One month in, got some right; got some wrong. Will continue to update, at east for a while.
March 20, 2022
A forceful reminder of why, particularly now, we should be engaging Russian culture more, not less. Please read this. As Morson fans already know, Saul is incapable of dull or shallow thinking.
https://quillette.com/2022/03/19/putins-russian-and-pushkins-russia/
March 20, 2022
Sadly, the death toll from WW I continues to rise, yes, the First World War. The decisions/treaties/boundaries (Sykes-Picot, Soviet “Union”, etc)/movements associated w/the “Great War” and the years immediately following (1918-1922) are still driving today’s geopolitical and military realities. The tragedies of WW II, Bosnia, Aleppo, & now Ukraine can be linked back to that first “great” war and to paraphrase Keynes, the “consequences of the peace.” (Not to mention the numerous outcomes further afield/outside Europe/Middle East). In retrospect, the Cold War peace (1945-1990s-ish) was just an interregnum in a larger cycle in European history. Today’s historians refer to the “long 19th century”, 1789-1914. Future historians will study the period from 1914-20xx as a distinct period that deals with the forces that first came to a head on the fields of Flanders.
March 18, 2022
2nd order effects of the R invasion–on German policy, on US dom politics, on Chinese strategy–could be as important to global affairs as the obvious 1st order effects. Nicely summarized in re Germany by @andreaskluth
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-18/putin-s-invasion-of-ukraine-has-fixed-a-flaw-in-german-history?sref=vBm6bz3t
March 17, 2022
A TL;DR summary for people who missed the last month. R gambled & lost a huge geo-pol powerplay, but flattened U in the process. G will have to foot the bill for rebuilding as their foreign policy & energy policy strongly implicated. 1/3 Significant 2nd order effects: R set back decades. Surprise strengthening of EU, incl. fence-mending w/UK. Major reset of G foreignpol, though not yet willing to accept nuclear power. “Small states” of E Europe stepping up in big way. 2/3 The unanswered question: the 2nd order effects on the GOPFOXDrumpf complex. Will it disentangle or go down with P. tbd. 3/3.
March 16, 2022
Ever wonder why you had to memorize all those battles in high school? Now you know why. For many intents and purposes, the Battle of Poltava (1709) has just been re-fought. The prior victor may still win the battle, but they have certainly lost the 21st c equivalent of the Great Northern war. History matters.
March 14, 2022
Most of you will have already seen today’s video from Moscow. For those of us who were introduced to the official Soviet news program Vremia in the 1980s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlH8zFOyLU), today’s Channel One “newsbombing” was nothing short of extraordinary. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDgBGp07z1U). Such an event was simply unimaginable in the tightly state-controlled enterprise Vremia was then and that Channel One had become under Putin. Perhaps even more than some of the street protests we have seen over the past decade, this is a definite crack in the regime’s facade.
March 14, 2022
From a friend of nearly 40 years:
My dear Russians – the Ukrainians are fighting Putin’s army for their freedom, and ours | Mikhail Shishkin
March 12, 2022
There is 19th c Congress of Vienna realpolitik, w/Metternich, Castlereagh, & Talleyrand. And then there is 20th/21st c realpolitik against genocidal madmen/dictators/ideologues. They are not the same. Warrant different responses. History matters.
March 12, 2022
Finally found a way to still my rage of the past 2+ weeks, albeit temporarily. Not a huge surprise: a night at the symphony. Marta Krechkovsky led an ensemble of Musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in an arrangement of Ukrainian folk music. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra itself followed with a chipper early work of Prokofiev, his Classical Symphony. The highlight of the evening was Villegas playing Rodrigo’s Aranjuez, a piece that transcends sadness through simple & timeless beauty. For me, it offered спокойствие души. Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun completed the evening’s diversion from doom-scrolling. The orchestra brought the audience back to the current time with Lutoslawski’s very loud and raucous Concerto for Orchestra. It was time to go home and check the news.
March 9, 2022
Pls remember not all Russians in Russia support Putin. And almost all Russian-speakers in the West strongly oppose the invasion/are horrified. They left Russia for a reason. Support Russian/Ukrainian culture here, as it being erased/destroyed there. The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis.
March 7, 2022
History matters. Some eighty years ago, a fascist force moved East in search of Lebensraum under the slogan “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.” Now a force using a similar ideological umbrella is moving West in search of unity & a buffer territory.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putins-new-ukraine-essay-reflects-imperial-ambitions/
March 4, 2022
Putin has created in one week what 2+ centuries of Romanticism, Nationalism, revolutions, wars, liberation movements, nationalities policies and boundaries did not: an absolutely crisp & clear Ukrainian national identity and unity recognized the world over.
March 3, 2022
For those of you wishing to accost the first Russian-American/Russian-speaker you come across on Main Str, pls remember they all came here for a reason & are almost all strongly anti-Putin. If you want to harangue a Putin supporter, contact Fox News.
March 3, 2022
Guernica is a town in the Basque region of Spain. It was bombed to the ground by Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion in April 1937 on behalf of the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. It held no military significance.
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March 3, 2022
Guernica is a town in the Basque region of Spain. It was bombed to the ground by Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion in April 1937 on behalf of the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. It held no military significance.
