As recently as February 15, the House Oversight Committee described as one piece of “key evidence” in its impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden an “FBI Form 1023 alleging then-Vice President Joe Biden engaged in a bribery and extortion scheme and ultimately received $5 million from a Burisma executive.” About a week later, that item was scrubbed from the evidence list without comment.
Stating the obvious, but it would be great if Democrats could do a better job of making the Russia-love more of a political liability for the GOP. As Matt points out, Russia sucks as a place to live in many ways, not least of which is that if Putin doesn’t like you, he can just have you murdered. They’re classic movie villains, their soldiers commit war crimes routinely, and so on. Maybe I’m naive but it really seems like Democrats could make them pay a political price for this guilty association.
I generally agree with this take. But it's hard to overstate how much the Mueller report's failure to land a big hit against Trump (even though it makes some pretty devastating claims) took the air out of the MAGA/Russia story. From CNN's wall to wall coverage to literal Mueller bobble heads, Democrats prepped the public for a clear cut collusion story. And now it's hard to go back to that playbook after it didn't land really the first time.
No see this is the same mistake people make on the right, is thinking Trump was impeached over Russia, or Mueller, or something. He wasn’t. “We would like you to do us a favor though” was unrelated to anything found by Mueller.
Trump was impeached over misuse of his foreign policy authority with respect to Ukraine, a country that had been awarded an aid package by Congress in order to enable to defend itself from Russia. If you want to say he was impeached over Ukraine rather than Russia, I wouldn't object.
That’s exactly what I’m saying, since the post you’re responding to was talking about the failure of the Mueller Report to hurt Trump over allegations of Russian collusion in the campaign (allegations that I think were largely substantiated).
I think with respect to Trump, the whole Russia issue goes way beyond.simply the Muller report. That’s the point I was making. he’s paid no political price, because the public, tragically, is insufficiently concerned with the danger of Russia and the fate of Ukraine.
Agree not straightforward but I just have the conviction that if the roles were reversed and somehow Democrats were overtly sympathetic to a hostile foreign country the Republicans would hardly break a sweat running the table.
For starters, maybe people need some more explicit reminders that the Russians are bad guys. I think some Democrats think they can just draw a line between the Republicans and Putin and that’s all. But maybe people need some more reminders of exactly the horrific things the Russians are doing and would do if they were victors. How about doing hearings to document Russian atrocities, finding witnesses to testify to what’s been done, and make the Republicans in the House look them in the eye?
We'll, thankfully we live in a free society governmened by laws which you actually have to break in order to be punished, and we can't just hang people because they say stuff you don't like.
Your eagerness to dole out pain to those not falling in line with your political desires feels very... Russian.
I said in another post; a huge GOP delegation spent Independence day in Moscow in 2017. Most of whom are still in Congress (including Ron Johnson). It is an insane failure from
Democrats to not highlight this more. If Bernie had won the 2016 nomination there is no way the airwaves wouldn’t have been flooded with stories of him honeymooning in Moscow.
So among the very first comments I read this morning pivots directly to telling the Democrats what to do, with the implication that the Democrats are falling short.
I know this is meant as constructive advice to us on the Democrats' side, but maybe just this one time we can keep our focus on what a historically horrible thing the Republican party is?
This was literally my first thought as well. I absolutely hate being a partisan hack but, seriously guys, is there any problem in objective reality that isn't Dems' fault?
Dem voters absolutely need to be self-critical, and I agree that Dems should hammer the GOP on Russia more. At times though it just gets pathological and self-flagellating in this comments section though. My shoot-from-the-hip, immature speculation is that it's just uncool to criticize the GOP. It's passe. People, this country has one responsible political party, can we just for one freaking time acknowledge that the Dems are clearly superior to the GOP? Saying that doesn't make you a blue haired, DEI-pilled rioter. We can still fix the issues with the Dems without needlessly laying blame for all faults on Earth at their feet.
I think it’s more that it’s pointless to criticize the Republican party. The vast majority of their voters don’t have the IQ required to read and understand Slow Boring and the few that do are unrepentant fascists who want to turn America into Russia or, the slightly less insane ones, into Hungary. You can’t reach them, you can only beat them. Repeatedly, until they give up.
Wow, great point. Republicans are not shy about calling liberals traitors, but I don’t see many, or really any Dems hurling that insult to the right. Seems a pretty apt descriptor.
I think internal Dem politics prevents this. Things that might help in the general election probably hurt in the primaries. If moderate Dems took a stronger stand regarding patriotism generally (as lots of these articles have advocated) the calculus might shift and make this a more plausible strategy.
I sincerely believe it can be done. To some degree it has been done in the business world. As Rep. became more extreme there has been a general shift in terms of businesses becoming major funders and important allies to the Dems.
The other parts of this I can get behind, but how is a congressional delegation going to Russia a big deal? They have visited lots of countries, including Russia, China, Turkey, Syria, etc. Biden traveled to Russia on multiple occasions as a Senator...
Call them out for many things, but if you are going to say there was something fishy about this trip, can you be more explicit than just saying they went there?
I mean optics matter a lot here. But again, to my point, a number of those same lawmakers are basically pro Russia. To not even address, to not even make this part of any Democratic messaging is just such dereliction.
Meh, hammer them for the positions. Teaching Congress that they shouldn't visit other countries because they might take a position later and be hit over it is a long term bad we should avoid.
Is “Democratic messaging” even a thing? People I follow on social media who are Democrats have howled about Russian influence since 2017 while “conservatives” claim it’s all a hoax. The public seems to regard this as strictly a partisan matter. Basically one’s partisan identification determines whether it’s treason or a nothingburger, and no one trusts “mainstream media” to sort it out.
A lot of truth here. But this is why someone like me rants and rails at the political desk at the New York Times. I know there is now an upteenth woke left out of control article on the Atlantic right now. But something Matt noted on Twitter is that the super leftists at places like the Times are very often NOT the political reporters but the reporters for say tech, movies, culture etc. But as I've noted many times, the most important desk at the Times for affecting national discourse (by far) is the political desk and the political desk is very very firmly entrenched in "both sides" framing on everything. Which is part of the problem and where people like me shout "if one side says it's raining and the other side says it isn't, your job is to put your hand out the window and see if one side is right or not".
Let's say that the NYT political desk ran a front page article tomorrow directly saying what you have here about Trump and Republicans being sell outs, traitors, and agents of the Russian government.
Who would you expect to have a different opinion about Republicans the following day/month?
