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ChrisWeigant

(950 posts) Fri Feb 25, 2022, 09:02 PM Feb 2022

Friday Talking Points -- A Changing World Order

Some weeks, obviously, are more momentous than others. This past week may be looked back upon as being one of the most historic anyone alive has ever lived through. The world order shifted on its axis and nobody is quite sure what is coming next.

We should begin by saying that we're going to get to our outlook on what has already happened and what is likely to happen in the future in a much more "big picture" way down in the talking points. It's not a "rant" (as we are sometimes wont to write), it is instead a sober (and hopefully sobering) take on what might be looming on the horizon. This isn't a week for partisan political talking points, we felt.

But domestic American politics is a part of what is going on, so we are going to do a quick rundown of what's been happening here in the introduction, as usual. Although we are going to flip our usual order of presentation, by covering the inane and ridiculous first, and then we'll get to the political machinations on Russia and Ukraine.

The Canadian truckers' protest was finally fully evicted from the streets of Ottawa this week, to the great relief of the people who actually live there. Because Fox News had such fun lionizing the protestors, however, American copycat protest "convoys" have (kind of, sort of) begun here. So far, these efforts are rather small and pathetic, and they have been completely overshadowed in the news by world events, so it looks like this effort is doomed to fizzle in one way or another.

Washington D.C., however, is taking it seriously. Already 700 National Guard soldiers have been approved together with their support vehicles, to "direct traffic" within the District. This is all going to come to a head next Tuesday, which is the true target of the protest -- when President Joe Biden gives his first official State Of The Union speech to a joint session of Congress. Since the risk at any of these events is routinely off the charts (since all three branches of our government will be present in one single location), security will undoubtedly be critical. The truckers are all probably dreaming of surrounding the Capitol with their big rigs and blasting their horns while Biden gives his speech, but this is just not going to happen.

Donald Trump launched the social media platform he's been promising for a while now, and it immediately crashed and burned. Nobody could sign up, apparently. Seems like a rather large software bug, but it's about par for the course on any of Trump's startup ventures. Here's the story, in case you missed it:

Former president Donald Trump, a longtime critic of how Democrats debuted Healthcare.gov, is facing a bungled website launch of his own.

His long-promised social network, Truth Social, has been almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut because of technical glitches, a 13-hour outage and a 300,000-person waitlist.

Even Trump supporters made jokes about the early slog. Jenna Ellis, a former member of his legal team, posted to Instagram a photo showing Trump with his finger hovering over a laptop, "letting us on to Truth Social one at a time."

Ouch. That's from a former member of his legal team, not some Never-Trumper. Can't wait to see what the K-pop crowd does if it ever does get up and running!

There was one rather important political event this week that might have an impact on the midterms (but there will be plenty of time to dissect this in later weeks, so we're holding off for now). Senator Rick Scott, who chairs the partisan group in the Senate whose job it is to get more Republicans elected to the chamber, stepped into the policy void left open by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell this week with his own 11-point plan for Republican candidates to run on. And as he himself put it, his plan might just "strike fear in the hearts of some Republicans." Note that: Republicans, not Democrats. Scott said this because his plan is not just a whole bunch of GOP base red meat, but also some absolutely insane ideas -- like forcing Congress to reauthorize every single federal law every five years. And the lunatic cherry on top: raising income taxes on over half of America because they were so poor they "didn't have skin in the game." We did write about this aspect of it earlier this week (since it is so obviously the best attack line Democrats can use against it), or you can take a quick listen to the audio ad the Senate Democrats immediately released instead.

But as we said, we'll have plenty of time later on to take Scott's plan apart one extremist proposal at a time.

If an international crisis hadn't happened this week, the biggest political news would have broken today, as President Biden announced that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will be nominated to the Supreme Court. This annoyed Lindsey Graham -- and probably Jim Clyburn too (no word, yet) -- because they had thrown their support behind a different candidate, a federal judge from South Carolina.

Jackson's biggest asset she will bring to the high court is that if confirmed she will be the first Supreme Court justice to have worked as a public defender since Thurgood Marshall (who famously argued Brown v. Board of Education before the court, before he was a member of it). Along with all her other life experiences, that will add to the diversity on the court in a very ideological way. If Biden is smart, he'll invite her to the State Of The Union and personally introduce her to America, when everyone's watching.

