Deep Dive on Ukraine (Part 3)

It has taken me so long to collect my thoughts on the current crisis in Ukraine because 1) I never could understand what Putin is trying to accomplish and 2) I don't trust any of the news coming across my various feeds.

For weeks President Biden babbled about the imminent invasion of Ukraine but I never understood why Putin would invade, so I figured it was just an example of a POTUS trying to change the subject (*). The military maneuvers along the Ukrainian border that Biden continually cited are operations that tend to be planned months (if not years) in advance, so it still seemed to me like POTUS was just blowing a relatively ordinary occurrence out of proportion to deflect attention. And when Putin gave a rambling speech (which was filled with talking points that he's been saying for years, not exactly something new) about the territorial history of Russia, it seemed designed to inflame Western pundits rather than a preamble of what was to come, so I still didn't buy that an invasion was coming. 

So when the invasion actually did occur, I was blindsided because, well, I've spent much of my life doubting what I see on TV. 

Initially, it looked like the Russian forces methodically loaded into the eastern territories of Ukraine and simultaneously seized the Kiev airport. But, when Ukrainian forces took the airport back, social media was inundated with news that the Russians were losing and the mighty Ukrainians were on the rise. But, day after day, it felt like the Russians were still slowly but surely accumulating territory. 

One thing I think I can confidently say is that Putin wants to get rid of the pro-Western influence in the Ukrainian intelligentsia. How this invasion is meant to accomplish that...well....I dunno. I don't see how loading in tanks is supposed to change the minds of the resolute pro-Western, anti-Moscow fancy pants set in Kiev. If that crowd escaped to Poland and Romania, wouldn't that be right up Putin's alley? We think of refugees as poor huddled masses and that's true over time; but the first batch of refugees tend to be the rich people, the educated, influential moneyed classes that know when its time to get the heck out of Dodge. Aren't those the people Putin is trying to get rid of? He needn't kill them, seems like escorting them to the Polish and Romanian frontiers would be much easier than trying to militarily subdue the entire nation. 

The peace talks that have sporadically popped up over the last few weeks seem to be really starting in earnest now, seems like this is all winding down. So what did Putin accomplish?

The eastern territories of Donetsk and Luhansk seem to be pretty well out of Kiev's grasp now. And the southern territory along the Sea of Azov seems to be locked down by Russian armaments. The "land bridge" to Crimea seems pretty well intact. And that's really about it. Seems like Putin would've wanted to take all of the Black Sea-adjacent territory to keep that "land bridge" going all the way to Moldova--and perhaps that is still the plan--but for now it doesn't seem like Putin wants to reach past Crimea. From here, I would suggest any other territorial gains will be given back as the Russians recede. 

Okay. So what does Putin get out of that? He has liberated the chunks of Ukraine that were the most pro-Moscow....but doesn't that just make the rest of Ukraine more solidly anti-Moscow? How is that an improvement for Putin? Seems like an awful lot of effort to take what he more or less already had, while further inflaming the parts he didn't have. Furthermore, Zelensky is now in line to give away the districts that didn't vote for him, so hasn't this military action just strengthened Zelensky's hold on the rest of Ukraine?

Was the point to threaten Europe? I don't see how this would accomplish that or why he would want to do that anyway. The most excitable pundits thought that Poland was the next stop on Putin's tour but, dude, he never even came close to Poland. And considering how well the Ukrainians fought back without NATO involvement, how on earth can you think that Poland is in any way threatened by this advance? 

Was the point to completely annex Ukraine? I don't see why he would need to do that or how a column of tanks would get that done. If Putin was under the impression that just loading in some soldiers would cause Ukraine to collapse, well, that didn't work (and since I never thought that would work, I have trouble believing that's what Putin thought). And h's already got a pretty good grip on Ukraine's trade, seems like politically cultivating the pro-Moscow elements in Kiev (there must be some) would be infinitely more valuable more than a full-on invasion (dude, they have bribery in Kiev just like everywhere else, so much cheaper than an invasion). 

Was the point to keep Ukraine out of the EU? I don't think so. When Yanukovych was negotiating for EU acceptance between 2010 and 2013, Ukraine's parliament passed numerous pieces of legislation to appease the Europeans and Putin never did anything to stop it. Indeed, in 2013, Putin was willing to be a part of the negotiations--it was the EU that balked at that suggestion. I don't see that Putin ever did anything to stop Ukraine's admittance to the EU and, again, a column of tanks doesn't really keep that from happening anyway.

Was the point to destabilize NATO and/or the EU? Maybe, but I'm not sure how any of these military moves get that done. And, in fact, seemingly the opposite has happened, since even Finland and Switzerland expressed newfound interest in NATO and the rest of Europe (re: Germany) actually pledged to increase their defense spending (which they have mostly pledged to do in the past, so....maybe not really that big of a deal). (**)

Was Putin defeated? Well, not exactly. He did carve off a hunk of pro-Russian territory that he won't likely give back in negotiations and strengthened his position vis-à-vis Crimea, which won't be going back in any kind of peace agreement. So, Ukraine seems likely to concede territory here. 

Was Putin victorious? Well, not exactly. Again, he carved off some territory for further Russian control, but since those people were already (largely) on Moscow's side, seems like this just weakens his position in the rest of Ukraine. All of that territory was theoretically more valuable to Putin as part of Ukraine (an internal fifth column) rather than as part of Russia. So what was gained? 

Authoritarians fall prey to demanding so much subservience from their People that they never really know what's going on. Mao discovered that in the 1950s: he kept demanding specific targets from the party apparatchiks and meting out such brutal punishments when they failed, that all of his underlings just kept lying to him to save their own hides. (Happens to capitalists, too: all General Electric shareholders will remember the disastrous rule of CEO Jeff Immelt, a dude that just didn't like hearing bad news, so no one bothered to tell him his company was crumbling) If you've got no taste for the Truth, then everyone will gladly lie to you. (***) 

Did Putin simply fall prey to the surrounding himself with toadies? Maybe. On the other hand, this last month may have been a house cleaning (for example, these tales of generals killed in battle...how many of them were shot in the back?) and Putin may have a clearer sense of his military power than ever before. Perhaps the less effective parts of his military machine where sacrificed to make the rest of the machine more ready. (Ehhh, ideally, we'll never find out)

I never thought the invasion was gonna happen. I was mystified when it did happen. I never understood why it was happening. And now that it seems to be winding down, I can't really see what the point of any of it was. 

I think I'll keep going with these Ukraine posts but I have the sneaking suspicion I'm never going to grasp why any of this happened. And the coming posts on this topic will likely be a continuation of my confusion. We'll see, perhaps a clear picture will emerge, but I doubt it. 

(*) Oh, hey, good news: Coronavirus is over! Yeah...Covid-19 is finally the footnote it always deserved to be. 

(**) Yeah, actually that part of it could still be working in Putin's favor: the rhetoric ginned up by Putin's advance will likely turn back the other way (re: even more American involvement in Europe), when the Europeans realize (or tell themselves) that Putin is weak and incapable of being much of a real threat. NATO may well end up weaker rather than stronger by their newfound confidence. Not that any of that was really Putin's doing, but the backward effect of now seeing Russia as even less of a threat could mean even more of a retreat for NATO.

(***) That message was to you, Media-loving Americans: News is not Truth, it is Entertainment. Indulge at your own peril.

Deep Dive on Ukraine (Part 2)

Vlog Brothers, March 4, 2014

This is an excellent quick primer on the situation in Ukraine as of 2014, just two weeks before Putin annexed Crimea, an event this video suggests is imminent. 

Let me throw in one bit of deep history that he doesn't get to (and perhaps this is my own personal prejudice--you decide): speaking of "Russia" and "Ukraine" are misnomers; what we mean are "Moscow" and "Kiev". Kiev is an ancient city, been there for as long as anyone can remember, whereas Moscow is not quite a thousand years old. Throughout the 13th and 14th centuries both cities were besotted with the Golden Horde, the eastern European branch of the Mongol Empire. When the Mongols finally receded around 1450, it was Moscow that rose to prominence, first and foremost by luring the Orthodox Church to headquarter there. With this cultural muscle behind it, the Muscovites set out to solidify the long stretch of territory between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea that had long been home to the Rus people (and then eventually the long stretch to the East known as Siberia). 

Imagine the relationship between Moscow and Kiev, then, as that of the upstart little brother trying to assert its dominance over the big brother that it admires/loathes. (Okay back to the video)  

While decrying the then recent invasion of Crimea by Putin, he points out that Crimea is naturally a part of Ukraine, as its electricity and water comes from the Ukrainian mainland. I'll add a detail he left out: the reason for Putin's invasion was because the Ukrainian gov't (an unelected de facto gov't at that time) cut off the water supply to Crimea, leading to massive crop failure in 2014. I point this out because while he mentioned the "disastrous" results of Putin cutting off oil supplies to Ukraine in 2015, he neglects to mention the Ukrainians doing the same thing (same thing? Even worse thing, no?) to Crimea the year before.

And why did the West uniformly decry Putin's annexation of Crimea? In the video he refers to this as "a big f'n deal", but why? Check out the Wikipedia entry on Crimea....where is the point where Crimea ever belonged to Kiev? Ever? 

In BC times, it was a Greek colony and then a Persian outpost. In Christian times it was territory controlled by the Byzantines, then the Ottomans. It was first annexed by Moscow in 1783. During the Soviet period, Josef Stalin (as he notes in the video), removed the ethnic Tartars and packed in ethnic Russians. In 1954, Crimea was made part of Ukraine in a drunken ramble by Nikita Khrushchev of which even the West "doubts...the legitimacy". And even then it was an autonomous region still realistically controlled by Moscow. And that autonomous status was reaffirmed in 1991 after the dissolution of the USSR.

