Robin Sears: Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine: No Deal with the Devil

Many of the world’s foreign affairs pundit class – and some in the Canadian contingent – seem trapped in a time warp. Before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, they tut-tutted about how the West and NATO should not have provoked Putin into threatening his invasion, by welcoming new members 25 years ago. Within days of the first attacks, they were already mumbling about the need to provide Putin with an “exit strategy”, and the importance of not “provoking” Putin further.

As the body count mounted, they began to speculate about when the Russian oligarchs might push back on Putin. What nonsense. The only pushback he fears is from the siloviki, the security establishment. They may yet decide he is a liability to their control of the kleptocracy they govern.
This is not 1989. This is not the era when Helmut Kohl, George H.W. Bush, Brian Mulroney and many other world leaders were able to gently nudge the Russians away from confrontation. Putin is not Gorbachev. We are at the end of the quiet decades of Russian integration into the global community, with occasional wrist slaps for Putin’s earlier, smaller aggressions against neighbors.
This is 1939, when a crazed autocrat drove his hundreds of tanks across the Polish border, only a few hundred kilometers east of where Putin invaded across the same vast, rolling plains, ideal for tank warfare. Then as now, the invader downplayed his strategic ambitions, attempting to soothe the world into not reacting. Both dictators got it badly wrong. Putin has made it clear he not only wants to annex Ukraine, but also to remove NATO forces from his borders, by force if required, even threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons if needed. Our Putin sympathizers might ask themselves the question, “How would Poland or Ukraine feel about not having a security perimeter against Russian incursions?” https://www.policymagazine.ca/putins-invasion-of-ukraine-no-deal-with-the-devil/

Max Boot: Will Trump’s love affair with Putin finally be the breaking point for Republicans? I doubt it.

For years, I’ve been hoping that some outrage would finally turn the Republican Party against Donald Trump, and for years, I’ve been bitterly disappointed. Trump survived describing Mexican immigrants as “criminals, drug dealers, rapists” … insulting John McCain for being a POW … mocking a disabled reporter … bragging about grabbing women by their private parts … calling neo-Nazis “very fine people” … arguably obstructing justice to block a probe of his campaign dealings with Russia … fawning over vicious dictators … lying nonstop … engaging in personal vituperation … calling the media “the enemy of the people” … separating immigrant children from their parents … mismanaging the covid-19 pandemic … trying to extort Ukraine into helping him politically … refusing to accept his election defeat … inciting a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol … and too many other scandals to list.

Will the Republican Party finally come to its senses now that one of Trump’s favorite dictators is waging a cruel war of aggression against Ukraine? Hope springs eternal. The Republican Accountability Project — a Never Trump conservative group — has been airing a hard-hitting commercial on Fox “News” Channel that juxtaposes Trump’s sickening praise for Vladimir Putin’s dismemberment of Ukraine (“genius,” “smart,” “savvy”) with heartbreaking pictures of the suffering being inflicted by the Russian military. Trump backtracked a bit last week; he called the invasion a “holocaust” but still would not denounce his pal Putin.

Even Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, took a veiled swipe at Trump, saying, “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin,” and former national security adviser John Bolton said Trump would have pulled out of NATO in a second term. Republican leaders are now in a competition to see who can sound tougher on Russia.

Republicans should be turning against Putin’s No. 1 American apologist, right? They should, but they likely won’t.

A  News poll provides disturbing evidence of the toxic impact of partisanship on Republican views. Only 3 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2020 say President Biden is “doing a better job leading his country” than Putin is. Nearly half of Trump voters — 47 percent — say Putin is doing a better job than Biden even while the Russian economy is collapsing. In the same survey, 82 percent of Republicans expressed a favorable view of Trump. A CBS News poll last month found that 69 percent of Republicans want Trump to run again, and I doubt those numbers will change much a month from now.

In short, for most Republicans, partisanship trumps — pardon the word — any principle, even devotion to our democracy. Because most Republicans hate Democrats more than they hate Russia, Trump likely doesn’t have to worry that his Putinphilia will cost him a significant amount of support with his base no matter how many civilians Putin slaughters. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/08/will-trump-praise-for-putin-cost-him-republican-support/

Jackie Calms: Russia’s crackdown on liberty sounds all too familiar to Americans

The news makes for a sickening split screen.