But to get back to the main issue of the week, President Biden was proven right all along as Russia's Vladimir Putin ignored all of the world's warnings and went right ahead and invaded Ukraine, just after the Beijing Olympics concluded (likely as a favor to China, whose support he will need in the very near future). Just like Biden had been warning, for the past few weeks. It was not a bluff. It was not Biden "overreacting." Which meant that the right-wing media echo chamber had to shift gears rather abruptly. Before the tanks started rolling, here's how Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo was talking about Biden's warnings:

"Was this a ruse?" [Bartiromo] asked her audience Wednesday last week. "Was this whole thing an effort to take everybody's attention away from what Hillary Clinton did and what we know to be a complete hoax over this Russia investigation?"

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld also said late last week that "there is something going on here that feels very, very manufactured."

Once the bombs started falling, however, they tried to quickly shift their story. They knew that somehow Biden had to be to blame for it happening, but they just couldn't figure out exactly how. The message was a bit muddled. Perhaps communications were down and they were left without their usual talking points from Moscow? Who knows, these days.

One Republican did know what to say, of course. But then that's no real surprise, since he has a rather long history with Ukraine and Russia. Donald Trump praised Putin as a "genius" and said he was "savvy," early on in the ramp-up to war. When asked in an interview with a rightwing journalist: "What went wrong here?" and what Biden had done that Trump would have done differently, Trump replied:

Well, what went wrong was a rigged election and what went wrong is a candidate that shouldn't be there and a man that has no concept of what he's doing. I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, "This is genius." Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine -- of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful.

So Putin is now saying, "It's independent," a large section of Ukraine. I said, "How smart is that?" And he's going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That's strongest peace force... We could use that on our southern border. That's the strongest peace force I've ever seen. There were more army tanks than I've ever seen. They're going to keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here's a guy who's very savvy... I know him very well. Very, very well.

By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened. But here's a guy that says, you know, "I'm going to declare a big portion of Ukraine independent" -- he used the word "independent" -- "and we're going to go out and we're going to go in and we're going to help keep peace." You gotta say that's pretty savvy. And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response. They didn't have one for that. No, it's very sad. Very sad.

Later on in the week, he had to be told by a Fox News host that the Russians were the ones staging an amphibious landing in Odessa and not the American military, since Trump had no clue what was actually going on (as usual).

Republicans in general are all over the map when it comes to figuring out exactly what they stand for. Republicans were in such disarray that some of them even had words of praise for Biden's retaliatory sanctions. Some of them even (gasp!) denounced Trump's position. Trump's own former military advisors also denounced his pro-Putin stance. Some of them just didn't even want to talk about it. But the party as a whole has not coalesced around any position on the issue, which tends to just make Biden's moves look more decisive. In the midst of an article on how Republicans moved from Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" view of Russia to where they are now came this rather extraordinary quote:

"Don't look for consistency in Republican policy," said Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer and longtime Republican political consultant. "The Republican Party right now is a little schizophrenic. Anti-communism and love of freedom used to be the glue that held the party together, but now the attitudes toward Russia have gotten all mixed up with domestic politics."

. . .

"Makes your head spin, doesn't it?" Shirley said. "The party is searching for meaning beyond just anti-Bidenism, and there's no one position."

Perhaps the most intelligent summation of the Republican disarray came in a reader comment to this article:

"Anti-communism and love of freedom used to be the glue that held the party together, but now the attitudes toward Russia have gotten all mixed up with domestic politics." translation: "We have no coherent policy agenda, ideology, or vision. We just want Biden (and by extension, the US) to fail."

Seems about right to us.

Congress was in the midst of one of its many weeklong vacations, so there was no immediate legislative action -- in fact, by the time they get back next week, several actions they could have taken earlier will now be off the table due to changing events.

Of course, zeroing in on domestic American politics gets away from the true extent of this tragedy. We'll get to the big picture momentarily, but we had to close on two gut-wrenching moments from the first days of the war, just to remind everyone how serious this all is.

