Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Ukraine Invasion

58 Comments

What to do about it. Note this one:

Move to set up the anti-ballistic missile facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic which Obama scuttled in 2009–on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, when it was an ally of Nazi Germany, in 1939.

They won’t do anything that requires an admission that they were wrong.

Mead makes the point that the pundits who predicted until Saturday that Russia would not move into Ukraine are solipsists — they assume that Putin sees the world as they do and will act as they would. That would indeed be nice. But Putin doesn’t see the world they way we — Obama supporters and Obama critics — do. We are told we should not mourn the transformation of a unipolar world into a multipolar world. It’s just selfish to want to see the United States as the world’s leading power. But the alternative is between a unipolar world and a zeropolar world, in which aggressive actors like Putin’s Russia, the mullahs’ Iran and Syria’s Assad can inflict tyranny, suffering and death to millions–and no one can stop or (preferably) deter them.

It is weakness, not strength, that is provocative:

A hundred years ago Theodore Roosevelt had warned Americans that, if we wanted peace in the Pacific, we should either withdraw from the Philippines or build a navy that Japan must respect. We did neither. Instead, US policy consisted of sonorous moral commitments to peace and good order, coupled with an increasingly hollow military: the unbridled tongue and the unready hand. The American people paid the price in blood.

[Update a while later]

58 thoughts on “The Ukraine Invasion”

  1. (sarc)What I learned in my non-violent communications course is that we need to establish a dialogue. That way we can understand their needs and they will understand our needs. Since they simply want us to understand, we will ask them to tell us how they feel. We will then share our feelings, and both sides will walk away without any desire to attack.(/sarc)

  3. I don’t know. We don’t need a missile shield in Poland, Russian access to the Mediterranean through Sevastopol is not against our interests and it’s probably best if Ukraine is somehow partitioned. We do need to insist that the right of minorities are respected, both in the Russian Ukrainian speaking parts of Ukraine. Let’s tell the Russians that they’re welcome to Crimea and the Russian parts of Ukraine as long as its done peacefully (through a referendum presumably, with each province voting on its future), but in the meantime send a strong NATO force to Ukraine to make sure the Russians don’t take all of Ukraine. Tanks, A-10s, Apaches, heavy artillery, air defence missiles, F-16s.

    1. A missile shield in Poland won’t deter Russia, and it also wouldn’t be particularly useful at stopping further Russian invasions, which at this point could be conducted by dudes on skateboards using slingshots and Obama would still do nothing but drone and whine. Our opponents have taken the measure of him, and found him an empty suit who couldn’t manage to get a platoon onto a school bus.

      Economic threats are likewise unlikely to work because Obama understands so little about economics that he’s a far, far greater threat to the US economy than that of any foreign adversary, and our adversaries know that, too.

      So instead of playing Obama’s weakness against Russian strengths, what we have to do is use Obama’s weakness and delusional attachment to failed socialist policies as the weapon itself, one that will be credible because everyone also knows that Obama will stick to a failed policy, pursuing it despite all evidence that he’s creating a disaster, long after any other sane leader would change course.

      So my suggestion is to have Obama offer to acquiesce in allowing Russia to annex Crimea, in return for having everyone in Crimea signs up for Obamacare. Putin would know that such a move would cause financial ruin and untold hardships for the Russians on the peninsula, and that Obama would never tire or falter in spouting streams of lies about how great the program is, as divorced from reality as Hitler hiding in his command bunker plotting the reconquest of Berlin, Germany, and the world.

      1. Interesting angle, but…. mandate that everyone in Crimea sign up for Obamacare?

        George, wouldn’t that be a war crime? Nuking them would be kinder…

      2. That’s the point. ^_^

        Putin knows that Obama wouldn’t nuke Crimea, but he would try to force them into Obamacare, a far worse fate.

      3. Had the southern gas pipeline through Turkey been actually built this would be less of a problem. Thankfully we are a month away from spring so Putin chose the worst possible time to attempt to invade Ukraine. Pretty soon the gas demand will go down again.

        In a rational world this would make the EU push for alternative routes like the Turkey pipeline or the Nigerian pipeline. They should also start licensing fracking in the EU. Build more nuclear reactors. Don’t expect it though. Not with Merkel on the helm.

        The only countries which could do something about this crisis in the EU are the UK and France. Yet they have both been cutting their defense budgets across the board. From Germany I expect nothing but speeches and more speeches. Financial backing sure. Sending actual troops in considerable numbers no.

    2. They have been pulling the A-10s from Europe to the US for quite some time now. Supposedly they are going to be mothballed to ‘save’ money for the F-35 project. Hah.

      F-35 is the project that will eat the US aircraft sector just like JWST is the project that will eat the US space science budget.