There has been no president who has been called out as much as Trump has been (for good reasons!), and he's running slightly ahead of Biden in polls. Is there any theory of politics that has been disproven more than if you just shout louder and harder you will convince more people?
half-baked theory here but is the NYT politics desk sort of an analog of the problem advocacy groups run into where Democrats care what they say and so they attack Dems for not going quite far enough on their pet issue instead of Republicans for actively opposing them?
Basically "NYT says Trump bad" is sort of a "dog bites man" story whereas "NYT questions Hillary's emails" is a "man bites dog."
There is defo huge opportunity for corpo mainstream press to debunk the "anti-war" isolationism that is being sold by Rebs and contrarians all of a sudden, (as inevitably enabling more war.) You have folks like Elon, or David Sacks, or Tucker, or Glenn Greenwald, and the occasional other leftie yahoo, saying that defunding Ukraine as a pro-peace move, without explaining what Russia will do if given free reign. And then what other rivals and near peers will do if they don't see any benefit to minding America's moralities. They intentionally don't extrapolate it farther, and squashing that lie is pretty low hanging fruit.
I've even seen comments in here suggest more isolationism could be a reasonable way to resolve the issue for Dem prospects in November.
I'm glad we are supporting Ukraine (and my industry indirectly benefits from it)...but my hackles get raised whenever someone acts as if we have an obligation to support them.
They are not a NATO country. There is no obligation.
If they go on to attack NATO members afterwards, that's a different story due to Article 5.
And our role as world police is soon to be untenable anyways. The post Cold War unipolar superpower days are ending.
"acts as if we have an obligation" is doing a lot of work here to be a vague policy principle based on perception. It's designed to get hackles up, because it can manipulated.
Whether a nation is part of NATO or not, doesn't make the murder and of these people less horrid. Nor the strategic benefits of preventing an ethnic cleansing less real.
Again, another easily digestible talking point people spread, even though the implications of it are worse than what we have now.
(After all, if someone invaded or nuked Ireland, it's not like we'd be wringing our hands over what's America's obligation)
There are wars going on all over the world, including some in Africa that have killed far more people than the Ukraine conflict. What are our obligations in those places?
I think that's a fair argument. But fundamentally, it's about where U.S. military aid can a.) defend U.S. interests the most and b.) give us our most bang for buck.
Our assistance is literally holding the Ukraine cause together. And delivering a humiliating defeat to one of our greatest geopolitical enemies(or at least bogging Putin down in a struggle akin to Afghanistan) is just a great military investment.
Completely agree. We are involved in Ukraine not out of obligation, but because it benefits us. But that's fundamentally a different rationale for supporting Ukraine than the US operating as the world's police and getting involved where we don't have strategic interests.
For what we were spending in Afghanistan in 2018, we can support Ukraine grinding Russia's military into pieces, and have no American casualties. This is an obvious American strategic win and we'd be absolute fools not to do it...
Putin is prepping to force NATO's commitment to Article V over something like Svalbard. He is rearming, he is substituting inputs from China, and there will be a demographic bump for Russia in the next ten years.
Letting Putin win in Ukraine is just another Munich Agreement.
The idea is to call NATO’s commitment over defending members over something that Russia can plausibly pull out of. The Lapland or Arctic are places to test that commitment. Asymmetrical risks to undermine treaty commitments, especially if Republicans are in power.
What the Republicans are doing is worse than Chamberlain and Munich.
I'm not saying this will lead to the equivalent or worse than WW2 but that in rational and moral calculation terms, it is a less defensible position. One can argue that Chamberlain had a rational case to make in September 1938 (and one widely supported by the British people): war is too horrible to contemplate after seeing what WW1 was like, we are weak and need some breathing space, if we go to war now we shall pay a vast price including among our civilian population.
By contrast, the Republicans' betrayal of Ukraine is based on . . . what? Because we're spending too much money on American jobs in the American defense industry? We are being asked to make no sacrifices, to take no risks, but simply to provide some aid to people giving their all in support of our strategic interests. Republicans oppose aid to Ukraine simply because the Orange God demands it -- at best. At worse it's because they want to see Russian aggression and savagery triumph.
Chamberlain was wrong, terribly so. But the desire to avoid war, or avoid war as long as possible, was understandable. There is no, zero, zip, nada defense for the Republican actions. It is simply evil, through and through. I hope history gives them the judgment they deserve.
If you are making a Munich analogy in foreign policy, you are making a bad argument. Really, not even Munich was Munich (Britain frantically re-armed during the time the agreement was in effect and it also bought time that increased the likelihood of Soviet and US entry into the war). But even assuming we take the conventional view of Munich, nothing else is Munich because nobody else is Hitler. It's a bad analogy that can literally be used to justify hawkishness in any situation, and people need to retire it. (Especially since, as noted above, all sorts of aggression is going on in the world that we "appease", in places we don't care about.)
This is just an argument against ever arguing from analogy, but I’ve seen you argue from analogy before; everyone does, yet when we see an analogy that disagrees with us we become very particular about this and that difference. In this case though you aren’t even arguing what makes the Russia situation different other than Putin not literally being the same person as Adolf Hitler.
Munich analogies specifically have killed millions of people. That's what makes them different.
We throw around Godwin's Law as a joke enough that we don't realize that in fact there are good reasons for not willy-nilly comparing everything to Hitler.
As far as literal Munich, I don’t understand the relevance of Britain using the time to rearm—so did Germany! It would surprise me to find out that the time between 1938 and 1939 was a net positive in terms of Britain’s munitions relative to Germany’s, let alone enough of a positive to make up for the loss of Czechoslovakia from the coalition—in David Lloyd George’s words, a million troops all gone. I also don’t see why the passage of time increased the likelihood of Soviet entry into the war, but this may be genuine ignorance; in actual fact Molotov-Ribbentrop happened, but were alternative outcomes likely?
" It would surprise me to find out that the time between 1938 and 1939 was a net positive in terms of Britain’s munitions relative to Germany’s"
How about Britian's + the US's + the USSR's relative to Germany's + Italy's? Britain in 1938 didn't have the allies it needed.
But also, you are ignoring the starting point. Britain had very little military capability and was invested in the remnants of a far flung empire. So even a not gigantic German force could have done a ton of damage in 1938. Germany already had its war machine going for several years by that time. Britain going to war alone against Germany in 1938 could have resulted in a loss.
