Krugman on Putin: "He Had No Idea What He Was Getting Himself Into."
Fareed Zakaria's Sunday interview with Paul Krugman
The Cognoscenti Syndrome
There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in. 74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
A very interesting discussion. Thanks, Mound.
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome, Lorne. I caught a snippet of the interview on Sunday but had to wait until yesterday for it to be posted on YouTube.
ReplyDeleteKrugman is far from alone in this assessment. I assume Biden's advisors are of the same mind. Unrestricted sanction warfare, real 'nuts in the vise' stuff, on a global scale is rare if not unprecedented.
If it works, great. If it causes Putin's rivals to oust him, better. But what if it turns Vlad into a cornered rat?
"what if it turns Vlad into a cornered rat?" Aye, there's the rub:
ReplyDeleteApparently Putin has turned on many of his cronies: He arrested the top two FSB spies for "providing poor intelligence ahead of Russia’s now-stuttering invasion. "
His finance guy and bankers may be next as they try to explain why half of Russia's gold reserves and foreign currency were being kept in the west - and are now as useless to them as the Venezuelan gold in the UK is, to Maduro.
But don't worry (be happy!) cause we are in safe hands at this critical juncture of humanity:
Bush Jr., Obama & tRump worked so hard to renew and extend all the nuclear disarmament treaties of their predecessors.
And ol' Iggy, the very paragon of virtuous Canadian international-intellectualism is given a G&M pulpit to provide wise council:
“The Russians need to understand that if they stage a military incursion across the NATO border […] they will be met by force, and if that fails to hold them, they will be met with nuclear weapons, at first tactical, and then as necessary, strategic too.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-diB65scQU
I was in on the "nuclear deterrent, Round One." A few years back I was rummaging through some old, old boxes and found my copy of DND's nuclear strategy handbook. Some of it I still remembered.
DeleteThe idea was that an attacking Soviet army would send its tanks through the Fulda Gap out into the central German plain and rapidly onward to the English Channel. At that point we'd probably be in a full-blown strategic nuke war. To prevent that, NATO ground forces were to seal off the Fulda Gap at both ends, trapping the Soviet armour. Then AFCENT (allied forces central Europe) would send squadrons of 104s and similar aircraft from 4 ATAF in to nuke the bottled up Soviet divisions.
It was hoped that a limited, tactical nuke strike on purely military targets would buy NATO and the Soviets about three days to avert a strategic nuclear exchange.
BTW, was this "Iggy" to whom you refer the onetime annointed leader of the Liberal Party who advocated for a "muscular foreign policy"? What a dolt.
Given the hapless performance the Russians have displayed so far in Ukraine and the still relatively robust forces NATO has deployed today in Western Europe and the Baltic states I can't see the need to resort to tactical nukes unless, as already threatened, Putin fires first. This is not the 60s when the Soviets had endless divisions of tanks capable of swarming across Europe.
Nukes are a blunt weapon, like a cudgel or a hand grenade. With the era of precision guided munitions, cruise missiles, modern aircraft and electronic warfare there are new ways to skin the Kremlin's cat.
I don't think that the Russian military has anything in common with the steadfast performance of that of 1941 when they stopped Germany at the gates of Moscow.
ReplyDeleteI doubt the many conscripts even know what they fighting for anymore than the youngsters of the USA did in Vietnam .
That the US did not learn from Vietnam and blundered into Iraq is testament to the wilful ignorance of nations and the power of propaganda and manipulative, for profit, social media .
Should the fact that the Ukraine proxy war of the west is being fort mainly by financial means be an indicator of what is important to the world? this as it collapses into environmental disaster?
TB
I'll be devil's advocate here.
ReplyDeleteRussia likely game planned for a number of scenarios. Best case, they'll roll over Ukraine and force its surrender quickly. Worst case, they'll be trapped in a quagmire. Either way, they probably feel as though both cases serve Russian interests. The former, they'll control Ukraine in full. The latter, they'll destabilize Ukraine enough so they can justify occupying Ukraine indefinitely. My guess is they want to split Ukraine in two from Kiev to Odessa, and this will probably happen, one way or the other.
As for money, Russia can simply ship oil to China via rail through Kazakhstan. They're already agreed to do this two weeks ago. This same route also probably ensures Russia won't be without parts it may need but doesn't produce. This route also ties Kazakhstan closer together with the two superpowers.