      I think it is a bad idea to partition Ukraine. The current borders may not make any sense but it establishes a dangerous precedent. I never like partitions. If they have to happen it must be through a referendum. Not a show of force like what is happening here. Fact is there are a lot of Russians in Sevastopol because of the military installations there. It is just like Vladivostok in that regard. It has little to do with historic considerations. I am fine with the Russians keeping their base but they don’t need to partition Ukraine for that.

      NATO can take a leaf out of Putins book and move resources close to the Ukrainian border claiming they are protecting their members from possible unrest. i.e. they could station more resources in Poland and Romania instead of the traditional bases in places like Germany. This would not require more resources. Just changing the bases of their current resources in the region would be enough as a first step.

      However I think intervention should not be in the context of NATO. They should make a separate arrangement under the auspices of the UN.

    1. If the earlier system doesn’t work, why did Obama expand the number of interceptors just last year, so as to add additional anti-missile defenses for the US mainland?

      1. Probably for the same political reasons he didn’t scrap the current system.

        The tech behind the Alaska-based system has a less-than 20% hit rate on a handful of tests. Aegis is running 90% on over 50 tests. Which system would you rather have?

        1. A good missile shield uses a variety of interceptors. Maybe Israel will sell us some of theirs.

          1. The Israeli system is probably the best currently available since it has multi-layered defenses and AI command and control. However it is expensive as heck. To cover the Gaza strip is one thing but the eastern border of NATO is just too big. I think the US did well to go with Aegis. It is available now, can be upgraded further, proven to work.

            The US and Russian ABM systems were developed to cover major cities or capitals. You can provide such coverage in a cost effective manner. However a global system is just too expensive to deploy.

            I also remind you of that sage old advice by Machiavel. Spending money on defensive formations like walls is a waste of time and resources. If the people don’t want to defend themselves no amount of fortifications will do it for them. Not interested in building the XXIst century equivalent of the Maginot Line.

        2. He canceled the plan to put them in Poland in favor of the Aegis so that the Russians would be happy, because a 50,000 pound ground-based interceptor is a lot more intimidating than a 3,300 pound ship-fired missile that’s an upgrade to a standard SAM. And indeed, the Russians were very happy with his decision.

          1. Of course they were. MIRV ICBMs are expensive. They said before if the ABM system gets put into place they will just switch back to using MIRVs.

  5. Excellent list of suggestions in that article.

    BTW, one thing many seem to overlook; Russia’s goal. It’s not simply grabbing Crimea. What they want is all of Ukraine, via defacto control.

    The proof; they aren’t making pro-partition noises. Partition is their fallback plan. (and partition is about the best we, or Ukraine, can hope for at this juncture).

    Oh, and for the next utterly unforeseeable Russian action, there’s a Soyuz launch scheduled for March 25th. Anyone want to lay odds that the American scheduled to fly, Steve Swanson, won’t be aboard? And neither will any American? (they’ll wait until after the launch of CRX-3 on March 16th to say so, though).

  6. Reagan: “We win, they lose.”

    In case you hadn’t noticed, we did win, and we keep winning. Six months ago Putin had a pliant ally running Ukraine. Now he’s got to mobilize his army, tank the ruble and Russian stock market, and tick off half the world in order to hold onto scraps. His Olympic PR offensive and plans to make Ukraine a cornerstone of a Eurasian alternative to the EU are in tatters. The line between the Russian and EU spheres of influence has moved hundreds of kilometers closer to Moscow, and his only option for pushing it back — armed conquest of all of Ukraine — would hurt him as much as the invasion of Afghanistan hurt his predecessors.

    1. And this is because of Obama’s brilliant strategy? Please. You libs said that removing the missiles from Poland would make Russia play nice. Well, it isn’t. That is a serious blunder by Obama.

      1. I still fail to see how anything that any US president could have realistically done would have changed what happened in either Ukraine as a whole or in Crimea in particular.

        This had nothing to do with the USA. This had nothing to do with Obama. In the cold war, whether we were full of bluster or when we were talking about detente, it didn’t matter: Russia did what it wanted in Eastern Europe. Missile defenses in Poland in 2009 sure wouldn’t have made a difference to Putin and his actions in Crimea in 2014.

        Since the Cold War, NATO and EU have expanded Eastward, but if someone thinks that Ukraine could have been offered NATO membership (or EU membership), explain to me exactly how that would have worked. Bear in mind that Obama has only indirect influence on the EU, and NATO operates by consensus. In both cases, the Europeans would never have gone along with fast track membership to either organization.

        Other than NATO and the EU, everything else being discussed is really only symbolic, and would not have swayed Putin one iota.

        1. (Correction: not all of your suggestions are symbolic, some are economic, but when it comes to Russia’s relationship with the Ukraine, I don’t think gas prices would matter either.)

        2. “but if someone thinks that Ukraine could have been offered NATO membership (or EU membership)”

          From what I have been reading, NATO won’t let anyone in while they have a Russian military base on their territory.