Absolutely, and even with respect to what Putin wants, you have to analyze both capabilities AND desires here. A man's reach often exceeds his grasp, as Robert Browning observed. The issue is what does Russia both (1) want and (2) have the capability to achieve. And to be clear, that doesn't let Russia off the hook-- they've done enormous damage and destruction in Ukraine. They are very dangerous. But that doesn't mean that unless we take the most hawkish possible position against Russia, they'll take over all the Slavic countries, or even that the most hawkish possible position would even work.
He's not wrong that there's a trough at 20-24 year olds right now and a bulge in younger ages, but I'm skeptical that it's going to translate into that much of a bump in effective Russian military power: https://www.populationpyramid.net/russian-federation/2024/
There was a bump in fertility in the early 2000s relative importance to the slump of the 1990s. There is a higher number of teenagers relative to current group of conscript-able males. Right now there has been a huge push to indoctrinate and politicize children for Putin’s imperialist agenda. This is contrast to the previous policy of depoliticization.
I'll admit that I have mild isolationist tendencies that make me biased (especially when things get too messy), but it really does seem like the state department/foreign policy 'Blob' is constantly trying to manipulate/pressure the nation in more and more foreign entanglements.
They aren't satisfied with our network of official alliances, but look for any nook and cranny that can be leveraged to de facto 'obligate' our country get more involved than our legislature has agreed to.
Neither is Israel, yet the US seems to have an ironclad obligation to defend Israel at all costs. Netanyahu knows he can thumb his nose at us and still count on US support, no matter what.
There is substantial support among the US populace for Israel, and has been for a long time.
And I know it is fraught to even point this out, but that popular support is amplified by some well-financed and well-positioned support from wealthier Jewish folks in the media.
I'd also say that Israel is surrounded by hostile countries that, if they thought they could get away with it, would happily exterminate them...so maybe they deserve more support.
To Susan's point, I don't care about Bibi being rude or showing insufficient deferrence to Biden...but Israel has been caught doing pretty egregious espionage stuff to us over the last few decades.
It's galling that they've faced few consequences for that.
The Ukrainian and Taiwanese diasporas in the US aren't as powerful/influential?
And they just don't have the historical support. Though for Israel that is partially for religious reasons among evangelicals.
Finally, neither Ukrainian nor Taiwanese are realistically facing extermination. Conquest and oppression under would-be totalitarian regimes, yes, but not extermination.
Can we just go back to calling people who support Russian imperialism commies and pinkos? (Or at least “Comrades”)? I mean, sure it isn’t laundered through the Soviet Union any more, but the hostile imperialism and autocracy seem like they were always the far more relevant considerations of the Cold War than state control of heavy industry.
Normally I’m not on board for abuse of language in a way divorced from its formal meaning so I have reservations about adopting this, but it seems like it may be warranted in this instance (1) because it’s an anti-Russian smear of the type that’s supposed to be the sort of thing that movement Republicans historically care about, so it’s not just the outgroup calling them things that are primarily concerns of the outgroup, and (2) notwithstanding the level of formal continuity between the current Russian Federation and Soviet Communism, “expansionist successor state of the USSR run as an autocratic dictatorship headed by a revanchist ex-KGB agent” seems like it’s good enough for government work as far as invoking the slur goes.
One of the reasons Democrats can't successfully do this is because of the wing of the party that supports the stuff outlined in this fortuitously timed article:
It’s unfortunate that someone like McCain isn’t around to provide moral clarity here. But in fairness, when he did he was called a HAWK by the left.
Now Trump has positioned himself as both tough and a proponent of peace. He’s the anti-war dove that no one wants to mess with because he’ll punch you in the face. It’s actually one of his more nuanced and brilliant postures. It’s a really unique place for a politician to get to.
Yeah, I'm no fan of Trump's, but I have to concede that he managed to get through four years without starting any new wars, when I presumed that he would at least get the US involved in a major military confrontation (if not a full-scale actual war) with Iran.
They definitely suck, but I was really surprised to have a convo with a few friends this weekend who were left, very left, and center left…all were skeptical that we should send aid to Ukraine and their reasons were that it prolongs a deadly war, or the conflict doesn’t affect us directly let Europe worry about it. They of course aren’t pro Russian but maybe it’s one of those things where going all out talking about the Russia issue may not be a slam dunk for Biden.
So the very first comment I read this morning pivots directly to telling the Democrats what to do, with the implication that the Democrats are falling short.
I know this is meant as constructive advice to us on the Democrats' side, but maybe just this one time we can keep our focus on what a historically horrible thing the Republican party is?
One problem Democrats have is that a lot of left-leaning Democrats still have a fondness for the Soviet Union or anti-anti-Soviet feeling and that crosses the wires. Jacobin usually Soviet iconography for example, and so a lot of "progressives" are emotionally pro-Russian and anti-nationalist, so anti-Ukrainian. You see it even on this site.
As with making the GOP's general authoritarianism more if a liability, I want it but am honestly not sure what we can do. These topics are being pushed but Conservatives dismiss it out of hand and Independents seem equally divided on whether it even matters in the polls. I'm not saying we give up, I just don't know what the "something" in this "do something" is.
The question I'd have is how salient the issue is with marginal voters. I've always felt that popularism needs two steps to really find the issues to target: first find what's popular, then find what's salient--whether it's something that voters are really revved up about. I don't know what the salience answer is here, I hope it would be high, but I fear it could be low.
Dems are bad at political campaigning because they refuse to get tough and mean when necessary. They should call out Republicans for being Putin-loving, anti-American traitors night and day. If and when the Republicans change back to becoming a relatively normal right wing party they should let off and tampen down the rhetoric, but with the current Republican party it is a battle for the future of American democracy and the rhetoric needs to reflect that.
"Dems are bad at political campaigning because they refuse to get tough and mean when necessary."
If you only knew how many times I've heard the same thing about Republicans it would astonish you...and I think that it makes a fundamental mistake in thinking that "if only people heard the message stronger it would convince them."
I’ve been banging my head against the wall for now 3-4 years but there’s an Occam’s razor explanation for why certain Republicans and certain members of right wing media (like Tucker) seem to be actively helping Putin; they are being paid.
I know, I know, it’s now cringe to say this. What are you full blown devotee of Rachel Maddow? Ha ha ha. But one of the unfortunate by products of Bill Barr misrepresenting the contents of the Mueller report is shift the goal posts on the “Russia stuff” from “a lot of left of center punditry about Trump and Russia is exaggerating or misrepresenting the extent of hard evidence” to “there is absolutely nothing to Trump and GOP and Russia.”
