly in recession, while oil prices drive inflation that has cut workers’ real pay by about 6% year on year.
Washington’s earlier boasts of driving Putin from power, destroying Russia’s capacity to make war and halving the size of the Russian economy look ridiculous in retrospect.
It is useful to recall the bluster about how we were going to beat down Putin and save democracy. The situation in Ukraine does not look quite that rosy any more. And besides, America and the West are now in a recession.
So, the question now is, how is the administration going to walk back its belligerent, blustery rhetoric, and promote a negotiated solution. For the record, at this blog, we have always believed that a negotiated compromise was the only way out. Looking for total victory seemed and still seems to be folly.
Climbing down off this ledge won’t be easy. It may be impossible. Biden denounced Russia’s leader as a war criminal, averred that he couldn’t be allowed to remain in office and bragged that US sanctions would cut the Russian economy in half. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin claimed that the US would destroy Russia’s capacity to make war.
That being the case, how can America encourage Ukraine to make territorial concessions without suffering yet another humiliation:
A compromise in Ukraine with significant territorial concessions to Russia – the only conceivable way to end the war – would humiliate Washington.
A negotiated solution to the Ukraine war, though, is not impossible. Washington could continue to portray itself as the defender of Ukraine’s sovereignty while encouraging European leaders to do the dirty work and force Ukraine into negotiations with Moscow.
Is the Biden administration trying to lay the groundwork for a negotiated compromise. Goldman thinks that we might be seeing just that:
A possible hint in this direction came on June 14 from the US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin H. Kahl, who declared: “We’re not going to tell the Ukrainians how to negotiate, what to negotiate and when to negotiate. They’re going to set those terms for themselves.”
As it happened, this proposal echoes one offered by the leaders of France and Germany. Ukraine rejected it in February, because the Biden administration made certain promises about defending its territorial integrity:
Kahl’s statement, to be sure, is mendacious in the extreme. France and Germany on February 15 asked Ukrainian President Zelensky to comply with the Minsk II agreement, then supported by Moscow, which would have given autonomy to Russian-speaking regions in the Donbas within a sovereign Ukraine.
A larger issue was Ukraine’s wish to join NATO. France and Germany told Zelensky to renounce such aspirations. The Biden administration encouraged them.
Michael Gordon reported April 1 in the Wall Street Journal:
Mr Scholz made one last push for a settlement between Moscow and Kyiv. He told Mr. Zelensky in Munich on February 19 that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia. The pact would be signed by Mr Putin and Mr Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security. Mr Zelensky said Mr Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO.
The United States has effectively sidelined itself, so France, Italy and Germany are doing the heavy lifting. Yesterday their leaders were in Ukraine. The issue was not NATO membership, but membership in the European Union. This will apparently take a long time, so it feels aspirational.
The United States won’t tell Ukraine what to do, Undersecretary Kahl declared. But that doesn’t prevent other governments from making Zelensky an offer he can’t refuse. Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych told Germany’s Bild-Zeitung on June 16 that German Chancellor Scholz, French President Macron and Italian President Draghi might deliver such a demand to Zelensky during their current visit to Kyiv.
So, the three leaders might have been trying to get Zelensky to back down. The war and the sanctions regime are becoming too costly. Yesterday, after I wrote a post about the problem with energy supplies in Europe, Russia’s Gazprom cut supplies to Europe. As noted in yesterday’s post, the loss of Russia energy is biting:
The Zelensky aide said he feared that Scholz, Macron and Draghi “will try to get a Minsk III. They will say that we need to end the war that is causing food problems and economic problems, that Russians and Ukrainians are dying, that we need to save Mr Putin’s face, that the Russians made mistakes and that we need to forgive and give them a chance to return to world society.”
Again, the feelers are not coming from the United States, but from European leaders. Whether or not Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland will sign on, is not quite clear. It seems more clear that the Biden administration, having dug itself into a hole, is trying to let the Europeans do the heavier lifting, to avoid even more humiliation. Surely, our president is no longer capable of reading from cue cards. No one can expect him to conduct a negotiation.
And the European message seems clear-- it’s time to put an end to the slaughter and to the economic damage being caused in the West by the sanctions regime:
Germany’s leading center-right daily Die Welt commented: “Kyiv is beginning to have doubts about the solidarity of the West. Voices are being raised calling for peace efforts. In particular, a statement by NATO chief Stoltenberg points to a change of course.”
Five days ago, we heard this from the head of NATO:
Die Welt referred to a June 12 speech in which NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated: “The question is: what price are you willing to pay for peace? How much territory? How much independence? How much sovereignty? How much freedom? How much democracy are you willing to sacrifice for peace? And that’s a very difficult moral dilemma.”
Goldman concludes:
The choices, though, are stark and clear: Either climb down off the ledge or plunge into a world recession and a spiraling strategic crisis.