          1. Which is why Ukraine shouldn’t be offered NATO membership. It makes no sense. The Russians won’t just fork over their base like that. The history of that region is full of bloody conflict of the Russian Empire against the Ottoman Empire just for that piece of dirt. In the end the Russians always get their bit because they are willing to sacrifice more. It is a waste of time.

            Now what could be offered is a guarantee against invasion. They don’t need to be in NATO to get that. Was Kuwait in NATO? No. It can be done under the UN Charter.

        3. Well, the obvious is going unasked. The ethnic Ukrainians wanted a closer economic relationship with the West, while the ethnic Russians wanted a relationship with Russia. Who on Earth made these two goals incompatible? Any smart businessman would want closer ties with both so he could make money going and coming, turning Ukraine into an epicenter of business and trading crossroads.

          A smart US administration would’ve pushed this angle long before people were taking to the streets, and the whole situation would have never developed. Unfortunately, we don’t have a smart administration, we’ve got a bunch of idiots who haven’t learned anything new since they were undergraduates in the Amnesty International club, half of them to get laid and the other half because they were true believers who were stupid enough to give it up.

          The failure lies not with Russia or the Ukrainian protesters, but with the “elite” foreign policy morons who boxed them both in, turning a golden opportunity into an issue, then turning the issue into a crisis, and then turning the crisis into a disaster.

          1. I read it. The only sentence that wasn’t a waste of my time was this one: “Mr. Putin’s Russia is a petro-oligarchy whose survival depends on high oil prices and privileged access to the West for the politically connected elite. Raise interest rates, investigate the finances of Mr. Putin’s inner circle, impose travel bans on Putin’s cronies and broaden the scope of the Magnitsky Act, and we’ll see just how resilient the Moscow regime really is.”

            At leas that makes some sense, as opposed to talking about missiles in Poland. I doubt it would do all that much, since those measures will hardly impoverish them.

      2. No, it’s because anti-Russian Ukrainians were willing to get shot rather than let their country be a Russian vassal state.

        If Putin wants to grab part of Ukraine by force, no number of missiles in Poland would deter him. It’s obvious to everyone that NATO, quite sensibly, won’t fight for Crimea or Eastern Ukraine.

        1. “If Putin wants to grab part of Ukraine by force, no number of missiles in Poland would deter him.”

          You clearly miss the point of placing missiles. The point is not as a direct stop against the Ukraine incursion.

          1. Ok, let me try again: I think that, with respect to Russia, anti-missile missiles in Poland won’t help NATO member countries in any way whatsoever. Why would they influence Russia in a way that would help us? Poland is safe, Ukraine isn’t, and the USSR doesn’t really care about the Polish installation – for Putin, it was just something to complain about to distract the Russian public.

          3. “Ok, let me try again: I think that, with respect to Russia, anti-missile missiles in Poland won’t help NATO member countries in any way whatsoever. Why would they influence Russia in a way that would help us? Poland is safe, Ukraine isn’t, and the USSR doesn’t really care about the Polish installation – for Putin, it was just something to complain about to distract the Russian public.”

            Go read – carefully – the opening chapters of “A Gathering Storm” and get back to us when you have been educated a little.

            I can’t be responsible for teaching you thousands of years of history – things like intent, deterrence, symbolism, perception, hard/soft places etc etc etc – which makes all of this clear.

            Sooner or later you’re going t have to get up out of that foreign policy armchair and educate yourself.

            Or remain at the grade school level in this discussion.

  7. I wonder how Turkey would feel about us deploying some AEGIS destroyers equipped with SM-3 into the Black Sea. The Dardanelles Strait between the Black Sea and the Mediterrain is only a few miles wide (I saw it last November). If Turkey wanted to close that strait to Russian ships, their port in Crimea would be useless. Somehow, I don’t think Turkey would see that as being in their best interest but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

    We could also send some to the Baltic Sea to provide an interim missile defense capability.

    1. Turkey is already slated for radar facilities under Aegis Ashore, and got some Patriot batteries due to the Syria mess.

      Russia is very aware of the threat of closing the Dardanelles. In WWI it was a crippling economic blow, which is why Russia spent ginormous amounts of rubles to get Archangel and other northern ports operational. Under current treaties, Turkey can close the strait in time of war.

      Ever since Turkey joined NATO, the Soviet and Russian Black Sea fleets have been relatively small and oriented towards coastal defense.

  8. “We don’t need a missile shield in Poland, …”

    Who is “we”, Kimo Sabe? If you live in Poland then you have some standing – for your own opinion. I recall the Poles wanting the Shield and being quite miffed when Obama made liars out of the US government.

    “Russian access to the Mediterranean through Sevastopol is not against our interests”

    Before this latest invasion, what limits existed to Russian access to the MEd?