But I’m sorry there really is a lot “there”. I’ve repeated this before but a huge chunk of GOP congressmen and senators spent July 4th 2017 in Moscow (it drives me crazy Democrats don’t bring this up), NRA is in serious legal jeopardy due to financial ties, go look Madison Cawthorn and honeypot.
And in regards to Tucker. Honestly, what is a better explanation for why he’s doing what he’s doing? Did any of you watch his videos? Matt is understating how insane they are. At one point Tucker goes into a Russian McDonalds and decides to have a full meal of McDonalds in his SUV. The video is (I guess) to show how cheap McDonalds in Russia but it’s basically just him going crazy about how tasty McDonalds is and how tastes like American McDonalds. Like dude, this is actually showing the extent of American cultural and economic power. And yet it’s framed as this way Russia is so great. Like honestly, the best explanation I can think of is Russians behind Putin propaganda told him to do this. It’s basically an informercial.
Sorry, more ranty than usual. But it drives me nuts that too many Democrats and centrist pundits seem reticent or pull their punches when talking about GOP and Russia.
Fair! For people like MTG, I suspect this is the much likely explanation; I honestly think if a reporter asked her to provide the most basic facts about anything involving Russia, Ukraine, Trump and Biden she would actually struggle.
But yeah for others, I just think we're too afraid to go "there".
As a pretty related example, see Elon Musk who right now as far as I can tell is actively helping Russia and quite frankly I think should be seen as a traitor at this point.
Matt is pretty insistent that for Elon this is all this craziness is just a way to get someone in office to cut his taxes. Pure financial gain. That he doesn't actually believe what he's spouting. And to be frank, I find this really hard to believe given timeline of events. I keep bringing up the fact you can mark Elon's right wing turn to the moment his non-binary child openly declared he's disowning him. And then soon after suddenly Elon is wading into these debates about transgender issues and talking about how "woke" has gone too far. Like this isn't hard to figure out and yet it's just not talked about. Also, as Matt's new "frenemy" Will Stancil points out, there is a ton to suggest that Elon has a pretty serious drug problem that likely is partly explaining this turn to boosting actual Neo-Nazis on his platform.
>>But yeah for others, I just think we're too afraid to go "there".
I think the basic underappreciated fact here is that the underlying right-left media asymmetry produces a mistaken self-perception by Democrats that whenever they "go there", it rarely yields the results they want, so why bother?
To wit, Fox News and its successors are unconstrained by any commitment to basic journalistic and editorial integrity. It's a political operation from top to bottom. This allows for a remarkable unity of purpose and action among their politicians. When a headline story comes across Fox News, every elected Republican receives the information that day, and can pretty straightforwardly decide on their individual course of action in response, and then they know exactly where to go to publicize that response. They don't have to all agree on those responses, but the straightforwardness, speed, and centralized, open platform allow the entire party to signal its opinions, gauge public opinion, and then iterate accordingly within the space of minutes, days, or weeks. When all's said and done, even if the Fox News headline is based on a complete, provable lie, some not-insignificant minority of the party faithful will believe that lie forever.
This shit doesn't happen on the Democratic side. When a big op-ed gets published in the NYT, the first thing that happens is that Slate, the Atlantic, Vox, and a number of other big-name publications all get to argue about it. The Twitterverse and academia get their say, too. A Democratic politician then has to weigh dozens of different takes, decide on their own personal take -- remember, they're expected to have PRINCIPLED takes, not just base them on any old crass political consideration -- and THEN decide whether to actually publish that take. Because SOMEONE out there will disagree deeply, and because those someones are usually pretty well-educated and informed liberals, that disagreement will be pretty well-grounded and well-argued, which means that internal backlashes genuinely hurt party cohesion. If and when they publicize their opinion, there are dozens of venues to do so in, and even the biggest, most centralized ones like PSA barely reach a plurality of the Democratic faithful, let alone swing voters etc. To the extent that the base ever comes away with a belief about the news story in question, those beliefs can vary wildly and will be seeds for future disagreements.
The net effect is the asymmetry that whenever Democrats "go there", most efforts fizzle, but when Republicans do, there's a much better chance of it going viral and turning into yet another brainworm.
Liberals and centrists now have substantially higher IQ than conservatives, in today’s America, as GOP/conservative media has polarized voters according to education and IQ. Long term this will be bad for Republicans to have lost intelligent people who can see reality somewhat clearly and reform the party, but short term they can get away with whatever crap they want by distracting their base with conspiracy theories and nonsense.
What scares me is that the short term can have a way of becoming the long term if it persists enough.
The two basic outcomes are that (A) they take down our entire society, or (B) they fizzle out.
The problem is, they feed on the zero-sum mentality, and most of the institutions that we might use to defeat them are zero-sum themselves. In past episodes where the right has attempted to take over the country... well, we had to resort to violence in the Civil War, but then the right successfully established its own authoritarian sub-state when it ended Reconstruction, and then they fizzled out during the run-up to WWII. So we're only 1-for-3!
I basically agree with all of this. There is another aspect which is Fox (and equivalents) see themselves as supporters of the GOP in a way that publications like the Times just don't. And that also has to factor in.
Indeed! And I don't want to come across as too fatalistic here, either. Democrats need to start flexing this muscle more.
I know I probably sound like a broken record, but the one big bright spot of hope right now is the Bulwark. These guys get friendlier and friendlier by the day with Pod Save America. They're already starting to osmose most of the Democratic Party's mainstream positions, albeit with their own small-c conservative bent on them. They aren't hidebound hacks like the Douthats and Stephens' of the world, misguidedly laundering sanewashed and horrifically mistaken GOP talking points into the mainstream media. And they don't hesitate to call out the GOP's shame every single day.
Mark my words, this is going to be one of the major drivers of rejuvenation of the Democratic Party in the next 10-20 years.
I just want to add that I continue to be baffled at how genuinely smart people like Matt and Ezra always feel the need to say that a Douthat take is "smart" because he sort of pretends to engage with arguments, when he is in fact the hackiest of hacks.
It kind of scares me how much more comfortable I am with the Bulwark than any other source of views and analysis. I'd like to think that's because they're moving closer to me than the opposite.
How the heck does Musk having a drug problem -- no matter how serious -- "partly explain[] this turn to boosting actual Neo-Nazis on" Twitter? Even if the value of Twitter drops to $0, he still would have enough money to party like it's 1979 at Sudio 54 every day for the rest of his life.
Uhh, I thought the implication was pretty clear, but I'll take a stab for Colin...