The war already has its first heroes, on the Ukrainian side. Here is the heartbreaking story of courage:

A group of Ukrainian border guards were stationed on Snake Island, in the Black Sea south of Odessa, when a Russian warship ordered them to surrender under threat of attack.

Their response: "Russian warship, go fuck yourself."

They held their ground. All 13 were killed.

And then last night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told a conference call with European Union leaders:

This might be the last time you see me alive.

Kind of puts our domestic political squabbles in perspective, doesn't it?

Volume 652 (2/25/22)

We are forgoing our awards this week, due to the seriousness and severity of the situation. We just felt it wasn't the proper time for such things. Which is also why, as promised, we do not have partisan Democratic talking points for you this week, either. There will be plenty of other weeks for that sort of thing (especially next week, since it will be State Of The Union week).

Instead, we'd like to veer away from the small-picture politics and instead take a wider look at the ways the world order did in fact change this week. Because the shifts can really only be accurately described as "tectonic."

A Changing World Order

In the Cold War, most of the world was on one side of the Iron Curtain or the other. The constant threat of a possible nuclear war was frightening (just ask anyone who lived during the period, they'll tell you), but it was at least fairly easy to understand: we were the good guys, the Soviet Union and all its communist vassal states were the bad guys, and if we ever directly fought each other the end of the world as we know it would be the inevitable result. Nuclear wars were simply not winnable -- everyone on the planet would lose. So while living with that constant threat wasn't a whole lot of fun, at least it was fairly simple to comprehend. Hollywood stopped churning out anti-Nazi movies and started churning out anti-Rooskie movies. Dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction also thrived. It was basically us-against-them, which is a pretty easy theme to expound upon.

Then the end of the Soviet Union came and communism essentially disappeared as a valid governmental theory (not completely, but even China became more of a totalitarian capitalist country, while authentic Soviet-style communism retreated to a few dark corners of the Earth -- notably North Korea, where it has morphed into an even stranger beast: a communist familial dynasty). So all the anti-communist cold warriors were left with nothing to do but deify Ronald Reagan for his supposed one-man victory over "the commies." Which they happily did.

Since then, America and the Western world have turned their attentions elsewhere -- to China, for the most part (although occasionally to North Korea or Iran, as well). And then after 9/11 the worldwide conflict wasn't communism-versus-capitalism, it was terrorism-versus-civilization. Our small-scale and proxy wars were fought against Islamist forces, not against puppets or allies of Russia (although occasionally the two were indeed the same, notably in Syria).

This week, all of that changed. The entire balance of power in the world and the focus of what should be feared the most have both been inexorably altered by Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine. This tragedy continues to unfold on the world's television screens.

From the start of it, President Joe Biden has made it clear that America would "stand with" Ukraine... without actually fighting with them. No American military men and women would be present in Ukraine no matter what happened. We would beef up our NATO allies (in Central and Eastern Europe) and send troops to bolster the easternmost defenses of the alliance, but none of them would be directly involved in whatever happened in Ukraine.

This was the only feasible course of action for Biden to take, obviously. Ukraine is not a member of NATO and we have no defense treaty with the country. We have no obligation to help them at all, in fact. We would do what we could, mostly by shipping them arms that would increase the government forces' lethality against Russian tanks, but that was about as far as we were willing to go, militarily.

Instead, our main weapon would be sanctions on Russia, its leaders, its banks, and its economy. Biden has been ratcheting these up as events have unfolded, but has (so far) withheld some of the strongest sanctions he could impose on the country. Sanctions can really only be effective if the entire West supports them and Europe will feel the economic pain a lot worse than we will, so the Europeans are reluctant to impose the stiffest penalties possible. Again: so far, at any rate -- we will see how the situation continues to develop.

That is the international picture, in a nutshell. At this point, nobody knows what endgame Putin sees for all this. He could be sincere when he says he doesn't want to occupy Ukraine (at least not for any extended period of time). It seems definite now that his initial goals are to depose the duly-elected Ukrainian government and destroy their military capability. After that is achieved, nobody has any clue about what Putin will do next. And since Putin is a total autocrat (and a megalomaniac to boot), while it is impossible to predict his actions it's a certainty that whatever he decides to do is exactly what Russia is going to do -- he won't have to face much political dissent at home. Putin may decide to settle for his original goal of just absorbing the two eastern Ukrainian regions into Russia (whether de facto or de jure) and install a pro-Russian Ukrainian government -- but then soon exit the country. He may try for a bigger division of Ukraine, taking the entire eastern half of it that has more citizens who are sympathetic to Russia while leaving the west of the country (where people are much more supportive of Western Europe) to its own devices. Or he may just try to occupy Ukraine until it is completely pacified (and has become an obedient satellite state, like Belarus to the north).