    None.

    “and it’s probably best if Ukraine is somehow partitioned.”

    Oh? Whose interests? Are you in Ukraine? If so you have some standing – for your own opinion. It is not up to us to tell the Ukrainians they ought to be partitioned. Chamberlain did that with the Czechs. You’re welcome to your own opinion on this but whether or not there’s a referendum at all is up to the people of the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

    1. Whose interests?

      Those who want to be left alone to eat their pancakes omelets, first need to break a few eggs.

    2. Remember the people who thought it would be a good idea to support the over throw of Mubarak and let the Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt for awhile? Same people who thought Egypt shouldn’t have a military coup later.

    3. Maybe the Poles need a shield, but the rest of use don’t. We don’t need to limit Russian access to the Mediterranean, but the Turks could easily close off the Dardanelles if they had to. And there simply is a division in Ukraine between those who lean to the West and those who lean towards Russia.

    1. The Russians want a buffer between them and NATO. If that is Ukraine proper or they have to create an Eastern Ukraine they’ll do it.

  11. Weakness is provocative, as is a tendency towards arbitrary and capricious action. The occupying regime in DC is very provocative.

  12. Obama is a bully. And like all bullies, he thrives so long as his targets back down and his sychophants support him . He looks strong.

    But like all bullies, one good solid punch in the mouth exposes the bully for what he or she is:

    spineless big mouth with nothing to back the bullying up.

    Every kid who had to play in the schoolyard at recess learns this sooner or later.

    Putin just punched Obama right in the mouth. Publicly. Putin exposed Obama, for what he is.

    And this is just the beginning. Obama – and Eastern Europe and Asia – are in for a rough 2 years.

    Or more.

  13. And by the way, YOU Jim and the rest of you Obama-bots were told in explicit terms that when President Mom-Jeans created the red line for Syria and then punted, that a precedent was set and the lesson would be noted and understood by the power players of the world.

    You were explicitly told that no-actin would lead to other acts of aggression.

    And they have.

    You can continue to cover your ears and draw halos around Obama’s head….I know what you’ll say next – that A does not led to B and these are totally isolated events and so on….

    But the Ukranians (and then maybe Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians) will have to suffer for your thick-headedness and starry eyed-googly-brained stupidity.

    Strong men and women who have some knowledge of how the real world works will have to clean up the mess left by your voting stupidity and President Metrosexual.

    And it will all cost more blood and treasure than it should have.

    “Nobody has ever been physically intimidated by somebody wearing mom jeans. Now Vlad Putin on the other hand, he shows up, hide your wife, hide your kids. ”

    Lary Correia July 2013

    1. Has making fun of someone’s pants ever been productive? Has the word “metrosexual” ever been a helpful addition to a foreign policy discussion?

      1. “Has making fun of someone’s pants ever been productive? Has the word “metrosexual” ever been a helpful addition to a foreign policy discussion?”

        Like all good metaphors, it underscores the exact problem with precision.

      2. Good lord Bob what a caricature you are. A salient point is made about Syrian red lines, and your response is “don’t make fun of someone’s pants, its counter-productive”.
        Do you possess enough self-awareness to realize how much of what you post here really makes your side of the argument look like the mealy-mouthed protestations of a 4 year old?

    2. You were explicitly told that no-actin would lead to other acts of aggression.

      And they have.

      No, they haven’t. Putin would be moving to protect his influence on Ukraine regardless of what we did in Syria. When Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 he wasn’t deterred by the fact that Bush had shown an abundant willingness to use force. In both cases he knew that the objective mattered far more to him than it did to the U.S.

      1. Comparing this to South Ossetia is specious. That was a Russian response to an invasion by Georgia . Even wikipedia has this correct.

        1. And your point is what? In both cases Putin could use troops without fear of a US military response, because everyone knew that the US wouldn’t shed blood for the objective in question. The idea that Putin wouldn’t have sent soldiers to Crimea if someone else was president is ridiculous.

          1. I need to have a point in correcting an idiotic and false statement? Fine, my point is you’re an idiot. What’s ridiculous is your pathetic attempts to paper over the endless examples of directionless stupidity that is this presidents “foreign policy”. Only exceeded by the assertion that a president with a better thought-out strategy wouldn’t have brought about an improved outcome in this situation.

        2. If comparing this event to South Ossetia is specious, do you agree it is not specious to compare it to Soviet interventions in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968)?

      2. See? Right on schedule. Right on target.

        Keep drawing those halos…keep disregarding cause and effect…..keep making those excuses for President Not_Present….

        But don’t be surprised that when it’s your ox being gored you are totally ignored. Maybe even laughed at.

  15. The important thing for this blog, I would think, is how all of this impacts US crew access to ISS. Jim Oberg recommends increased funding for commercial crew, and exploring use of the Chinese Shenzou.

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