He seemed to be saying that the drugs are fueling a paranoia complex where Musk began to feel persecuted for having a subset of heterodox beliefs. Unlike Matt, who is sober-minded and not a billionaire and thus responded by simply striking out on his own Substack, Musk responded by doubling down on his heterodoxies and also doing more drugs.
Eventually, because we ALL have a natural human tendency to osmose the beliefs of those we surround ourselves with, Musk started to believe some of the more insidious propaganda of the Neo-Nazis whose free speech rights he saw himself to be doubling down on, and kept doing more drugs to cope with the stress of being considered more and more objectionable in the mainstream liberal eye.
The only thing I'll add is that prolonged drug use has very real effects on the brain that fuel paranoia. "Brain imaging studies have also suggested that long-term substance use weaken the brain’s prefrontal cortex and it’s links to other parts of the brain, especially the reward centers that are excessively stimulated by substance use. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for higher functions like self-control, attention, planning, and emotional regulation. When working properly, it moderates the emotional responses generated in the older areas of the brain. However, excessive substance use weakens this area, making you vulnerable to emotional swings."
I would be skeptical of any claim that any particular behavioral change could be attributed to “excessive substance use” with no specificity about the substance. Cocaine and cannabis and alcohol and mdma and heroin and lsd are going to do very different things to you.
It would help if there were a falsifiable version of the blame-Russia-for-everything-Republican shtick, but there isn’t. Laundering all of Republican concerns over Biden’s corruption through a nebulous cloud of “Russian intelligence” as a way of bulletproofing one’s claims is a trick that got old in 2017. The FSB are not sci-fi spy geniuses, and Americans did way more damage to each other arguing over this crap than the Russians ever could on their own.
Is it cringe that some Republicans daydream of what they could accomplish if the US were more like Russia? Absolutely yes, also ignorant. But Dems seriously need to unlearn the Russiagate blue anon lies and all the lies built upon them.
The Occam's razor part for me focuses on Trump: he knows or at least fears Putin could easily provide records of financial improprieties—I'm thinking primarily of money laundering—involving Trump's dealing with Russian organized crime. Trump also personally admires strong men who have no time for the niceties of democratic norms. So there's a valorization factor. Trump has also long been a skeptic of NATO—I don't think it's a stretch to call him an enemy of NATO. And, well, Putin is also an enemy of NATO.
And the rest of the GOP falls in line because they're like ringwraiths to Trump's Sauron.
I think it's time we drop the idea that Trump supports Putin in part or whatever because he's afraid of being blackmailed. What could Putin possibly have on Trump that would be worse than all the stuff that has come out on Trump over the past nine years? And has any of that stopped him?
Your second sentence nails it: he supports Putin because he admires him, loves strongmen and wishes he could be just like him.
Was Trump's NSC uniquely deferential to Russia or China? I don't remember this happening, so it sounds like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are being conned if there's a deal going on. In fact, there probably isn't a deal going on and Biden is just screwed because the Ukrainian counter-offensive failed, even though similar to Afghanistan, a second term Trump would've plausibly taken a very similar approach.
The thing Matt was right about is Saudi and Israeli interests; they really do like Trump more than Biden. But the US really does care about keeping cheap oil and trade going in the Middle East, and part of the Dems still agree with the GOP on this. So they've curiously discussed this obvious foreign influence to get Trump reelected far less than Russia, where the evidence is much weaker.
Are Democrats moving on from the Middle East because of Iranian propaganda? Who knows. But I think sticking to the facts is more useful than Hunter Biden/Russiagate/whatever investigation the opposition party is launching getting ahead of evidence. Even in an election year where everyone has clear interests.
I don't know if Trump's NSC was uniquely deferential to Putin or Xi but Trump absolutely was. Just look at what he said.
I don't understand what you're saying about Ukraine -- Trump would have taken a similar approach? If that's what you're claiming it strains belief past the breaking point.
Israel and Saudi Arabia clearly prefer Trump and say so openly. What they don't do, unlike Putin, is break our laws and use various forms of subterfuge to anonymously screw with our electoral process.
I don't think Democrats are moving on from the Middle East because of Iranian propaganda. (I can't imagine how that would work.) Democrats are moving away from the Middle East because of two horrific wars (honorary Middle East membership for Afghanistan) and because, as we move away from fossil fuels, our last strategic interest in that region is disappearing. Oh, and because they hate supporting authoritarian and right-wing rulers.
It's telling nobody ever says we should judge Trump's approach towards China based primarily on what he said about Xi Jinping. It wouldn't really help us understand what his NSC or Congressional Republicans think about China.
"What they don't do, unlike Putin, is break our laws and use various forms of subterfuge to anonymously screw with our electoral process". No they don't need to; in the Saudi case the bribery is pretty out in the open. $2 billion to Trump's son in law. And as for Trump himself:
"From December 2016 through February of 2017, Saudi government lobbyists reserved blocks of rooms at Trump’s D.C. hotel, “paying for an estimated 500 nights at the luxury hotel in just three months,” and spending at least $270,000 at the property in total. Trump continued to benefit from Saudi business in office. When the Saudi Crown Prince visited New York in 2018, several members of his entourage stayed at the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan. Earnings from the room rentals caused revenue to spike 13 percent, putting the hotel “back in the black” after two years of decline. Weeks before the murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi government, Trump’s business partner in Indonesia signed an agreement for a Saudi-backed company to work on a development with Trump-branded elements. Asked about the deal, “an official with the Saudi-tied firm also said they expect to be involved in the development of a different Trump-branded project in the future.” Trump returned the favor, shielding Saudi leaders from criticism after Khashoggi’s murder and going so far as to allege Khashoggi was tied to terrorist groups."
I think the better Ockham's Razor explanation is even more troubling. The reason why US conservatives support Putin is that Putin is a type of conservative, and US conservatives share a lot of agreement with his political philosophy. The further right you go, the more people would favor a Russian system of government over the system of government we currently have in the US.
Some of the may be getting paid too, I don't rule it out. But that doesn't mean they disagree with the ideology. It's much easier to get someone to accept a bribe to support someone or something that they already sympathize with.
I could be wrong but I’m not sure how much dems are underplaying their hand wrt Russia. I have some center friends and mostly left friends and we talk about politics quite a bit these days and I’m always interested to hear why they vote left and are so worried about the right. Out of all the major issues- race, economics, social justice in general, abortion, Palestine, Russia- by far the issue they care least about is Russia. Very nonscientific but I really think between abortion and Russia people care about 100x more about abortion and it takes so much explaining and energy to hammer home the Russia issue (bc many just aren’t paying attention to it) that it might not be worth the investment.