The Wikipedia entry (a well known bastion of Putin-esque misinformation?) goes back 3000 years and never at any point was Crimea ever part of Kiev. Even in that brief period of time (1954-1991) when it was ostensibly Ukrainian territory, it was autonomous and even then, as the home base of the Russian Navy, it was never out of Moscow's orbit. Crimea has never belonged to Kiev. 

Personally, I never had any problem with the 2014 annexation of Crimea and I think Western outcry is, it best, misplaced--and, at worst, totally ignores that Putin was actually trying to save the lives of those people imperiled by the (unelected) Ukrainian parliament. And how do we correct this "big f'n deal"? By putting Crimea under the sway of the Ukrainian gov't? How does that solve anything? In 3000 years Crimea has never belonged to Kiev nor has the population ever been made up of native Ukrainians. Why are we under the illusion that Crimea belongs to Ukraine? Indeed, wasn't it Kiev trying annex Crimea by starving it 2014?

New York Times, March 11, 2014  ("Ukraine 2014: Ukraine-Russia Ties Explained") 

Check out this next video (from those pro-Putin puppets at the New York Times). 

"Ukraine, like every other non-Russian Republic in the Soviet Union was the creation of of the Russian--or if you prefer, the Soviet--leadership in the 1920s and 1930s. These boundaries are drawn and the attempt was to bring together within certain administrative units individuals that could be identified in terms of language, culture, and so on." When the NYT says it, you believe it, right? It's only "disinformation" when Putin says it. 

"Crimea was, is and will be an integral part of Ukraine." -- Arseniy Yatsenyuk ("Yats" to his Western allies), the interim (unelected) prime minister of Ukraine in 2014. 

Tell me: is this "disinformation"? Show me when Kiev ever ruled over Crimea? If you find something prior to 1000BC, I'd love to see it, because at no time since then was any kind of ruling power in Kiev ever in control of Crimea. 

Given the brief history of Crimea above, doesn't Yatsenyuk's language sound much more ominous and bellicose than Putin? (Reminder this quote from the unelected Ukrainian gov't was shortly before they would go on to cut off water supplies leading to crop failure...sounds kinda Stalin-y, doesn't it?) 

Stephen F. Cohen on The Charlie Rose Show, March 19, 2014

"...(M)any advocate moving NATO troops to the Polish-Russian border....aircraft is already there and NATO is moving troops around. If that happens, Putin almost certainly moves 150,000 troops...into South and eastern Ukraine...that would be the Cuban Missile Crisis..."

In 2014, the danger was already firmly in place. If this video seems repetitive its because everything Cohen is saying in 2014 is all the same stuff Cohen has been saying since at least 2006. He was right in 2006, he was still right in 2014 and even though Cohen has since passed away, he's still right in 2022.

"Demonization of Putin is not a policy but an excuse for not having a policy." -- Henry Kissinger 

Jack Matlock on Democracy Now!, March 20, 2014

Final word: "They're better off without Crimea."

Matlock is not as media savvy as most of the other featured talkers in this post. And he's an old timey Cold War soldier. But he brings an interesting perspective and is properly guarded in his commentary. He was a career ambassador meaning he was trained to say blandly non-committal pleasantries without belying any confrontation (or information). Worth checking out, though, in the context of these other videos and articles. 

Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, June 24, 2014

This is a long press conference of the UK's Ambassador to Ukraine in 2014. It is mostly just self-serving double talk, which is frankly all ambassadors are equipped to do. I'll refrain from any other observations because....well, I don't have any, there's not much else to say. Just thought I'd add it here in case you want to see what British stuffed shirts sounded like in 2014. (Though now might be a good time to recall that the during first impeachment of Trump, the testimony came almost exclusively from ambassadors....who know virtually nothing about how the White House works or even how foreign policy is developed and implemented, meaning the trial to evict the President was led by the absolute lowest people on the totem pole--hell, ambassadors aren't even on totem pole!)

New York Times, June 27, 2014 (pay wall)

(Well, I read this a few days ago but when I went back to take notes, I was paywall-ed out. So, whatever it was the NYT had to say, it seemed important to me earlier in the week but the NYT has decided it doesn't want me to see it again. So, I'll just leave the link in case you want to see the NYT's version of Ukraine's trade pact with the EU in the summer of 2014)

Brookings Institution, June 27, 2014 ("Poroshenko Signs EU-Ukraine Association Agreement")

"It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Moscow's actions since late February have aimed to destabilize the gov't in Kiev and slow its path to the European Union."

Really? By late February 2014 the gov't in Kiev was already very de-stabilized thanks to the bogus negotiations of the EU in the fall of 2013. In fact, Kiev was pretty stable until they began talking to the EU. 

"Russia can use that influence and leverage to promote a ceasefire and a settlement, if it wants to."

So could the Americans. So could the Europeans. But why would the Western powers want that? They wanted a Ukrainian president that would sign the deal to anger Russia and, after years of fraudulent negotiations and a coup d'état, they finally found their man in Poroshenko. (Oh, fun fact: Petro Poroshenko, who won the election of June 2014 to be Ukraine's president (where he served until 2019), was the owner of Ukraine's two largest news channels, Pryiami and 5 Kanal, all through his presidency. Do you suppose the Ukrainian people were well informed by their Media?)

Politicos have been crafting whatever narrative suits them at the moment and in 2014 the narrative was "Putin is the problem, not us" and that played very well to American and European audiences. But the idea that Russians are crazy for thinking of Ukraine as part of their own land that has been "invaded" by Western infidels is not as far fetched as, say, the Brookings Institution would have you believe. 

The Minsk Protocols, September 5, 2014

There were negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE and a handful of separatist factions from Luhansk and Donetsk. The idea was to create a ceasefire in the restive Eastern Ukrainian areas but this collapsed almost immediately. This was followed by Minsk II in February 2015 but this, too, was a non-starter in reality. (Think about it: in all that's gone on in the past 6-8 weeks, has anyone ever bothered to bring up the Minsk Protocols?)

The only notable part of this negotiation is it suggests that Luhansk and Donetsk are potentially independent territories...why would the Kiev gov't or the OSCE even entertain the idea in 2014? 

The Obama White House, November 26, 2014

Here's some utterly harmless video of then Vice President Joe Biden making some bland pleasantries with Poroshenko near the end of 2014. "I want to congratulate all Ukrainians on last month's successful parliamentary elections, overwhelming endorsed by Ukrainians and the entire int'l community as being fair and free."

"Fair and free" is a phrase that recurs again and again in relation to Ukraine. I think Orwell would've suggested this is the beginning of the movement to ensure that the words "fair" and "free" will never be useful to the Ukrainian people ever again. 

Though I must concede that the slow erosion of independent thought through the warping of language is preferable to columns of tanks on city streets, I can't help but see that over time the two things have a lot in common. 

Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now!, March 2, 2015

Noam Chomsky on "Diaper-ology" and John Mearsheimer. Pretty much the same as all the other links in this post (though he veers numerous times into Cold War tales of near nuclear war). 

He raises an excellent point that I haven't noticed anyone else saying: why not encourage Ukraine to take a neutral position? It wouldn't join NATO, nor would it militarily align with Russia. What's wrong with that? Ukraine gets to maintain trade with Russia and with Europe without militarily antagonizing anyone. Seems like a pretty elegant solution at this point. 

Vox, March 25, 2015 ("What Most People Miss About the War in Ukraine") 

This is a short video on where Ukraine stood in the spring of 2015, roughly a year after the fall of Yanukovych. The sociological overview of Ukraine is pretty basic and uncontroversial. But it isn't much of a "deeper" look.

"When (Yanukovych) abandoned (a deal with the EU) and took a bailout from Russia instead that was perceived as turning away from the West...and it was controversial and prompted protests largely in the western part of the country..."

This video is trying to get beyond the conventional wisdom and yet it totally absorbs and regurgitates that official line while pretending to go deeper. Notice how effortlessly it describes Tymoshenko as "Pro-Europe" and Yanukovych as "Pro-Russia". That's not really fair at all to Yanukovych (nor to Tymoshenko, who had her own agenda), who was desperately pro-Europe. But that just highlights the convenience of using Yanukovych as the scapegoat, the punching bag, allowing him to take all the blame when I'd say he was seduced and abandoned by the EU and left to the mercies of Moscow. He took the "bailout" from Moscow, because Ukraine needed a bailout and he wasn't going to get it from the EU or the IMF, despite feigned overtures from the West.

But that story is complicated, nuanced, and not the one American audiences want to hear. This is ultimately an examination of how "news" is just entertainment and "journalists" are just telling the story that the audience wants to buy (everyone on TV is just an entertainer). I blame the audience not the newscasters, they're just doing their job, which is to entertain rather than inform. But even in "deeper looks" like this video, the conventional wisdom is a tar pit that engulfs the Left and the Right, when it comes to Russia. 

The Obama White House, June 5, 2015

Nothing to see here. It is as deep and informative as what you'd expect from a White House press release (which is to say not at all). But it does suggest that Putin is in violation of the Minsk Protocols (of which USA was not a signatory). 

Max Blumenthal on Real News, February 4, 2018

Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on Americans arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine. 