We see the ravages of Russia’s war on Ukraine, where it’s as if the black-and-white scenes of carnage and fleeing refugees in World War II Europe — scenes consigned to history books, we thought — have been updated in horrific, real-time color. Vladimir Putin’s heinous war has united the Ukrainian people.

Then there’s the coverage of the figurative war here in America, a culture war waged by Republicans against women, minority groups, LGBTQ people, educators, public health officials and just about anyone not of a right-wing mindset. This needless conflict divides us, for Republicans’ political gain.

The juxtaposition with the real war in Ukraine isn’t all that’s maddening about the political wars of choice in state capitals.

It’s also that the culture warriors claim to be fighting for freedom. Yet “freedom” to these mostly white, male conservatives often comes at the expense of others who don’t look or think like them.

Even as Ukrainians suffer bombings of hospitals, a maternity center, apartments and schools, our bloodless war proceeds on its several fronts: Against women’s constitutional right to abortion before a fetus’ viability. Against teachers’ rights to speak freely about race and gender. Against transgender youth and their parents. Against public health officials dealing with a once-a-century pandemic that’s killed nearly a million Americans.

On abortion rights, Republican-led states aren’t even waiting for the conservative U.S. Supreme Court to turn back the clock a half-century. They’re rushing either to ban abortions at 15 weeks’ gestation, significantly before a fetus is viable (the latest bill just went to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to sign), or to go further and copy Texas’ plainly unconstitutional law that ended nearly all abortions in that state, home to 7 million women of reproductive age.

In Russia, Putin is cracking down further on speech too, just as he has moved against gay rights and abortion. If Republicans in this country truly stood for freedom, their domestic agenda wouldn’t have so much in common with his. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/08/will-trump-praise-for-putin-cost-him-republican-support/

 Bill Eddy: Malignant Narcissism

What kind of personality would promote such heartless, destructive action against Ukrainians, a people who have done him no harm? There is a special kind of personality that this suggests, which is the most dangerous and untreatable condition, according to the highly regarded Otto Kernberg, a psychoanalyst who studied this condition for most of his life and helped define it: malignant narcissism.

This personality may look unhinged at times, but someone with this personality grows more and more dangerous with time and must be understood in order to stop him. While I should not diagnose someone I have never met, I feel that we must now operate on the likelihood that Putin has this personality and is revealing who he always was and who he is becoming. If he has this disorder, he is entirely predictable. Put simply, he cannot stop himself from this malignancy. It grows like a cancer.

Erich Fromm may have been the first to write about this as a psychologist in his 1960s book The Heart of Man: It’s Genius for Good and Evil as applying to the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Roman Caesars, Hitler, Stalin, and others. Unlike most personalities, which stay stable over a lifetime (including most personality disorders), he said malignant narcissism grows over the years. He becomes more isolated and considers everyone a danger, so he takes more and more extreme action to increase his power and ruthlessness and narcissism. https://www.highconflictinstitute.com/hci-articles/putin-attacking-ukraine

David Brooks: This Is Why Putin Can’t Back Down

The end of the Soviet Union could have been seen as a liberation, a chance to build a new and greater Russia. But Putin chose to see it as a catastrophic loss, one creating a feeling of helplessness and a shattered identity. Who are we now? Do we matter anymore?

Like identity politicians everywhere, Putin turned this identity crisis into a humiliation story. He covered over any incipient feelings of shame and inferiority by declaring: We are the innocent victims. They — America, the Westerners, the cool kids at Davos — did this to us. Like other identity politicians around the world, he promoted status resentment to soothe the wounds of trauma, the fears of inferiority.

In the first years of his reign, he rebuilt the Russian identity. He reclaimed parts of the Soviet legacy as something to be proud of. Mostly, his vision of Russian identity revolved around himself. By parading as a powerful figure on the world stage, Putin could make Russians feel proud and part of something big. Vyacheslav Volodin, then the Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, captured the regime’s mentality in 2014: “There is no Russia today if there is no Putin.”

This grand strategy seemed to be fully vindicated that year with the successful invasion of Crimea. Having reclaimed this land, Russia could strut like a great power once again. More and more, Putin portrayed himself as not just a national leader but a civilizational leader, leading the forces of traditional morality against the moral depravity of the West.