>Putin is already indebted to Iran for helping him out with lots of missiles and to China for being by far his country’s most important ally.<
This is the part that's the real head-scratcher for me, and pushes the GOP's embrace of Putin's Russia firmly into the realm of cognitive dissonance. It just doesn't make sense. Sure, for some reactionary Republicans of the Bannonite-Miller faction, there's the blood and soil appeal of Putin's rule. But these weirdos are hardly the whole GOP, and, more importantly, the Republican Party in its entirety is deeply hostile to Communism, and Communist China. But Russia is China's (by far!) staunchest and most important ally, providing Xi and the CCP with huge quantities of grain, hydrocarbons, minerals—and also a lethally nuked up military ally.
The GOP has become ardently pro Putin because of the personal preferences of their God-Emperor Donald Trump. But it makes no *strategic* sense whatsoever in terms of national interest (or even in terms of the narrower ideological goals of movement conservatism). The Republican Party is simply barking mad on the topic of Russia.
I think we underestimate how many elite GOP officials and pundits have drunk the Trump kool-aid. Yes many know he’s a POS and will apparently say so privately. But I suspect many really think he’s subject to a “witch hunt”.
One of the more noxious ideas from 2016 is that Trump’s super fans are almost entirely the white working class or non college educated. And yes that clearly is a group he probably has most appeal. And I’ll admit to a certain degree I was a bit this way, but there was a belief that conservative “elites” know better and their support is entirely transactional. What people entirely underestimated is number of elites that are “true believers”.
By the same coin, I think your take underestimates how many of them are true believers in *winning*. The Trump win was a major windfall for them, and they stick with the movement because they think their loyalty can buy them another win.
None of them want to be caught flat footed again by another surprise win.
You would think so. But apart from a black swan squeaking through to the presidency in 2016, Trump has been electoral bad news for the Republicans in every election since then. The problem (for fixing the Republican party) is that most of those defeats have been close, so the Republicans don't learn the lesson. They're like bettors on a losing streak who think one more roll of the dice will change their luck as they see their money slowly dribbling away.
Completely agreed. To be clear, I never wanted to imply that their worldview was correct, I just pointed out that they don't want to miss out on another bonanza. You're absolutely correct that they're tantalized by the prospect of squeaking out wins despite the rest of the country hating them.
I think fear of primary challenges is how they start, but once someone says something in public enough times, they tend to convince themself to believe it.
The increasing primacy of “anti-wokeness” in right-leaning thought probably plays a role here too. The bundle of ideas, practices, language norms, etc that get classified as “wokism” are mostly from the US (eg: intersectionality and critical race theory came out of American legal academia), so if you sincerely think that it’s the greatest threat to civilization (which a lot of right-wingers seem to), you’ll be less concerned about foreign adversaries, and maybe even inclined to ally with them.
I've some recent first hand experience with the pro-Russia stance from some of the members of my extended family.
And while I don't think they've really thought it through much at all, the only explanation that 'connects the dots' among their disparate views is that they've basically gone isolationist and are overwhelming focused on the culture wars and making sure that 'our country isn't lost'. Justified or not, it is causing a lot of real despair.
The fact that Putin nominally touts traditional social values makes him an ally. Or at least an enemy of an enemy.
Though 10 years ago they were firmly anti-Russian and mad that Romney was being jeered at by Obama and liberals for saying that Russia was our main geopolitical adversary. So maybe there really is nothing rational connecting the dots. Maybe it's just Trump.
I don't think isolationism is the answer. I live in Vietnam. I have a friend who grew up in South Africa, then lived in England for a decade, before moving here for work a decade ago.
US isolationism has nothing to do with him because he has no dog in this fight.
He's pro-Trump soft on Russia.
I think, at the end of the day, there's just a very strong lure of "my team". Quarterback plays for a division rival and you hate him and talk up his flaws. Then one day he gets traded to you...you don't switch your fandom. You just switch your talking points about the quarterback.
For my friend, at least, it is entirely the same thing. Since he's obviously not voting. But he still cares deeply about the upcoming US election and talks about Biden, Trump, and culture war stuff in the US nearly every time we catch up.
I can't help but think many in the US are the same.
I don't think they are naturally that inclined towards isolationism, but kind of fall back into it as a defensive posture because they are so focused on the culture war stuff.
"Get our own house in order before engaging heavily with the outside world" kind of thing.
To me America First means an America willing to use it's (imagined) might to throw its muscle around to achieve short-run material and symbolic gains. Trump threatened to pull out of NATO, but he also massively increased US bombing of the Middle East, compared to his predecessor. He doesn't support neocon-nation building, but he does want to just steal Iraq's oil. It's a dumb, incredibly short-sighted, and self-defeating impulse, but it makes sense. It thinks that America should be more of a bully on the world stage, and that'll get us what we want.
I was just talking last weekend with one of my relatives who's a veteran, and is now working a civilian job where he's still in the presence of other veterans and active service members. Suffice to say, that's a crowd that defaults to leaning heavily GOP. He's been trying really hard to point out all the crazy things Trump says about NATO, Russia/Putin, and so on to get them to see Joe Biden as the lesser of two evils. So far, sounds like his efforts have been mixed, which was actually better than I was expecting to hear.
The idea that conservatives are persecuted is more deeply embedded than tribalism. It’s such an extremely long-running narrative it may actually be older than Biden.
No, I think it's actually very rational. Putin is a conservative, so it's unsurprising that American conservatives root for him. Of course there are many policy disagreements between American and Russian conservatives, which is only natural since our societies are very different. But they're aligned on the most important policy goals - for example, that rich people should pay low taxes and never have to face criticism or judgment from the non-rich. Plus, many conservatives in both countries are not mainly motivated by policy per se, so much as by their convictions about the proper structure of government. The further right you go, the more that people agree with Putin's political philosophy and prefer his system of government to our own. If you took a conservative out of 19th-century Europe and showed him the American and Russian systems of government in 2024, he'd find both to be a little strange but he'd clearly prefer Russia's.
The weird thing is not that conservatives support and admire Putin today, but that they didn't 12+ years ago. I think that was just because they didn't know as much about Putin back then. If you take their ideological priors as given, they were ignorant and wrong back then, and they are correct now.