Obviously, this is a nonsense disinformation story--I mean Ukraine has a Jewish president! How can they possibly have Nazi citizens? Preposterous! (**)

Vice News, February 18, 2018 ("Why Ukraine is Trapped in Endless Conflict") 

"Conflict began in 2013, when the Ukrainian gov't rejected an association with the European Union in order to build stronger ties with Russia."

Five years later the Western narrative is perfectly ensconced. It isn't that the EU negotiated in bad faith with Yanukovych for the purpose of encouraging a pro-Western uprising. It is that Kiev needed to strengthen ties with Moscow--as if those ties weren't already centuries old! 

"The pro-Moscow move led to massive protests in the capital of Kiev....Russia took advantage of the chaos and sent its military in to annex Crimea."

But, again: Yanukovych's turn wasn't a pro-Moscow move but a realization that the EU was jerking him around with an impossible offer that solved none of Ukraine's problems (because the EU was motivated exclusively by antagonizing Russia). The Ukrainian People are pawns in the game of Western buzzards trying to pick clean the Russian carcass. And--really?--it was Russia that took advantage of the ensuing chaos? How did the chaotic decline of Yanukovych benefit Russia in any way? 

Then the video falls into thinking that Minsk and Minsk II were actually of any use. But then reminds that the various militia groups highlighted by the Media (and "disinformation-ed" by Putin) are from all over the country, represent a wide swath of political views and are funded by a variety of sources. If you seen one militia group, you most certainly have not seen them all. 

I'm all for the Ukrainian People living freer, richer and smarter lives, but the overtures from the EU were disingenuous to say the least and led only to Ukraine falling into chaos. But the Western media--even the independent-minded Vice News--falls lock step over time with the conventional wisdom, frankly because they're just lazy. 

Stephen F. Cohen and Aaaron Mate on The Grey Zone, November 13, 2019

Cohen and Mate revisiting the Ukraine crisis during the time of Trump's first impeachment. (Oh, and what were the Bidens doing in Ukraine again?) And for good measure, a reminder of what Noam Chomsky thought about Trump around the time of the release of the Mueller Report. There's no discussion of Ukraine but Ukraine has been playing a large role in American politics ever since. 

"What's bad for Russia is what's good for us."

A good talk, well worth your time if you want to learn more about what led to the current Ukraine crisis. But, yes, basically a recycling of all the same warnings Cohen has been giving for decades. 

(*) And look how deep does this "disinformation" goes: here's the BBC in 2014 (twice) and 2015. And The Guardian in 2017. Then the BBC again in 2018. And Time Magazine in 2019. Just remember: it's only "disinformation" when Putin says it. 

(**) Hat tip to Spondulix99 from whom I cannibalized a good deal of this deep dive.

Afghanistan

In 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Off the top of my head, I have no idea why except that the Russians have always had prickly relations with their neighbors (and Russia has a lot of them). 

It wasn't long before the Russians were bogged down in the desert, no real sense of what they were doing or why. Meanwhile, the Russian people back home were watching the clumsy carnage on their TVs and grew dissatisfied with Moscow's imperial ambitions (Afghanistan has long been considered Russia's 'Vietnam'). And, predictably, the Americans stoutly supported the native antagonists (as long as they continued the job of killing Russians, according to Charlie Wilson). The American support took the form of giving money to Pakistani intelligence to funnel to anti-Soviet warlords in Afghanistan. 

Within the larger Arab world, the fight against the Soviets in Central Asia was a righteous cause (a la the Spanish Civil War) and many Arabs dedicated themselves to going to Afghanistan and making war on the imperial infidels. These groups were called "Afghan Arabs", though they are not Afghans, and eventually they wore out their welcome in Afghanistan. By the mid-1980s, the Soviets were done with all that and pulled out. American support, too, disappeared when the Soviets left town. Soon after getting their country back, the Afghan people grew tired of these outsiders trying to show up and take credit for everything (a phenomenon seen again when the Iraqi Sunni fought against al-Qaeda interlopers after the fall of Saddam) and drove many of the Afghan Arabs out. 

Afghanistan bathed in its ability to spurn empires, recounting tales of fending off invaders going back to Alexander the Great. In the following years, the Taliban came to power. They were mostly an obnoxious religious organization with vague political (re: warlord-ish) philosophies, but since Russia and USA no longer cared, really only Pakistan was left to pay any attention. Pakistan took on the Taliban as useful idiots (well, that was the hope anyway) and more or less abetted them. The Taliban were happy to destroy religious relics and basically act like the recalcitrant dinosaurs they are. 

During this time, the most famous of the Afghan Arabs, Osama bin Laden, who went from Afghanistan to the Sudan after the Soviet retreat, returned in the late 1990s, presumably under Taliban watch.  It was from the mountains of Afghanistan that bin Laden planned and implemented 9/11.

The Americans by Xmas of 2001 were able to rout the Taliban and put "our guy" (Hamid Karzai, who is ready for a comeback...?) in power, where he stayed for almost 14 years, controlling Kabul with an iron fist and not much else. The hinterlands were never swayed by American influence but the overwhelming force did drive the Taliban underground for a decade or so. 

The recently concluded American operation in Afghanistan was a direct outgrowth of 9/11. In October 2001, USA invaded Afghanistan with three goals: 1) capture/kill Osama bin Laden; 2) crush al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; 3) push the Taliban out of Kabul as punishment for allowing al-Qaeda to plan 9/11 from its territory. Here's the thing about USA's involvement that always struck me: the Americans accomplished all three of those goals years ago....so why were we still there in 2021? 

#1 took almost a decade and took place outside of Afghanistan but the goal was accomplished. #2 al-Qaeda was well smashed in Afghanistan by 2010 and I think foreign terror influence there is currently minimal and I think likely to stay minimal (at least when it comes to attacking the West, the Afghans have bigger fish to fry). As for #3, we pushed the Taliban out of Kabul within weeks, mostly before even putting boots on the ground, and kept them out for 20 years even though they clearly make up the largest chunk of the population and basically represent the only political game in town.

The third part of the mission is where we got creeped. Pushing the Taliban out as punishment for their involvement in 9/11 is like sending your child to his/her room: is the kid supposed to stay there forever? Were we really supposed to suppress the Taliban indefinitely in their own home country? The only thing that suppressed them was the overwhelming American firepower hidden in the hills and now that that has been collected up and rotated back home, what is there to stop the Taliban? The Taliban are the bulk of the population, why wouldn't they rule the country? It is worth noting that throughout July and August as the Taliban "re-took" territory from the departing Americans, these gains did not come (for the most part) through battlefield victories. The Taliban didn't have to fight anyone to get the power back, they merely had to show up. This is a re-flourishing of culture that has been hibernating for the last decade or so.  

When Trump and then Biden negotiated their various escape plans, they talked with the Taliban because they're the only people there. USA negotiated the withdrawal with the Taliban because who else were the Americans going to negotiate with? Think of this: we worry now about the refugees pouring out of Afghanistan as the Americans leave, but there was no such worry in 2001 when the Americans invaded because those people didn't leave. They stayed and for 10 years or so they (kinda) fought the Americans and then for the last 10 years, they've just been biding their time waiting for the Americans to inevitably exit. 

The Americans have known for years that as soon as they leave, the Taliban will take back over, the Americans forces were merely a finger in the dike, not a force for nation-building. Everyone was taken aback by the sheer speed of the Taliban takeover, but no one was surprised that it happened. The question is how long was the American Public supposed to care about keeping the Taliban out of power? What was the value of a Taliban-less Afghanistan to USA? Does it matter at all? In October 2001 it was a perfectly reasonable mission but by the summer of 2021, the mission no longer served any purpose. 

I'd say it was by 2012 or so that the mission no longer served any purpose. From 2001 to roughly 2010, the Americans routinely skirmished with those militants willing to fight the American presence, which whittled down al-Qaeda and other foreign terror elements and the most militant elements of the Taliban. But after Osama bin Laden was killed in May 2011, the mission didn't have much left to accomplish. Obama declared the end of combat operations in 2014 because combat had pretty much run its course. The Americans fought everyone that wanted to fight and when that dried up, Obama was clearly ready to bring the troops back home. As we can see, the American presence in the hinterland put a freeze on activity but didn't really squash any beefs. 

Obama wanted to leave but the Pentagon suggested instead keeping the troops there. Why? Recall that in 2014 Obama was entering the final two years of his second term, which is a death knell for the Prez in DC. During this phase, the Prez is free to make all sorts of bold visionary speeches and invent all sorts of ways to lionize himself or smite his non-gov't enemies. But when it comes to actually getting shit done, a Prez in his final two years is pretty powerless, even in foreign policy. The Pentagon was not going to let an outgoing president push long term agendas. And at that time the Pentagon still liked the idea of having combat troops in forward bases because...well, the Pentagon just likes that stuff.

But I think it was somewhere around 2018 when the Pentagon decided that Afghanistan was more trouble than it was worth and began to indulge Trump's ambitions to leave. They famously dragged their feet (*), but they had already begun plodding toward the exit in Afghanistan by the time of the 2020 election. So when Biden came to power earlier this year, he picked up the exit strategy that Trump had already begun (which suggests that if Trump was President, the turmoil in Kabul would look pretty much the same as it does now) and was eager to start his Presidency with a quick and smart retreat. 