Nobody knows how long that would take, not even Putin. Will there be a guerrilla insurgency in occupied Ukraine that wages continual hit-and-run warfare against the occupying Russians? If so, how long will it last and how successful would it become? Would NATO allies supply such forces with arms? What would Russia do in retaliation? Is Putin going to be satisfied with just Ukraine, or does he have his eyes on the three Baltic states as well (which are all full NATO members)? Nobody knows the answers to any of those questions. All are distinct possibilities, at this point. So is World War III, if Putin does attack the Baltics -- since he's already dropping veiled hints about first nuclear strikes happening.

What strikes us is that whatever happens, this is going to be just the start of a long period of instability. There will be no quick solutions, militarily or otherwise. America and the West might just have to get used to Putin's newly-drawn Iron Curtain. We may wage more of an economic war against Putin and his cronies, but that may take a degree of sacrifice by Americans that they haven't been asked to do in a very long time. If this truly is the coming of Cold War II, then our domestic politics are going to have to adapt to the changing world order.

Whatever happens, we're no longer in a golden age of not having a superpower of a military adversary to fear anymore. From the fall of the Soviet Union until now, some people have been proclaiming the period to be the "end of history" -- with things so hunky-dory that the world simply would never see global conflicts ever again. That was obviously far too optimistic, in hindsight. One might even use the word "naive."

How will the American public view the situation next week, after President Biden gives his State Of The Union? Probably pretty positively, as Biden might just benefit from the "rally 'round the president" bump in support that usually happens. But if gas prices continue to creep up (or, even worse, spike sharply upwards), this might be very short-lived indeed. Although Biden might just have an ace up his sleeve, as (oddly enough, since it will depend on Russia's help) a new nuclear deal might be reached very soon with Iran which would not only limit their nuclear ambitions but also allow them to freely sell their oil on the world market again. That could change the equation to at least some degree or another.

With all the Monday-morning quarterbacking already directed against Biden, nobody yet has come up with some sort of magical solution to the problem -- what Biden "really should have done" or what he should be doing right now that will make the whole problem disappear and go away overnight. That's because -- quite obviously -- such a solution does not exist.

We've already written this week on the monumental change the Russian occupation of Ukraine will mean to NATO and the West. We were inspired to write because of a very clear-eyed article in the Washington Post that had a map which clearly showed the conundrum both Russia and NATO now find themselves in, in terms of how they think about their own security. It's a sobering look at where we might be months or even years down the road.

Biden, in his big speech next Tuesday, really needs to prepare America for what we all could face in this changing future. He should even remind everyone that this is precisely how Adolf Hitler got started -- with the annexation or forced surrender of Austria, the Sudetenland and then all of Czechoslovakia, all of which happened before the Nazi blitzkrieg was unleashed against Poland (and the rest of Europe).

Normally, drawing parallels with 1939 would be seen as overstating the case. Scare tactics, even. But not this time. This time the situation the world is facing right now is indeed just as serious. Vladimir Putin has already successfully absorbed parts of other former Soviet republics; Ukraine is just the biggest bite he's taken yet. So far, he has largely gotten away scot-free with these aggressions. Even the theft of the Crimea didn't cause too much of a world uproar.

This time is different. This time Putin really is changing the world order that existed from the dissolution of the Soviet Union up until now. This is the biggest military invasion Europe has seen since World War II. NATO might have to -- for the first time in its history -- collectively defend a member state's home territory against a nuclear-armed state. That's about as serious as it gets.

At this point, even a Cold War II would be better. But if this crisis does develop into such a long-term standoff, the West needs to be prepared. Mentally prepared. Because learning to live with a new phase of geopolitical threats is going to be a major shock for us all.

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
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