I have to wonder how far along things have to get before Very Serious Conservatives like Douthat, Stephens et. al. cut the crap and actively start campaigning against the KG-I mean GOP and actively campaigning FOR Democrats to utterly defeat them. The GOP is clearly in need of a reckoning and the only way the reckoning can occur is once Trump is utterly defeated and thoroughly discredited.
The analogy I like to use is that of a neighborhood. The GOP family allowed Cousin MAGA to move in. Problem is Cousin MAGA is an arsonist and burned the house down. For some strange reason Cousin MAGA now just parties in the burned out shell of the old GOP house and is probably gonna start burning the rest of the neighborhood soon. The responsible members of family GOP are standing outside talking to family Democrat about how terrible this all is. Democrat offers them a place to stay and help rebuilding their old house once Cousin MAGA is handled, but GOP just finding things to complain about like wall colors and shrubbery and making snide remarks about how really it's the poor landscaping in Democrat house that let Cousin MAGA do all this.
Anyways. Fable over. It's maddening. Kudos to the FSB for the most successful psyop ever.
Douthat, Stephens et al don’t represent a nontrivial real-world constituency. They have jobs because a significant subset of prestige publication readers like ideological diversity but wouldn’t want to deal with the intellectual dishonesty and general unpleasantness that you’d get if you put somebody actually representative of contemporary American right politics (eg: Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza) on the op-ed page.
If Douthat and Stephens just became Democrats, they couldn’t fill the fantasy of intellectually engaging and reasonable opposition anymore. Douthat is a good enough writer and has an interesting enough point of view that he would still get work, but he wouldn’t fulfill the same niche.
"I have to wonder how far along things have to get before Very Serious Conservatives like Douthat, Stephens et. al. cut the crap and actively start campaigning against the KG-I mean GOP and actively campaigning FOR Democrats to utterly defeat them."
There are a bunch of "Very Serious Conservatives" who are already doing that -- Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol, etc. -- so it seems like that is in progress as we speak.
That's fair - I just think we need like Mitch McConnell, Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney types to get on board. Bigger fish who in their hearts loathe Trump and Trumpism but haven't been able to muster the courage to act in a meaningful way.
Mitt Romney became the first same-party Senator to _ever_ vote to convict on impeachment. Could he do more? Sure - he could always do more - but I'm not sure how much it would help.
I think the only way Douthat and crew officially support Biden and the Democratic Party is if the Democratic Party disavows pursuing radical progressive policy change until the threat of Trump has passed. That isn't going to happen, so Douthat and crew will continue voting third-party/write-in.
I think Douthat's position at the New York Times depends on his being an iconoclast and an Explainer of the Others to befuddled New York Times readers. I bet in his heart of hearts he would prefer to see Biden win over Trump but that won't pay the bills, and if he said so publicly he would just become a somewhat more centrist Jamelle Bouie and why would the NYT still need him?
Douthat’s purpose has been to pretend there’s a real debate about issues, rather than alignment with Trump on whatever Trump does or says, ever since 2016.
I mean, there are real issues but there’s no possible debate about them because only one side actually has them as a priority at all.
You can see this in the scale of backlash, really. There is a kind of agent-less quality to it because there’s no cohesive strategy or leadership. Look at how fast Republicans get surprise wins they immediately hate having. Literally: tired of winning.
We have issues the same way other countries have corruption: they’re a byproduct of the people in charge but there’s not really a discussion possible.
> Democrat offers them a place to stay and help rebuilding their old house once Cousin MAGA is handled, but GOP just finding things to complain about like wall colors and shrubbery and making snide remarks
Back in real life, Democrats have taken the opportunity to move significantly to the left during the Trump era. You could imagine some kind of Grand Bargain party that ran the rightists from the Obama administration and won 60% of the vote to shut Trump out, but that's not what we have, and there's no chance that's what we're going to get. Revealed preference is that the DNC prefers shifting the Overton Window at the expense of an elevated risk of Trump being elected.
I'm with you until the "DNC" part. There is no big dial party leaders are turning to decide how left-wing to become. Just like the Republicans, Democratic leaders are being pulled to the extreme by small donors, hyper-online activist groups, etc.
I definitely take your point, but I'll hold firm on using "DNC" as long as they are boosting Trumpy candidates to increase the odds of the Dem winning the election. Not interested in litigating whether it's "fair" or whatever, but just pointing out that the strategy here is still definitely that the risk of Trumpism is outweighed by the benefits to the party winning more marginal seats.
Wait, though, that's a totally different question from the DNC moving left or not. I do see how it's inconsistent with a possible grand bargain with anti-Trump Republicans, but then again, Peter Meijer wasn't going to vote against Kevin McCarthy, right?
I don't think it's totally different. When it comes to the question "are you willing to trade a higher % chance of Trump victory for a lower % chance that you control the NLRB," the answer has been no. I'm not judging that, just pointing out that there isn't a world where the Douthats are going to sign on for the Democratic platform on abortion just because Trump sucks.
I think that's exactly why it *is* totally different! The DLC wants to win elections. There are two ways to increase your chances in elections: run more electable candidates, and face less electable opponents. Boosting Trumpy candidates is an attempt to face less electable opponents. That's the *opposite* of moving left, which makes the Dems' candidates less electable, not more. When Democrats boost John Gibbs over Pete Meijer, they're accepting a greater risk of Trumpist power in exchange for a greater chance of Democrats holding the House. When the Sunrise Movement makes the Biden Administration swear off fossil fuels or whatever, they're accepting a greater chance of Trumpist power (because that's who's running against the Democrats) AND a reduced chance of Democrats holding power, in exchange for getting candidates to take the more left-wing position. Boosting Trumpy candidates is tactical; forcing candidates to take unpalatable positions is anti-tactical.
Also, although I continue to maintain it's a separate question, my understanding is that the Democrats' method of "boosting" these Trumpier candidates isn't to, like, funnel money into their war chests Iran-Contra style. It's to run ads saying "this candidate is totally wackaloon," which the candidate is. It's not Democrats' fault that the GOP primary electorate prefers wackaloon candidates in many places. As long as it's the case, maybe it's better to just rip off the band-aid? How much ability will Meijer have to caucus with Democrats if he's holding a seat where Republican primary voters prefer someone wackaloon?
I cannot possibly roll my eyes at this comment hard enough. There's no "dealing with it," the Very Serious Conservatives are not going to join your movement just because you came up with a more colorful description of Trump. They really do care about abortion, it's not an act.
Yes, of course. Just like the Democrats care more about Lina Kahn running the FTC than they care about living in an authoritarian country. Obviously nobody *actually* thinks Trump can institute an authoritarian state, because otherwise they would be offering compromises to their nearer opponents in order to make common cause to defeat him.