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March 2, 2022
The conquerer’s dilemma, a short thread. Without descending into Orwellian discourse, I want to reiterate that while what has happened to Ukraine is an utter tragedy, the invader has a very serious problem. 1/6 What exactly does the conqueror envisage happening in the conqured territories? An occupation force constantly engaged in guerrilla warfare with a population of 40 mln? That was not part of the plan. The invader can ill afford that, even at $100 oil. 2/6 If the invader somehow succeeds in “pacifying” the population–seems unlikely–then it would have to rebuild the country. You break it; you own it. That was not part of the plan. The invader can ill afford that, even at $100 oil. 3/6 If the refugees keep leaving, the invader will sit upon a depopulated piles of rubble. At home, it faces its own existence-threatening demographic catastrophe. It can ill afford to populate the “liberated” areas, except w/migrants from C. Asia. That was not part of the plan. 4/6 The “destroy and rebuild” strategy “worked” in Chechnya, but the scale and circumstances are very different. The Chechnya model will not work in this instance. 5/6 Conqueror’s dilemma was not an initial concern because the invader did not envision having to flatten the cities. But now it is a problem, the major problem in each locale they control. 6/6
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March 1, 2022
NATO push to the E was aggressive (99/04), as Mearshimer/SecDefs/SecStates noted at the time & since. But this reaction by R is so far out of proportion as to make the original argument moot. This is not the reaction to a “legitimate security concern,” but a desparate powerplay.
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February 28, 2022
A short update thread: PutinRus have lost. By not winning in the first few days, they have lost. UKR did not fold, Zelen did not flee, & the EU/Germany developed a backbone. 1/6 As Japan lost WWII in the Pacific on day one by not taking out the carriers, & Germany lost WWII when its 1941 Blitzkrieg against the SovUn did not immediately succeed, it is now just a matter of time. 2/6 Though the end is clear, how we get there is not. Poutine has 2 choices, both bad. He can double down & take Kiev w/his full military might–that 40 mile convoy–& install a puppet govt. It will involve massive destruction/dislocation of the civilian pop. A Pyrrhic victory. 3/6 But w/out a brutal crackdown on a 40 mln pop, holding UKR will be impossible. And with a brutal crackdown on a 40 mln pop, holding UKR will be prohibitively expensive. No way to occupy UKR. Period. 4/6 Or Poohtan can back down in the face of UKR resistance & W military support. He would soon be out of a job, leaving UKR wrecked & Russia a crippled pariah. An intermed. scenario has him continuing the attack, but his siloviki/military turn on him. Possible, but not right now. 5/6 But the outcome is the same. Whether Puteen continues the war/”prevails” or retreats right away, Russia has taken an enormous step backwards economically, diplomatically, politically. And the European history books have a new chapter, 1945-2022. 6/6
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February 28, 2022
An extraordinary document, reads like a new call for “Lebensraum”, this time from the East.
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February 24, 2022
Further parallels w/WWII. Heretofore Rus/Putin assumed to be working incrementally, using Great Power chess-like moves to reconstitute its hegemon status. 1/x So vis a vis its neighbor, the pundits expected partial this, partial that, sabre rattling, or death by a 1000 cuts to achieve the never-NATO-ification of UKR and to let the W know R was back. 2/x Monday’s speech and, of course, the all-out attack, full-country invasion is out of character with prior statements & actions. 3/x
Instead, it is evocative of both Barbarossa & Tora, Tora, Tora–two surprise, bet-the-house operations that revealed the weakness, not the strength of the attackers. 4/x In both instances, the attackers needed the operations to succeed fully and quickly. Neither did, and the underlying weakness of the Axis Powers emerged. 5/x In this instance, Rus trying to take advantage of Western distraction & division to get its hegemonic status back while it can, before its domestic challenges (aging kleptocracy, demographic disaster, still narrow economy, etc) make it impossible. 6/x Hard to see this right now, but the invasion–the largest military attack in Europe since WWII–is in fact an act of desperation. The longer UKR can hold on, the more evident this will become. 7/7
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February 23, 2022 (10:18pm, Eastern)
Going quiet on finance for a while, out of respect for the gravity of the situation in Ukraine. Much greater issues at stake.
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February 23, 2022 (12:49pm, Eastern)
History matters. Want a better understanding of the crisis involving Ukraine? Study World War I. It is the “big bang moment” for modern politics, culture, arts, economics, even science and technology. A brief thread. 1/x More than a century later, we are still dealing w/the consequences of the boundary drawing/”country” creation exercise that occurred in the Middle East (Sykes-Picot, et al)as the Ottoman Empire weakened in the late 19th c & finally disappeared w/the rest of Old Europe in WWI. 2/x Nationalism was a super strong force in the 19th c, culminating in the emergence of many new European countries out of the ashes of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, & Ottoman Empires. 3/x These new entities were often old, even ancient ethnicities, w/rich histories, but new countries in a modern “nation-state” sense. 4/x In the East, early Bolshevik/Marxist ideology was dismissive of nationalism as a distraction from the class struggle. But the Bolsheviks could not ignore the nationalistic feelings of those ethic groups delighted to be free of Habsburg, Romanov & Ottoman suzerainty. 5/x A century later, some of those entities have done just fine; others, not so much. Central & E Europe in the 20th c has been a hard place to build sustainable nation-states, to say the least. And even harder to create representative democracies/classically liberal orders. 6/x As competing historical narratives are now being deployed to justify momentous/hugely costly actions, it is worth being up to speed on those histories. If you are not, someone who disagrees w/you will certainly use those narratives to their advantage. Time to read up. 7/7
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February 13, 2022
Tweeting about the stock market on the eve of a major geo-political-military event seems self-indulgent. Adding yet another Tweet to the countless others on the geo-political-military matter in question seems pointless. Have I discovered the essence of Twitter?
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February 7, 2022
A country’s capital markets reflect w/ nearly mirror accuracy that country’s political culture. That long-term relationship substantially explains market outcomes of several prominent authoritarian regimes over the past several decades. 1/3
Initial fervor & capital inflows when they first “open,” but over time, local practices come back to the fore. 2/3 Bigger question is our own political culture. Whither our experiment in (mostly) open markets, open minds, open rule of law…? Tell me your view on those issues, & I’ll give you your market forecast. 3/3.