What happened to make the Pentagon prefer a lighter footprint in Afghanistan? I dunno. Perhaps the money-sucking potential of boots in country just wore itself out and supporting them was costing more than the corruption could bear. Perhaps the trade war with China showed the Pentagon that China was becoming a different sort of adversary and that positions in Afghanistan would be more of a weakness than a strength. Perhaps militant Islam of the sort that threatens the shores of the USA was just simply no longer there. Perhaps the evolution of the American military from a large standing army to drones and special forces has finally matured. Perhaps this is just a re-assessment of Central Asia security needs. Perhaps the realization that keeping the Taliban out of Kabul was just no longer necessary finally took hold. Perhaps other allies (India or Turkey, for example) were willing to take up positions in Afghanistan similar enough to the USA's that we became redundant. I dunno, pick your favorite explanation. 

At any rate, I would suggest that the mission was far from a failure. Again, we achieved everything we wanted to achieve...and then hung around an extra ten years because withdrawing was always going to be an unholy shit show. 9/11 is far enough away now to perhaps no longer recall that it was not uncommon in the American media landscape to refer to these War on Terror incursions as World War III. I would point out the American casualties in 20 years of war in Afghanistan (2,448 according to the Associated Press) aren't even as large as single days of Civil War battles, which suggests that this was not the epoch-shifting clash of civilizations that we thought we were in for at the time. Indeed, in America we've had the luxury of largely ignoring this war. Even its effect on the Arab world has been pretty minimal outside of Pakistan (though exerting no more force on Pakistan than USA already possessed). This was not World War III, it wasn't even Gulf War II. 

And during that 20 years the Taliban didn't go away. They just realized they couldn't rule by force and so went into hibernation. Did the Taliban mature during that time? Well, it probably won't look like it to American eyes but I don't see how they couldn't have matured. They step into power with a brand new appreciation of foreign policy, a more sophisticated sense of controlling the media narrative and will have to serve their populace in a whole new way now that they have been introduced to the 21st century. Don't get me wrong: the Taliban are still pretty close to the bottom of enlightened thinkers but their floor has been raised whether they like it or not. 

Imagine having enough guns to be able to invade Kansas and at gunpoint force all the residents to become Duke basketball fans. Watch the Blue Devil games, cheer the wins, sing all the fight songs, all that shit, just for Duke. No Jayhawk gear is allowed (not even Wildcat gear), just Duke blue for everyone, everywhere all the time. Say, this lasts for 20 years and then you pack up your shit and leave one day. Do you think the local Kansas residents will all stay loyal Duke fans? Oh, I don't think so. 

Well that's more or less what we did to Afghanistan: we deprived them of their natural choice to run the country because those people pissed us off. So we punished them. We sent them to their room without any dinner....and how long was this supposed to last? Were the Taliban supposed to stay in hiding forever? The Americans didn't do much to eradicate them or replace them (with whom?), but merely to force them to cower for a coupla decades while heavily armed Americans wandered the countryside. We don't have to stay there forever, the territory is simply not valuable enough and the people aren't dangerous enough to warrant staying indefinitely; but there's no reason to think they're gonna sing our praises when we're gone. There was always a moment when exiting was gonna be the next step and that moment has finally arrived (well, I'd say it arrived around 2012). The Americans leaving Afghanistan is a good thing even if it looks bad on TV.

And as for the troubling exit strategy, look man, there is no exit strategy that makes for good lookin' TV. The proper withdrawal from Afghanistan (to my mind) would've been to send in an additional 10,000 troops to sweep into the hinterlands around Kabul, accumulating any American assets that would be exiting, then gathering at the south end of Kabul ready to lead a procession to the sea. Move large, move fast, gather friends, avoid enemies and talk a lot of shit. This would've been a provocative move designed to make the locals defensive rather than offensive and ideally should've minimized any reprisal as the American forces hasten to the exit. This would've been accompanied by loud angry words from the POTUS and probably even some shady misdirection on how/when the exit would actually take place, all designed to keep the timid elements from joining any kind of fray. (This would've been expensive as hell, would've really cut into the Pentagon's foreign budget, but what does POTUS care?)

Is that the plan you wanted, America? An increase in troops, six-to-eight weeks of constant war games, while your President screams bellicose words into a camera, just so that we could leave an empty crater in our wake to pretend like Afghanistan never happened...is that the plan America wanted? Because that would've looked like shit on your TV. Exits need to be hard and fast, you need to leave fire in your wake, you need the people left behind to be glad that you're no longer around. But that's not how the politics of this stuff works. Partisans nowadays are eager to look soft and sensitive rather than tough and brutal, which is theoretically better (fewer pointless deaths) but optically tougher (everything always looks like shit when you think in terms of the specific rather than the abstract).  

Biden willing to take the short term heat (personal) for the long term good (collective) is something we just don't get out of a POTUS any more. It is better to be out of Afghanistan, it is probably better to not use that level of boot-force ever again. It is time for militaries to turn into search-and-rescue teams built to save lives rather than take them. 

I am confident that six months from now we will be glad to be out of Afghanistan. I think 10 years from now we'll be glad to no longer be in Afghanistan. Hell, I think we're already glad to be out of Afghanistan--and I should've put this post up 4 weeks ago! (***) 

I think this the correct long term move for USA, for the Pentagon, for American geo-strategic thinking and for Afghanistan and the Afghan people. For Biden to shoulder the short term blame for our collective long term gain is as admirable as anything I've seen a President do in a long time. And, of course, nobody noticed.

Yes, the Taliban are still a bunch of recalcitrant dinosaurs. But they really can't be as bad as they were before 9/11. And America's defensive posture vis-à-vis Central Asia is vastly better than it was before 9/11. And oh, by the way: I guarantee the Afghan hills are still dotted with American special forces, dudes that have only learned to live that way since the Towers came down....they're still there, I'd bet my last dollar on it. This strategy is a move toward a lighter footprint, not a move toward total absence because the central Asian landmass and the Indo-Pacific is where the military stuff is headed for the foreseeable future (and ain't no way the Pentagon is gonna get left out of that!). Whatever shenanigans lay ahead for Central Asia, the Americans are dug in and ready to participate, they're just not doing it with thousands of boys in country the way we did in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The eminent British historian John Keegan once made a list of the countries he thought to be more or less unaffected by World War II: Iceland, Ireland, Afghanistan. Not a lot. And honestly I'm not sure why Iceland is on there (**). Do you understand how far from the mainstream of civilization Afghanistan really is? It is the edge of the world. Papua New Guinea--a literal Stone Age population--was way more affected by World War II than these people were. And it sums up why the Americans are eager to leave in 2021: Afghanistan is harsh deserts with harsh mountains with a harsh population still living at mostly subsistence level and that doesn't mean much to us in our digital world. 

Does it surprise you, then, that it was from this place that the plans for 9/11, the plans to bring down the western global socio-political economic infrastructure were born? It shouldn't--it should be plainly obvious that these were the people most suspicious of the coming global order. Now in 2021, World War II is finally complete. Even the Taliban have cell phones and the internet now. We tried give them the best of what we've got but the Afghan people did not want it, did not need it, did not hunger for Republican Democracy (apparently the Hamilton Mix Tape hasn't made it to Kabul yet). The technology, though, has been forced on them and they will keep it now whether they want to or not. 

In the long run, I think, the big move signaled by the American exit from Kabul is that the Americans want war through the drones, special forces, and spies, rather than regular army positions. The USA has decided to remove itself from the 21st century ground war. Currency wars, tariff wars, bond market manipulation, the endless elbowing for market share, shit talkin' politicians and (ugh!) the 24-hour propaganda machine....those are the mechanisms of future conflicts. Fewer deaths but virtually endless angst...is that better? Wars have become just too damn expensive. And rather pointless, even when they end in victory! Drone strikes have limited value in an actual war, they are much more useful as interrupters of peace than as instruments of war. 

Okay....you ready for the crazy prediction? I bet this will be a golden age for Afghanistan; don't get me wrong, it probably won't look like one to American eyes (and all we'll get is the bad news), but the Taliban are the natural leaders of that territory. The "improvements" the Americans had to offer (bicameral legislation! Judicial oversight! Citizen control of the military!) are not really all that sexy to people that will mostly never learn to drive a car. But the Americans leaving is likely something they almost all agree on. 

And I'll bet they've got a line of financing already open (w/ either China, India or some of the Gulf States (****) or all of the above). I bet their statecraft is going to be a lot more modern than it was in 2001 and a lot more sensitive to the media and int'l diplomacy. I think they've actually got a nice shot at working India and Pakistan against each other, at least for defense purposes. Slowly but surely, even Afghanistan will crawl into the light of civilization and central Asia will become an actual homeland rather than just a place for space agencies to test their Mars rovers (*****). In short, now that the Americans have come and gone, Kabul is as connected as it has ever been with as much opportunity for advancement as it has ever had. The Americans turned the lights on and then got out of the way--frankly this is one of the great days in their long history. I think this could be the ultimate unifying experience of the Afghan people.

As for the Americans, I assure you nobody will look back 6 months from now and wish that we were still in Afghanistan. Nobody. If the Pentagon doesn't want it, then you know nobody wants it. The Afghans are better without us and we are better out of their territory. The Taliban are back in charge and they know better than anyone how ruinously annoying the American military can be...and how quickly (and capriciously) it can return.

I think getting out of Afghanistan is a momentous move, a brilliant move and the right move. And President Biden should be applauded for it. Of course, we're not going to do that because we prefer "optics" to "reality". And if you don't like it, let me suggest that 20 years in Afghanistan is perfect example of how gov't programs work: made sense at first, endured setbacks, had some success, lingered because no one knew how to get rid of it, then brought nothing but calamity to the guy with enough courage to actually pull the plug on it. This is what the American gov't has been doing to Americans for decades. 