But now it’s all spun out of control. Putin’s identity politics are so virulent because they are so narcissistic. Just as individual narcissists appear to be inflated egotists but are really insecure souls trying to cover their fragility, narcissistic nations and groups that parade their power are often actually haunted by fear of their own weakness. Narcissists crave recognition, but they can never get enough. Narcissists crave psychic security but act in self-destructive ways that ensure they are often under assault.

The Putin identity and Russian identity are currently inseparable. The billion ruble question is: How does a guy who has spent his life battling against feelings of shame and humiliation react as large parts of the world rightly shame and humiliate him? How does a guy who has spent his life trying to appear powerful and farseeing react as he increasingly appears weak and shortsighted?

My fear is that Putin knows only one way to deal with humiliation, which is by blaming others and lashing out. A couple of years ago my colleague Thomas L. Friedman wrote a prescient column about the politics of humiliation in which he quoted Nelson Mandela: “There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated.”

Putin brought this humiliation on himself and on his country. Speaking as one who deeply admires so much in Russian culture, I think it is a great crime that a nation with so many paths to dignity and greatness chose the path that leads so viciously to degradation. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/opinion/putin-ukraine-russia-identity.html

Paul Krugman: America’s Right Has a Putin Problem

Just a few weeks ago many influential figures on the U.S. right loved, just loved Vladimir Putin. In fact, some of them still can’t quit him. For example, Tucker Carlson, while he has grudgingly backed off from full-on Putin support, is still blaming America for the war and promoting Russian disinformation about U.S.-funded bioweapons labs.

For the most part, however, America’s Putin lovers are having a moment of truth. It’s not so much that Putin stands revealed as a tyrant willing to kill large numbers of innocent people — they knew or should have known that already. The problem is that the strongman they admired — whom Donald Trump praised as “savvy” and a “genius” just before he invaded Ukraine — is turning out to be remarkably weak. And that’s not an accident. Russia is facing disaster precisely because it is ruled by a man who accepts no criticism and brooks no dissent.

Russia is facing disaster precisely because it is ruled by a man who accepts no criticism and brooks no dissent.
...
The point is that the case for an open society — a society that allows dissent and criticism — goes beyond truth and morality. Open societies are also, by and large, more effective than closed-off autocracies. That is, while you might imagine that there are big advantages to rule by a strongman who can simply tell people what to do, these advantages are more than offset by the absence of free discussion and independent thought. Nobody can tell the strongman that he’s wrong or urge him to think twice before making a disastrous decision.

Which brings me back to America’s erstwhile Putin admirers. I’d like to think that they’ll take Russia’s Ukraine debacle as an object lesson and rethink their own hostility to democracy. OK, I don’t really expect that to happen. But we can always hope. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/opinion/putin-ukraine-russia-usa.html

Andrew Sullivan: Putin’s Challenge To The American Right

It would perhaps be too glorious an irony if it were Vladimir Putin who finally buzz-killed the American and European right’s infatuation with post-liberalism. But, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine staggers shambolically and criminally forward, it’s no longer unthinkable. The icon of the West’s new right is in serious trouble now — and it might tarnish all of those who only yesterday were idolizing his reactionary zeal.

It’s not so much Putin’s trashing of international law, his unhinged rehashing of post-Soviet grievances, his next-level Covid paranoia, the foul murders of his opponents, or his brazen embrace of shelling hospitals that has so deepened the damage to the Putin brand among the West’s new Russophiles. These atrocities and madnesses they have long found ways to live with.

No, it’s Putin’s failure — thus far — to actually win the war he started that’s so damning. It’s one thing for a dictator to be deemed cruel; and quite another — and far more dangerous — thing for him to be seen as incompetent.

And it’s happened so fast. The love letters had been flowing for years now before this unfortunate interruption. “Russia is like, I mean they’re really hot stuff,” Donald Trump chortled in April 2014, adding that “now you have people in the Ukraine — who knows, set up or not — but it can’t all be set up, I mean they’re marching in favor of joining Russia.” Two weeks ago, in the face of Putin’s pre-invasion posturing over the Donbas region, Trump marveled:

“They’re gonna keep peace all right.” Think of the depth of the cynical callousness that has to lie behind such a smirk. Notice that for Trump, Putin is not just a thug but a smart one, and the possibility of his brutal incursion into a sovereign neighbor state was, in Trump’s mind, “wonderful.” And cheap: “He’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” With Trump, evil is always better when it’s also a bargain. https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/11/europe/leaving-russia-analysis-robertson-intl-cmd/index.html

Seth Abramson: The Ten Hardest Truths About the War in Europe

Academics can debate whether our current period is in the umbra of the same Cold War that dominated the last century, or a new one; whether we’re on the doorstep of World War III, or are already in it; whether the conditions on the ground in Europe today are most reflective of the eve of World War I or World War II; but what no one can deny is that what is happening in Ukraine is not merely a “news story” or even a spate of well-televised war crimes but a fundamental shifting of our age toward chaos.