Dare one say that the Biden administration has demonstrated singular ineptitude in the Ukraine situation. But then again, at least it’s consistent with its handling of other diplomatic crises.
5 comments:
Putin is the new and, in some respects, just as stupid, Stalin, who acted to further secure the Soviet Union after Hitler invaded eastern Poland (followed by the Soviet Union's invasion of western Poland) and created new enemies instead. Stalin, seeking to expand the borders of the Soviet Union in an effort to push Nazi Germany away from its borders, attacks Finland, which almost certainly would have remained neutral in a Nazi-Soviet war, and pushes it into the arms of Hitler. The attack is made at the beginning of winter, 1939, and results in a disastrous series of defeats for the Russians until a truce is signed in the spring of 1940, ceding some Finnish territory to Russia. When Hitler invades the Soviet Union in 1941, Finland allies itself with Germany and moves to recapture the territories it previously ceded and other Finnish parts of western Belarus, freeing Hitler's Northern army to move on to Leningrad. Stalin's land grab in Finland is just a serious blunder.
Putin, in pushing back against NATO, a defensive treaty organization, attacks the Ukraine which in no one's wildest imagination would ever attack Russia. Putin's attack comes in the early spring when the mud makes the roads in Ukraine impassible to armies. Just a stupid as Stalin's waging war in Finland in the winter. The Russians surprise the world with their inept attack, lose much of their modern weaponry and grind down their ability to continue wage a modern war. They are now relying on massive artillery barrages to continue this war, as they did in WW2. The NATO countries wake up and realize that Trump may have been prescient in pushing them to stay current in their treaty obligations (remember, the Germans laughed). More scary, Putin then threatened the Baltic States. Apparently , Putin wants to put Humpty Dumpty together again and recreate the equivalent of a modern Russia that is the image of the old Soviet Union. Except for Belarus, those breakaway countries, including Ukraine, are not interested. So, because Ukraine fights back with some success and NATO is now alarmed, the NATO countries begin shipping modern arms to Ukraine, which had shown a willingness to hold off Russia. The Byractor TB2 supplied to Ukraine by Turkey has been a game changer.
So, what does this mean in a larger context.
Ukraine has become the proxy for NATO in what is considered by NATO to be its war with Russia. This Special Military Operation of Putin's is viewed by NATO to have larger aims than just Ukraine. After all, Putin has indicated that he has more than Ukraine in his sights. Should Putin take the Ukraine, what is to stop him from further attacks against NATO countries. So, the rush by Finland and Sweden to join NATO to further protect against Russian incursions. In sum, the war is actually between NATO and Russia and will come to an end when NATO wants it to end (assuming that Ukraine wants to stay in the fight, as it appears now that it wants to do) on terms that are acceptable to Ukraine and NATO, or something happens in Russia that just brings this to an end.Russia is half the size, population wise, as the old Soviet Union and cannot hope to win a war against NATO, which is ten times the size in population and just more industrially powerful. And, NATO and the USA have the capacity to produce modern weapons in such enormous quantities that Russia cannot hope to counter, for one reason due to the embargo on western technology. As time goes by, those modern weapons will enable the Ukrainian army to dominate the battlefield. It is just a matter of time until those weapons reach Ukraine in sufficient quantities to tip the balance in Ukraine's favor.
Only time will tell how this will eventually end.
Either climb down off the ledge or plunge into a world recession and a spiraling strategic crisis.
This is the leader of NATO?!?! Thank goodness, it's just some journalist! I hereby declare him an idiot.
The coming world recession has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine. It's because the US doubled its money supply creating insane inflation, which can only be stopped with high interest rates, which will plunge the US into recession (technically, we're already in one but it takes a while for people to notice), which will plunge the world into recession, which is what happens when the world's largest (consumer) import market stops buying things.
The coming world food shortage, on the other hand, is mostly, although not entirely, due to the Ukraine war.
We've been in a spiraling strategic crisis for decades, now. That the spiral has tightened (or widened, which way are we going with this metaphor?) until Mr. Goldman notices says more about Mr. Goldman than the strategic crisis. There is no point to NATO. The USSR is dead and Russia is no threat (without nukes, which NATO can't do much about, anyway). THAT is the strategic crisis: What is NATO for?
"Dare one say that the Biden administration has demonstrated singular ineptitude in the Ukraine situation. But then again, at least it’s consistent with its handling of other diplomatic crises." Who dares, wins: I recall a movie that used that phrase...
No offense to anyone. But I have heard several times about the plucky Finn's who kicked the Soviet Union's butt. So much so, that they lost two wars and only really survived the second one because they flipped on their allies and joined Stalin to give Adolf and his minions a final knock down. They were very fortunate at the leadership of Mannerheim to even survive. Why they have let themselves be lined up with NATO, when Russia is no threat to them is beyond me. But it is their decision. Hopefully we will survive this fiasco.
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