The Afghans have finally had their taste of civilization. Yup....just like chicken. 

(*) This may well be apocryphal and I may well be remembering it wrong, because I can't recall which tell-all book by which author this came from. But the story goes: Trump said to the Pentagon, I want out of Afghanistan, how do we get that done? The Pentagon says come back in six months. So six months later Trump calls a press conference and announces we're completely pulling out of Afghanistan. The Pentagon says, whoa! What was that? Trump says, you said six months. The Pentagon says, no, that meant come back in six months and we'll start talking about it. Your announcement means nothing because we're not prepared to do anything any time soon. 

To me, the story illustrates the difference btw running a company and running a gov't: when CEO Trump brought in some mid-level flunky for some project, Trump knew how to treat the guy and what to expect and then how to reward or punish him in conclusion. But just because the POTUS tells the Pentagon to do something...yeah, that doesn't really mean much. The Pentagon is willing to work with the Executive, but the Defense apparatus of the USA is much larger than any one office could control, which is why the Pentagon is an ongoing concern while any given POTUS is guaranteed to be gone in 8 years. The fact that the Americans left suggests the Pentagon didn't want Afghanistan enough to fight for it (in Congressional sub-committees, I mean, not Afghan battlefields).

(**) Iceland's wartime dealings with the American Navy warped their social economy well into the 1960s, a clear and direct outgrowth of World War II.

Yes, the USSR's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan had Cold War implications, which itself was an outgrowth of WWII, but it isn't hard to imagine Russia in the 1970s blundering its way through Central Asia with or without WWII or the Cold War. 

(***) Me. The whole point of this blog is to go from the top of my head without any research. Research is fine but I've been researching these things my whole life, the point is to not distill all my knowledge for all time into one post, but rather to spit out what I think I know at any given moment. But with this post for instance, I kept re-starting it, I just kept writing the same shit over and over, such that the editing process was more of deleting rather than re-organizing. And instead of posting this in a timely manner (this was more or less done a month ago), I let it linger to a point where it barely seems relevant any more. Oh well, I can console myself that this post was never relevant and never will be, so what difference does it make when it goes up? 

(****) Did you notice that Ghani (and his helicopter of money) made it to the UAE? I dunno, man, I figured the UAE was the Taliban's new creditor, so does that mean Ghani is living in house arrest forever now? Is he a bargaining chip or a gift? Man, Ghani really needed to get to a NATO country, you'd think a helicopter of money would get you to the south of France, but I guess not. 

(*****) That's not really a joke. Seriously, Afghanistan is more a lesson in trying to control the uncontrollable from the other side of the planet. This mission will ultimately be of more use to Elon Musk than to West Point. 

RCEP

Last week at the most recent ASEAN conference, China announced that they would be joining RCEP (Regional Cooperative Economic Plan). The previous video features the stuffed shirt talking head hot takes from India and Japan. RCEP becomes the largest free trade agreement in the world covering 30% of the world's population and an equal amount of global GDP--and that's without India, who has flirted with RCEP over the years but ultimately (for now) backed away. RCEP is currently: Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam. 

But...no USA (*).  

You may recall that in 2016, US presidential candidates Trump and Clinton agreed on pretty much only one thing: that the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) was a bad idea for American workers and both poo-pooed the idea of joining in--even though it was Hillary Clinton that initially put the organization together while Secretary of State under President Obama. The whole point of the TPP was to create an East Asian trade block that would be aligned against China but Trump was against this because of his rabid anti-China policy (uh...wait that doesn't make any sense) and Clinton caved in the face of the Bernie Bros that (for whatever reason) think global trade is somehow bad for American industrial production. *sigh* Even when Americans have the right idea they manage to talk themselves out of it. 

So instead of an American-based free trade coalition spanning vast chunks of human population arrayed in opposition to China, now we have a China-based group without the need of American economic muscle behind it. Between the Bernie crowd and the Trump idiots (**), I'm certain I'm in the minority when I say this is a colossal wasted opportunity for USA. And likely an all-out triumph for China. 

Instead of TPP, Trump pursued a trade war with China built around unilateral tariffs--which would've been greatly aided by a TPP-like organization but somehow he didn't see it that way. My personal belief is that Trump's anti-China rhetoric was merely a staged attempt to create a détente with China going into the 2020 election and that the first three years of tariffs were really just a pantomimed attempt to gin up rapprochement. (***) But once Covid-19 appeared, the hope of détente with China evaporated. So instead, Xi Jinping has moved on with other plans: testing nuclear weapons again, cracking down on Hong Kong, picking fights with India, continuing to grow a military presence in the South China Sea and snatching the free trade bonanza the Americans let wither on the vine. 

About 15 minutes into this video, Ambassador Fujisaki refers to the 1990s-era belief (mostly in USA) that expanding trade with China would bring about a democratic revolution among Chinese workers/consumers. To further flesh out this belief that he refers to, I went back to "The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations" by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner from the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs (****). The authors say things like, "Growth was supposed to bring not just further economic opening but also political liberalization...with a burgeoning Chinese middle class demanding new rights and pragmatic officials embracing legal reforms...for further progress." But "(r)ather than becoming a force for greater openness, consistent growth has served to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party". I think it's fair to say the first sentence was a popular belief in American foreign policy circles in the 1990s and that the second sentence is a popular belief in current American foreign policy circles. 

So, in short, the Americans believed that expanding economic cooperation with China was a necessary post-Cold War step to make sure that Chinese growth came with an American imprimatur and that over time the growth would create a more liberal, open Chinese establishment that would fall in line with Western democratic capitalism. We had become accustomed to pictures like this. We saw China's leadership as capable only of oppressing the in-born desires of millions--billions--of good hearted Chinese people that yearned only to buy more stuff (I mean, it's not insignificant the man in this iconic picture carries a grocery bag, is it?). And we saw ourselves as a force for good by way of infiltrating the Chinese economy and allowing a newly burgeoning middle class to demand more democratic representation. (Or perhaps we saw the opportunity to co-opt the inevitable economic expansion of China and to get rich off of China getting rich....there's that, too) 

But when Xi Jinping came to power in 2010 and then retained power in 2015 (and will be granted another 5-year term any day now), something previously unconstitutional in China, Americans began to wake up to the idea that the grand design of democratic capitalism wasn't taking hold as it should. Indeed, the power structure seems all the more powerful because the last 20 years of Chinese economic growth hasn't produced a middle class but a thin layer of super-rich private citizens eager to wed themselves to the CCP's hold on the culture. Oh...yeah....there has to be a middle class to have a middle class revolution.

For my part, I never really bought the idea back in the 1990s. China has been China for more than 3000 years and the only hint of democracy they've ever had was a brief flirtation with Republican gov't in the early 20th century that was not popular, not successful and is likely considered their lowest point in the last 3000 years (at least by the Chinese themselves). The people of China have been ruled by the imperial Middle Kingdom since before the beginning of time--yeah, check it out: Chinese history kicks off with several hundred years worth of a dynasty that no one's sure even existed. The Emperor emerged from the mythological primordial ooze of life itself and that's all they've ever known. And--here's the thing Americans will NEVER understand--the Chinese people are...pretty cool with that. They don't mind it, they rage against it every once in a while but nothing else has ever replaced it. So expecting the Chinese people to rise up and demand more self-determination is gonna take some time. Like, a lot of time. Like, I dunno, a thousand years...? The idea that two decades of selling Chinese people Wal-Mart bedsheets was gonna completely reverse several millennia of culture...uh...never made any sense to me. Americans are beholden to iconic images like the one above, but I gotta tell ya: you don't control a billion and a half people with a line of tanks.  

Frankly, it just shows a misapprehension on the part of the West of how China works. We look at the Chinese Communist Party and see only the Communist part and totally neglect the Chinese part. I would suggest the CCP functions pretty much just like the Confucian bureaucracy that was the spine of the last thousand years of the Middle Kingdom. Hell, I would suggest the CCP is way more enlightened, egalitarian, forward-looking, responsible and inclusive than the Confucians ever were. So what the Chinese people have is already light years more advanced than what their ancestors would've expected from their emperors. Furthermore what they have is not actually something that we would recognize as "Communist". The way the CCP operates in China is not at all how Communism has ever been practiced anywhere else--and certainly not what Karl Marx would've imagined (an agrarian peasant rebellion was not what Marx had in mind (*****)).  

Actually what Americans think of as Communism is just Authoritarianism with a fancy name on it. In the west we fear Communism for its authoritarian tendencies and we use Stalin and Mao as the examples; but the authoritarianism in both cases pre-dates Marx and has little to do with top-down Marxist economics. When we say that Communism has never worked, that isn't really true: it's never been tried. When the Russians latched on to Marxist thought, they were working within a tradition of brutal authoritarianism and they saw the opportunity to push the Czar out and grab that authoritarianism for themselves. Stalin grabbed power and glommed onto Marxist ideas about committees and class warfare, neither of which really come from Marx, but I see no evidence that Stalin had any interest in the economic precepts of Marxism. I am convinced that Marxist top-down economic doctrines are doomed to failure but I am not convinced the failure of the Russian Soviets was because of Marxist economic dogma. As for the authoritarianism, it wasn't a product of Marxism, it was already there, the Czars ruled with an iron fist long before Karl Marx was born (******). Stalin was born from a tradition of Czarism more than Marxism and Mao represented a new type of Middle Kingdom rather than being the Marxist ideal.