There is no need to rehash the core facts beyond this brief summary: Putin is a former KGB agent and current murderous autocrat who is almost certain to be a dictator over Russia until his death; he has repeatedly said that the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century was the 1991 fall of the Communist Soviet Union; he seeks to reconstitute the land area of the Soviet Union by whatever means necessary and over however long a period of time is required, though he understands that this cannot be accomplished without the dissolution or destruction of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization defensive alliance (NATO) and possibly both the European Union and the United States; the post-Soviet government in Russia, including (indeed perhaps especially) Putin’s KGB, began searching for ways to collapse American democracy through asymmetrical warfare from the moment the Soviet Union passed into history; and some significant portion of the current domestic political strife in the United States has been deliberately provoked by the Kremlin and its agents through acts of subterfuge, espionage, propaganda, and hacking that properly answer to the name war.

Yesterday, a former high-ranking official in the Donald Trump administration, Miles Taylor, said that the current Trumpist-Putinist Republican Party is far and away the greatest national security threat America has faced in his lifetime. That he is correct is confirmed not just by the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trumpist irregulars or the fact that former president Trump—to please Putin and ensure his own future business opportunities in Russia—put every U.S. alliance and interest lying beyond our shores at risk, but the fact that America is now in a global conflict (call it the Cold War, World War III, or Second Cold War, as you like) at a time when Trump and Trumpism have deliberately put our body politic at a point of permanent fracture. That most Americans still do not understand what Putin is trying to do and the cost that will be exacted upon the United States as he seeks to do it means that the coming months and perhaps years will be the darkest and most fraught in a century. https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-ten-hardest-truths-about-the?s=r]

G. Cristina Mora and Julie A. Dowling: The Latino undercount is a grim Trump victory

On Thursday, the U.S. Census Bureau released a long-awaited report estimating the 2020 census undercount. Given the challenges of conducting a census in a pandemic, undercounts had been expected by many experts and the report bore them out: The overall total population was deemed accurate, but white people and Asian Americans were overcounted, and other groups were undercounted, especially Latinos. In fact, the undercount rate of Latinos — at 5% — is more than triple the rate of the 2010 census.

This is not a new problem. Latinos have been a “hard to count” population for decades. Analysts at the Census Bureau know their counts may miss those who have lower incomes, experience housing instability, speak languages other than English and distrust or fear the government — all qualities present in Latino communities, which include high percentages of immigrants and whose members face discrimination that can lead to economic disadvantage.

But while an undercount may have been expected, more than tripling is not business as usual. Rather, it is an injustice and the culmination of a calculated attack on the census during Donald Trump’s presidency.

In 2018, Trump and his secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, halted the revision and demanded their own change in the 2020 census forms — a question to determine the citizenship of respondents. A lengthy legal battle ensued, ending in a 2019 ruling siding with Latino advocacy groups who had shown that a citizenship question would disparately affect Latino communities, dramatically depressing their participation and undermining the Constitution’s mandate to count “the whole number of persons in each state.”

The damage was done however. During 2019-2020, we conducted interviews with Latinos in two major metropolitan areas and found widespread distrust of the Trump administration that often led our interviewees to fear completing and submitting their census forms.

In the end, the Trump administration got what it wanted. It undermined a burgeoning minority in the United States, falsifying the size and scale of the population and literally discounting them. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-03-11/census-undercount-latinos-race-ethnicity-donald-trump

Francis Fukuyama: Preparing for Defeat

Prognostication: Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine.

Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.

The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. This is at least true in the north; the Russians are doing better in the south, but those positions would be hard to maintain if the north collapses.

There is no diplomatic solution to the war possible prior to this happening. There is no conceivable compromise that would be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine given the losses they have taken at this point. https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/preparing-for-defeat/