As for the economics, the reason Americans fear it is because we are born of commerce and bristle at any notion of fettering it. In America we have created not a worker's paradise but a consumer's paradise: it is still not uncommon to find items in your local grocery that are cheaper than the lands they came from. That's because we're awesome and those other places suck and the likely reason those other places don't have the options that Americans have is because there is some top-down authority keeping the citizenry from full self-expression. We have a tendency to call this "Communism", whether or not that is actually the case. Thus, we equate Communism with Authoritarianism and Capitalism with Democracy: it is only in a free economy than we can have a free society (or something like that). And, the thinking goes, the expansion of Chinese economy must necessarily be joined with the expansion of civil liberties and voting rights, while a decrease of Chinese Communism will produce a decrease of Authoritarianism. We have come to see these things as two separate poles and presume the rise of one will spell the doom of the other. But this isn't necessarily so. I never bought that Chinese capitalism would lead to freer gov't because I think the gov't and the economy are two separate and distinct paradigms. And in this case it shows our fundamental misunderstanding of Communism. 

The Chinese are doing something that no one else has ever done before: they're actually following Marxist economic ideology. The authoritarianism has been there for thousands of years but their recent forays into global trade are because Marx says quite explicitly that Communism derives from Capitalism. Marx says you must indulge entrepreneurial industrial Capitalism in order for Communism to arise (re: you have to create wealth that so that you can then have wealth to control). Thus, the Chinese have allowed a greater expansion of market activity and wealth creation among the citizenry over the last 30 years because that's what Marx says to do--not because it seeks to adhere to American-style capitalist democracy. Capitalism will morph into Socialism, then Socialism will morph into Communism. I think Marx is probably right (*******) but whereas in the West we fear the steady decrease of individual choice due to the imposition of more and more top-down economic activity, in China they already have the top-down activity and are trying to bring the relative wealth of the citizenry up through a burst of macroeconomic activity. In the long run, the Chinese will either become prisoners of the endless chase for economic growth or they will actually achieve the Marxist Utopia (which is basically just Europe before the French Revolution). Neither of those options sound very "Chinese" to me but they gotta do something, I guess. 

And so here we are at a juncture of history where the Chinese are expanding their economic frontiers and reaching out to their neighbors (something they've done very little of in 3000 years), while the Americans are acting like trade is bad for workers. Yes, I was skeptical back in the 1990s of the political liberalization the Americans promised would happen, but I did kinda believe that Chinese people would get used to having choices and that would filter into the Party structure on the local level. Not on the national level, because that is now and will forever be just a room full of chain smoking old men making the decisions for a billion other souls. But I did think and still do that on the local level the reach of the CCP will actually--perhaps in spite of itself--give more people more opportunity to exert some bottom-up control. But that would be relatively invisible to American eyes and probably have little to do with the foreign policy/foreign trade powers of the Party. So while I didn't really buy it back in the day, I think it's much too early to say the liberalization didn't work because even if it does work, foreigners probably won't be able to tell. And it'll take a while before it works anyway, maybe not a thousand years but probably something like a hundred years. 

Marx was not talking about Russia, Marx was certainly not talking about China. Marx was talking about England--and by extension America. Marx presumed that the Capitalism Americans so cherish will eventually devolve (evolve/devolve? You decide) into Communism: a world where all the economic decisions are made by a handful of old men in committees telling everyone else what will be available to purchase. I understand Marx's point: as economic growth binds social structures together, an overarching abstract power will naturally arise on top--indeed, may be forced to arise--in order to smooth the flow of resource distribution. But Marx (like Einstein) was wedded to a steady state universe. For some reason he didn't account for economic expansion, so his notion that wealth would entropically rise to the top is not quite how things work. Also the notion that economic power and political power are the same thing is frankly not how America ever worked.

Granted, the super rich in America become super richer all the time but they don't hoard that wealth, they put it back into the markets. Indeed, the rich people are the ones creating the wealth that drives all economic growth. So while Marx was correct that a handful of rich people would control all the money, he was mistaken in that it would be controlled by a gov't force. It is not. That is private wealth put to private ends and the aim of of private wealth is to create ever more private wealth, which is not at all what a gov't would do. And Marx's notion that a gov't committee would be the best source of resource distribution is...man, as wrong as it could be!

Only private wealth can create capital; the gov't produces merely inflation. "Helping" people through gov't demand doesn't help anyone because it doesn't create sustainable economic structures, it just creates inflation. A sugar rush is fine for a while but it isn't nutrition, it won't keep the body from dying. Likewise, gov't spending can be an occasionally worthwhile stopgap but it does not provide nourishment. Only markets build into the future.

The American Congress is ruled by a series of committees but frankly the sheer amount of wealth it controls is pretty piddly compared to the private wealth in our capital markets. The politicians (and the politically minded citizenry) are fighting over tax dollars, which by definition is a tiny percentage of the overall economy. They can be as Marxist as they like, it'll actually have a pretty minimal effect on the wealth redistribution that happens all day long in the American economy. The politicians like to act important--and the citizenry is eager to make them appear important--but they're pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. They have the ability to waste a lot of time and money but not much more than that--they certainly can't make money or invest it. Congress's only real economic power is making money go away. Congress is absolutely invested in helping the citizenry be more productive (re: produce more capital) because that's where the wealth comes from. It doesn't come from the gov't. Wealth can never and will never come from gov't spending. That's just as true in China as it is in America. 

The Russian Soviets didn't care about economics, they cared only for the maintenance of their iron fist, generally by cowing people into silence and inactivity. China, too, has a long history of just shutting people up rather than dealing with their desires. In America we blame the political structure but frankly it doesn't do much because it actually effects a pittance of the overall spending. Marx's assumption that gov't power is real power is only true when you follow the top-down economic structures that Americans have always eschewed. But the idea that Capitalism and Democracy go hand in hand is not plainly obvious. I think its quite possible to have free economies in a tyrannical state and loads of democracy in a top-down economy. Market forces are latent, permanent and exist regardless of the particular ruling authority; ruling authorities can make economies worse but they have no power to make them better because economy comes from the People not the State. 

The fact that we've lumped all of these ideas in a single stew is an unnecessary complication that clouds our vision of objective reality (an effect of Media, I'd say). It makes Americans think that our politicians should do more and then complain when they try to do anything. And it makes us fear any other country in the world doing anything because we see competition as a zero-sum game rather than a source of continual growth. 

I've long been "soft" on China, even though I didn't buy the 1990s-era rhetoric of Chinese capitalist democracy. The Chinese people have been empowered over the last few decades but that doesn't mean they have much political participation. Yeah....because they don't want it. They like American-style improvement of standard of living but they think our politics is stupid and corrupt (and I agree). But I believe that China's continued growth and international influence is coming whether we like it or not--and, personally, I like it. I do not fear it and I think economic growth in all places is good because it empowers the citizens, the individuals, the People, even if has the unfortunate by-product of making States seem more powerful than they actually are. 

But it's hard to wrap my mind around a China that yearns for free trade while in America our politicians are clamoring for the cancellation of student loans; while I agree that our method of financing higher education is shameful and stupid, using the gov't as a mechanism to release people from their contractual obligations is precisely the opposite of what our gov't should be doing (and would be ruinously expensive for the higher educational opportunities of future generations). When American Liberals dream of a "better world", they are invariably thinking only of a more expensive one...and then expect the price to be paid by someone else. For some reason, they think that's what Socialism is but I bet they wouldn't if they ever read Marx.

(*) You will notice that North Korea and Taiwan, the two inescapable lightning rods of Pacific Asia, aren't there, either. But why isn't Bangladesh in the RCEP? 

(**) Obama gave lip service to TPP in 2016 but I suspect this was simply because he knew it was a losing cause. I thought at the time that Congress might've wanted TPP so much that they would actually let Obama have a little victory on the way out, but either Obama didn't care enough to take up the offer or Congress didn't care enough to extend it. Instead, the presidential candidates both talked Americans out of its usefulness...and we got a lame-ass trade war instead. *sigh* The business of America is business and we forget that at our peril.  

(***) I think Xi Jinping was on board with this plan. Enduring three years of an American tantrum for the prospect of 4-5 years of American support probably looked pretty good to him So, in case you're trying to read between the lines, I would suggest this shows that Covid-19 is absolutely NOT a Chinese conspiracy to weaken the global economy because I think it actually hinders what Xi wanted to do going forward. Or if this is some kind of devious plot, it is anti-Xi plot more than an anti-American one. 

(****) I started this post on Aug 29, 2018 initially with my thoughts on Foreign Affairs Mar/Apr 2018 essay "The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations" by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner.  But...I'm a lazy guy, picked this back up based on recent events.

(*****) I kept trying to convince my Chinese Political History professor that in an agrarian economy the farmers control the means of production, but he never bought it. I still (sorta) believe it but I still have no way of making anyone else believe it. Like I still believe that when looking at a US electoral map, it's easy to point out that the red states produce little of the overall GDP but how can you not notice it's where all our food comes from? Do you honestly think that's insignificant? 

(******) I'd say it's an outgrowth of the Golden Horde. Prior to the Mongols ransacking Russia circa 1250, there were democratic movements in that area, there was the attempt to make the leadership responsible to the citizenry. The Mongols ruled not merely with an iron fist but went out of their way to humiliate local Russian leaders and for 200 years brutally repressed any kind of movement at all. When the Muscovite princes were able to finally shake off Mongol rule around 1450, they took on the tenor of that bone-crushing leadership and that's the way it's been ever since in Russia. At to that end: Yeah, I know you're not gonna dig this but Vladimir Putin is easily the kindest, sweetest most benevolent leader they've ever had. I would say by a fucking longshot, he's the most enlightened leader they've ever had. Russia today actually has something that could be referred to as a middle class....when in the last thousand years was that even a possibility?

(*******) Though I don't agree with his rationale. To Marx economic growth will necessarily create an underclass that can only be cared for by the State and the State will then have to collect more and more from the citizenry to account for the left behind. I think the actuality is different: I think the upwardly mobile citizenry want more than they want to pay for and will think that gov't spending will be able to provide more and more. Thus, wealthy gov'ts will steadily drift toward Socialism and ultimately Communism through the force of ever-growing debt obligations. Politicians in charge will take on more and more spending as a means of holding on to power. But as gov't accrues more purchasing power, it will continually depress its own currency and all other markets. And in the long run we'll end up with dwindling consumer choices and more expectation of the gov't to make our choices for us. Kinda the same but Marx thought of helping the poor within a world of economic growth while I see it as steady decrease of economic growth as the people have fewer and fewer choices that only makes life tougher for the poor. 

PS -- Here's the Chinese stuffed shirt talking head hot take version. I think its noteworthy that they close by allowing the Singaporean representative to remind everyone that RCEP does not keep these Asian nations from militarily hedging against China (oh yeah: militarism is another separate and distinct paradigm that I didn't even touch on here). The agenda for the Americans is clear: guns but not butter. 

(Part 1) Iran: Who was General Qassem Soleimani?

At the end of 2019 I was contemplating my next post here with the thought that 2020 might be a bad year. Then, on January 3, the USA assassinated General Qassam Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Quds Force with a drone strike at the Baghdad airport and I knew was I was onto something.

I chose the video above out of a plethora of similar videos because this one is short and to the point. A detail I would add: Soleimani was not a cleric, he was not a religious man that people bowed down to because they think they're supposed to. He was a general, a bureaucrat, a diplomat, a powerful secular man. He was arguably more important than the Iraqi president or even any of the Mullahs. This guy knew where the bodies were buried, he knew the numbers to the bank accounts, he knew all the friends and all the enemies and he moved amongst all of that. For the USA to cut him down in a single sudden move is an amazingly bold stroke that will surely invite a larger war.

....Or will it?

The Trump administration is suggesting that this strike was justified because of reports of possible forthcoming attacks on allied forces. If you will recall, the Brits bristled at similar American paranoia last summer so the idea that imminent danger is a reasonable excuse will be challenged; that said, the Germans did not bristle at such reports and stood by the Americans at the time, so perhaps imminent danger will have its supporters (there's probably a time limit on how long that debate will matter, we'll see if the distinction is even important). The fact that Soleimani was in Baghdad meeting with local militia forces after a similar visit to Syria is probably the only evidence the Americans have (or will offer) to the notion that Soleimani was plotting something big.

Tensions have been simmering between USA and Iran for several months (well, several decades) and I'd say this move is the retaliation for Iran's strike on a Saudi oil refinery back in September (which produced no response at the time).  Look at this picture:



Dude, Tom Brady in his prime wasn't this accurate! When seeing the unbelievable accuracy of Iranian missiles (or was it drones?), the Pentagon must have known some real shit was on the way. (My first thought when seeing this pic was, "Oh shit! They can do that?") And this came, as you will recall, after several months of shenanigans in the Persian Gulf and presaged a series of protests across Iraq. When one of those protests finally got into the American green zone in Baghdad, the Americans acted (*) by taking out Soleimani.

Okay, so what now? Well, as I write this there are reports of Iranian rocket launches on American bases in Iraq. That was predictable. I'd say keeping these Iraqi protests going is the next step for both sides, which calls attention to what I've been thinking all along: in the beginning this is about control of Iraq.

In 2003, George Bush invaded Iraq with the intention (I believe) of establishing 1) a battleground for Arab extremists and Americans to go at it and/or 2) a neutral ground between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi Shia threw off American overtures, forcing the Americans to maintain their Iraqi positions by shielding the Sunnis (which was precisely NOT the original mission). Once Obama removed American forces it sent the Sunnis into a freak tornado that produced Daesh (or ISIS, if you prefer). Daesh was able to grab impressive swaths of territory along the Euphrates River across the Iraq-Syria frontier and, in the end, had no allies whatsoever. Indeed, the emergence of Daesh is what brought Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Kurds, Israel, NATO, Russia and USA all together and set the stage for where we are now.

Since Obama pulled out American troops and Daesh rose, Iraq has been steadily infiltrated by paramilitary units (PMUs) largely supported by Iran. Over the years the Americans have insisted that the Iraqi parliament must decide how to deal with these PMUs, whether to expel them completely (and...how does that get done?) or incorporate them as a national military (also, a probably impossible task). But for Baghdad to truly control Iraq, they must control or dispel the PMUs. The aforementioned Iraqi protests began in the Shia area and spread because....well protestors often don't know what they really want. The Americans were encouraged by this because they interpreted this as anti-Iran (and it may have been). But outside of ousting the Prime Minister in December, I don't see that much else got accomplished except the communication of a basic unease in the face of the powers that be. The PMUs are still out there, supporting the protests in some cases and brutally suppressing them in others.

So how does Iraq deal with the murder of Iran's greatest soldier on their soil? I don't know. But Iran will ramp up its influence on the PMUs and USA will have to find the weaknesses in Iraqi support of the PMUs to fight back. That is undoubtedly the first step for both sides if a full-on war is actually coming.



(*) Ehh...that was the excuse, anyway. Those protests had been raging for months, it was only a matter of time that protestors ended up at the American embassy. The idea that Americans were truly threatened is probably an exaggeration or that Iran had anything to do with it is probably mostly fabricated.

(Part 2) Will a new gas deal fuel regional rivalry?

So let's re-set the scene: Turkey is advancing in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa (and we must assume the Red Sea is also in play), by force potentially. This is something that the Iranians absolutely want to stop. But USA has just crippled the Iranian response, while doing nothing to stop Turkey.

In short: Turkey is advancing and Iran is shrinking at the hands of the USA. That's what's going on in the Middle East right now. Iraq will become the battleground that Bush envisioned back in the day but the real war will be (or would have been) the oil fields of the eastern Mediterranean but I'm guessing USA and the EU have already decided to allow Turkey to take over (**). As long as the Iranians are sidelined (and the Saudis remain rich and clueless), the West will allow the Turks to reestablish its Ottoman era claims from the Gulf of Sidra to the Gulf of Aden.

Where does the assassination of Soleimani fit into this? It cripples Iran's chances to curtail Turkish advancement. Again: Soleimani was a powerful and knowledgable guy (***), replacing him will be virtually impossible (indeed, the next few weeks will be a referendum on Soleimani's management style: did he leave behind a crew ready to snap into action or no?). Iran has to respond (and the response has begun as of just a few hours ago) but their fighting capability has already been severely limited. One scary part of that calculus is that since their conventional fighting capability is in shambles, they may resort to unconventional tactics, like attacking embassies (and Trump hotels and resorts) or maybe by busting out the weapons we don't know about. Or by attacking Turkey or Saudi Arabia.

How big will the war be? I dunno. Might be huge, might already be over, hard to tell. But look for Russia to be a peacemaker and don't be surprised if this all ends with China expanding its position in the Middle East right as the Americans are eager to leave.

(**) Well, until they agree to see Turkey as a threat and start chopping them back. The Middle East is about on-going battle between Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The West has chosen Turkey to be the winner (for now). Iran has seemingly already been check-mated.

(***) Unlike, say, Osama bin Laden. When USA finally assassinated bin Laden, he was just a dude living in a house in the middle of nowhere. He had no power of any kind. Soleimani, on the other hand, was Iran's Eisenhower and J. Edgar Hoover rolled into one.

Impeachment (Phase Two)

On Friday (the 13th), the House Judiciary Committee passed a resolution to move forward on two counts of impeachment against President Trump. Now the full House will have a vote, probably some time next week. I think we can assume that the vote will go along party lines, meaning Trump will be impeached in the House and then it will move to the Senate, which I think we can also assume will move along party lines and Trump will not be removed.

The Committee held a number of public hearings leading up to this resolution, mostly with various Ambassadors, in proceedings that I thought were quite sober and tasteful, but didn't illuminate much beyond the original July phone transcription that was released in September. There was the one guy that thinks he may have overheard something in someone else's phone call and another lady that indignantly raged against conspiracy theories and the two guys that had conflicting memories of their various conversations. But none of that told us anything new about the nature of any arrangement between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky (*).

The revelation of a working team centered around Rudy Giuliani (and likely included Sec State Pompeo and VP Pence) wasn't new, although the depth of their participation was eye-opening. That said, it is not uncommon for presidents to have their own Special Envoys or even teams that work directly from the White House on specific topics or actions with other nations. Was Giuliani doing anything criminal? I haven't seen any evidence of that (yet). And while it was clear this ruffled the feathers of the Ambassadors, I don't know that there was anything truly out of the ordinary going on (perhaps there was, perhaps not, no one has bothered to make the case either way). Indeed, the fact that these ambassadors had little to offer shows the very nature of Ambassadorships: they're not particularly involved with foreign policy formation, so why would they know anything?

The most celebrated testimony came from Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland. As PBS Newhour reported on November 20: "“I know that members of this Committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a “quid pro quo?” As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes,” Sondland said."  The committee wanted to hear the phrase 'quid pro quo' and they got it but this is not in relation to the military aid but to a White House meeting. But in the course of the case being built this is a bait-and-switch. A White House meeting is always a quid pro quo--indeed, the whole point of a meeting with POTUS is so that he can thank the person for doing what POTUS wanted done! There has never been a White House meeting in all of American history that took place merely because the POTUS had time to kill. Meetings with the POTUS are highly scripted affairs where everyone involved knows precisely what is expected of them, they are planned with full knowledge ahead of time that everyone has/will play their part. And these meetings are often purely political with little benefit to the American people or nation as a whole. To wit: where does it say in the Constitution that the POTUS shall invite the winner of the Super Bowl for a photo-op? What is the 'benefit' to the Republic of such a meeting? It happens every year for purely anodyne reasons and no one complains. And is pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving every year done for the benefit of the Republic or is it just a bland opportunity for the sitting POTUS to enhance his own public relations? And, good God, what is politicized in Washington more than the State of the Union Address (**), where the POTUS gets to pat himself on the back and call attention to his political allies strategically placed throughout the chamber?

If American support of Ukraine is so important, wouldn't Congress want the POTUS to meet with President Zelensky in a very public fashion that acknowledges we stand with Ukraine against Russia? Why would Congress be punishing the President for a meeting when (a) it's the President's right to meet with whomever he chooses for whatever reason and (b) Congress presumably wants this meeting to take place? So while Sondland's quote won the daily soundbite war, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. As for holding up aid, the various ambassadors had their various opinions on aid to Ukraine but none exhibited any particular knowledge of what was at work or why. Again: why would they know anything?

And as for the aid itself being 'held up' check out this CNN story from November 26 (https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/26/politics/ukraine-aid-trump-call-omb/index.html). The first paragraph says: "The White House budget office's first official action to withhold $250 million in Pentagon aid to Ukraine came on the evening of July 25, the same day President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke on the phone, according to a House Budget Committee summary of the office's documents." Then the third paragraph says: "A hold was placed on the Ukraine aid at the beginning of July, and the agencies were notified at a July 18 meeting that it had been frozen at the direction of the President, a week before the Trump-Zelensky call." Wait...what?

So was it held up on July 25? Or July 18? Or the 'beginning of July'? Was it before the phone call or after? Why is this so hard to figure out? And why hasn't this timeline been explicitly laid out if the aid being held up is so central to this proceeding?

And what of Zelensky himself? Did he feel pressure to actually do any of the things Trump wanted from him? On September 25 Time Magazine (***) published (https://time.com/5686305/zelensky-ukraine-denies-trump-pressure/) that Zelensky "Denied Trump Pressured Him to Investigate Biden's Son" based on a joint press conference Zelensky and Trump held that day where Zelensky said: "Nobody pushed me." But on November 18 Time published (https://time.com/5731647/ukraine-trump-biden-investigation-anxiety/) that "US Officials Knew Ukraine Felt 'Pressure' from Trump Administration to Investigate Biden" based on a May 7 closed-door meeting that included then-current US Ambassador to Ukraine Yovanovich. But even the weird CNN article above doesn't suggest that the Ukraine aid was held up in May, so...how does this time line work? And if the 'pressured' person says he wasn't pressured, then...how does...any of this...wait, what?

Was the aid actually held up? We've long since accepted that this as a basic fact but the 'prosecution' (re: the House Judiciary Committee) has not explicitly put the details forward and the defense (re: POTUS) has yet to participate in the proceedings, so are we sure this even happened? And if the person who has been pressured has said publicly he was not pressured, then has anything actually happened? How is it possible for a President to hold up aid? And what particular mechanisms did Trump employ and what was his stated rationale at the time and to whom? This should be quite easy to figure out, I don't understand why we don't know this yet.

What it looks like to me is that Trump tried to extort a gratuity for himself based on an already approved deal. The bi-partisan support for Ukraine suggests that this particular aid package was ironclad and Trump saw an opportunity for himself to get a little something extra out of Zelensky. Has the case been proved? The circumstantial evidence doesn't look good but I'd say there's enough legal room to reach an acquittal, which all serves to remind us that this is not a courtroom trial but a purely procedural vote that is more often than not just a party line expression. At the end of the day, Trump did not get the investigation he sought and Ukraine got the aid they were earmarked, so did anything actually happen? Is the attempt to possibly commit a crime really worth this much time and energy?

Assuming Trump is guilty of this attempted extortion, is this worthy of an impeachment in the House? Again, it doesn't matter whether it is 'worthy', all that matters is the vote itself. Thus, impeachment is, or can be, a relatively meaningless piece of agitprop. Is this worthy of removal of the POTUS? No. Now if the House showed that Trump had done this before or that this kind of grease was a pattern of behavior, then you'd have something. If Trump was systematically abusing power with, say, Lebanon, Taiwan, Poland, etc., then that would be worthy of shipping him out. But I don't see that case being made.

Indeed, the most galling thing about this procedure is the suggestion that this is the worst thing Trump has done in office. Seriously? Trump has completely warped USA's trade relations, most specifically with China, based on some minuscule, vague wording about national defense and the House thinks needling the President of Ukraine for something that means very little to Ukraine (or I would suggest to the American electorate) is worthy of impeachment? This is an abrogation of responsibility dressed up as an attempt do the right thing. *smh*

Trump's approval ratings are a stunning anomaly: no amount of Trump success makes them go up and no amount of Trump failures make them go down. Truly amazing and probably indicative of what future Presidents must have. Has the impeachment damaged Trump? I'd say not at all. People who don't like Trump are eager to rush for any excuse to get him out of office but this impeachment proceeding only makes him stronger, I think.

So here's the new conspiracy theory: the House likes Trump's bizarre trading rationale vis-a-vis China and they know no one else is dumb enough to maintain such a potentially suicidal policy. President Hillary would've talked tough but wouldn't really have done much (especially since she, too, was backing away from TPP during the 2016 campaign), likewise with President Warren, President Biden would soft pedal China, President Bernie absolutely wouldn't treat China this way. Congress likes Trump's belligerent, haphazard treatment of China and they want him to keep doing it--they likely even see it as the most important thing on our current agenda. So they're rousting up Trump's base heading into the 2020 election. Honestly, I can't see any other rationale. Pelosi gets to say, 'Trump was evil and we tried to get him out'? Uhh, not really, as this does very little to make that happen. Or does this presage another impeachment in the future? Is a POTUS that has been impeached but not removed multiple times look like a big win for the Democrats? It doesn't to me but I'm not a Democrat.

I just don't get this. The case is not a slam dunk, the victim has claimed no victimhood, the Republic is not advanced by this impeachment any more than it was advanced by an investigation into Hunter Biden, the House has spent all of its political capital on a whimper rather than actually ginning up some interesting or useful legislation and the Democrats are really just beating the same dead horse they were going to be beating even this impeachment never happened. I think the whole point of this was to create enough ongoing controversy around Trump that Republicans in the House and the Senate up for reelection would have to deal with in a thorny uncomfortable way, potentially influencing those elections or at least interrupting the ability for the Republicans in general to raise funds. But I don't see that taking place. The only silver lining for Democrats: with Trump in office, donations to Dems are probably gonna be way up. What else gets achieved here? I...don't...see anything.

If this is the worst thing Trump has done in the last three years then he is officially the cleanest POTUS we've ever had. All this sturm und drang to convince us that Trump is a self-aggrandizing sleazy guy...dude, I already knew that. This has done nothing at all for anyone except Trump's chances for re-election. (****)



(*) Honestly the part I find most vexing is that Trump didn't seem to care about an investigation, he merely wanted an announcement of an investigation. I don't really know what to make of that. If the investigation will yield damning evidence about Hunter Biden, don't the American people to deserve to know? Likewise, if an investigation completely exonerates Hunter Biden, don't the American people deserve to know that? Seems like an investigation of Hunter Biden would only be damaging to the candidacy of Joe Biden if--and only if--it reveals disturbing revelations about Hunter Biden (and even then: do people really give a shit about what Hunter Biden does in Ukraine?). It seems to me there really can't be any effect on the 2020 USA election until AFTER the investigation is completed and revealed. And even then, it would only potentially effect how people vote, which is not an effect on the election itself. So what good/bad/otherwise is accrued from an announcement of an investigation if no subsequent investigation is performed? WTF, dude? I don't understand how any of this effects anything in any way and the fact that Trump only wanted the appearance of an investigation makes even less sense.

(**) The Constitution says an annual State of the Union shall be given to the Congress by the President. But it doesn't say it has to be televised in prime time for the sake of the POTUS tooting his own horn or making a display of his political cronies. This is an annual disgrace the Republic would be better off getting rid of.

(***) I've generally been trying to link to Left-wing media sites but, honestly I had no idea Time Magazine still existed, so not sure whether they'd be right or left at this point. When I was kid Time and Newsweek were the only political magazines around, they always seemed rather bland in that softly Left way that for-real 'journalism' used to pride itself on. Now I dunno what Time is like or who reads it. Although, if the November 18 article went back to a May 7 meeting, why didn't Time know about that on September 25?

(****) As a voting American I assure you I couldn't care less what Hunter Biden was doing in Ukraine. If the Ukrainians were so offended by his conduct that they had to indict him or deport him or whatever, that is entirely their business. But even then, Hunter Biden's activities would have no effect whatsoever on my vote. Also, for what it's worth, now seems like the most perfectly awkward moment to admit that Joe Biden is one of the very very very few politicians of my life time that I actually like. And watching Democrats shy away from not merely their best candidate in general but the only one that I think can actually beat Trump...and, well, the Pelosi-wants-Trump-to-win conspiracy theory begins to look plainly obvious.