It's funny, I actually used the metaphor of a crazy neighbor burning down a house and threatening the neighborhood when negotiations about the debt ceiling were occurring.
Hence my question for this week's mailbag. The husk that is the current GOP cannot hold people like Douthat, the Dispatch crew and most of the "traditional" conservatives even at the National Review. They won't join the Democratic Party -- only the Bulwark people have -- so will they create an alternative to the MAGA GOP or remain disconnected from any possible representation?
Currently, Trump is capturing about 76% of the vote in national primary polls. I think that the 24% of the Republican electorate not currently going for him would, at least in the near term, a de facto ceiling on an anti-Trump conservative party’s support, especially if it was as ideologically right-wing as the NRO is. (Indeed, they’d likely be to Trump’s right on abortion and entitlements). With about 12% of the overall electorate, this hypothetical party would have a hard time winning outside of a small group of geographies unless they pivoted really hard to the center.
Eh, that’s only been true in her home state and in New Hampshire, where unusual demographics and an open primary structure helped her a lot. She’s doing okay for a protest candidate, but people who like her and hate Trump shouldn’t self-deceive too much.
The popularity of European-inspired leftism has been a disaster for this country. It just imports issues we simply don’t have and makes them central parts of left identity.
It’s not just the left, either. The US right has been wholesale importing European right-wing ideologies lately as well. But it’s a much longer standing dynamic on the left.
What? European leftism means - at least in a Scandinavian context - muscular social democracy that is patriotic, populist, popular, center-left on economics and centrist on cultural issues, immigration and crime. As well as electorally extremely successful.
It’s American leftism that is all about identity politics, wokeness, open borders and defunding the police. When European leftist parties import these ideas they lose.
Importation of European views on nationalism is a real problem. Everything about the usual objections aside, it’s just irrelevant here.
Nationalism addresses real questions in Europe, therefore has real tradeoffs and issues. It doesn’t do any work for Americans, the rhetoric around it is what’s attractive. But for exactly that reason, it’s just a dry hole, a deep waste of elite social capacity that’s been invested in arguing about nationalism.
That's not the right axis of criticism of the metro stuff (it really is massively better than any US system). To counter it, you need to point to other scary foreign lands (allied with us) that do it even better, while being democracies
Tbh Vancouver has a better transit system than anywhere in the US ex-NY and is even less "carceral" on drugs than the US west coast. Because we suck so much, you really can improve while satisfying any set of desires!
Tucker Carlson’s Russia peons are truly mind-bogglingly stupid. Not just in the sense that talking up an oppressive revanchist dictatorship is totally oppositional to the values he claims to espouse (and which America stands for), but also in the sense that the arguments he is making are extremely dumb. Pouting to Potemkin villages as proof of quality of life or suggesting a fortnight’s groceries for $100USD are a good deal (in a country where that represents 10% of monthly income) are asinine.
Can confirm after a trip to Poland a couple weeks ago, they are scared shitless that they are next, and firmly believe that Trump winning will make this far more likely.
A lot of Russian misinfo has legs because it’s convenient for the US right’s overall worldview as well as its political priorities. “Joe Biden is corrupt” and “this foreign country is a utopia because it’s anti-woke” validate their core beliefs in the same way that the utopian Cuba narrative validated Marxist-Leninist beliefs. Misinformation is a demand-driven phenomenon, and the FSB has gotten better at identifying what sort of narratives Americans are hungry to buy.
Would add that an overlooked reason why social media has been an accelerant for misinfo is that it lets liars rapidly prototype and test out new narratives and see which ones stick. The KGB or Nixon’s dirty tricks team could plant fake stories, but they couldn’t assess which ones would quickly gain traction in real time.
We’re making it too complicated; it’s the Republican version of “but her emails”. Think about what happened right before the 2020 election, and the fact that the key aspects of that Hunter Biden story turned out to be true.
Imagine: right before the election, the entire “normal” media and a bunch of guys from intelligence services deemed a negative story about Donald Trump Jr to be Russian misinformation, social media companies wouldn’t even let you link the story, then Trump won the election and the story turned out to be true. At what point would Democrats believe a story about Donald Trump Jr ACTUALLY IS Russian misinformation? At what point would a Congressional Democrat tell their voters “actually, this time . . .”?
Not to mention maybe one or two other “huge if true” Russian stories that didn’t pan out. Also, after the FISA issue and the Nunes memo mess, you have to wonder if there isn’t a very deep and real mistrust between Congressional Republicans and the FBI.
The Hunter Biden story *is* a Russian operation, though. The emails may be real. If you believe the story of how they came to light, please come to my poker night! I'd like to discuss with you some lucrative real estate investment opportunities.
Look, if I'm selling you diet pills, are you more or less likely to think they work if I tell you they're from the planet Zoltan? The people scolding the media for not immediately swallowing the Hunter Biden laptop are asking them to believe that, with all the horseshit around, there must be a pony somewhere.
Your comment I was responding to seemed to suggest that the e-mails should be disregarded regardless of whether they are real or not because of how they were recovered.
I conceded they're real, just like John Podesta's emails and Trump's leaked tax returns. I'm just responding to the assertion the story "turned out to be true". It did, if you ignore the fake parts.
To anyone discussing the "story" of any of those documents, they're referring to the contents of the documents, not how they were supposedly discovered.
I'm suspicious of any kind of dirty story that comes out right before the election, and that applies to the Donald Jr scenario. There is simply not enough time to vet and properly process the information before the election and so I would be happy to see it not contaminate the airwaves.
Chuck Grassley in particular disgusts me. Far from being an elder statesman, he laundered false Russia propaganda after the FBI very publicly told him not to trust it, and has yet to issue even the slightest mea culpa. It’s borderline treasonous.
"There’s a school of thought in Eastern Europe which holds that if Ukraine falls, Lithuania and Poland are inevitably next. That seems a little bit overblown to me."
Russia has all the time in the world to move to the next target - the US is not confidence inspiring in their commitment to alliance right now.
Noah Smith would happily get us all killed defending Taiwan. He enjoys traveling there, clearly there’s some cultural affinity and his thinking is more sentimental than rooted in American material interests.
I disagree with Smith on his more hawkish pronouncement regarding Taiwan. But in general, the fact that more of our allies possess nuclear weapons (if it became a fact) should make direct US involvement in a kinetic (and potentially nuclear) war with China or Russia less, not more, likely.
If anyone needs nuclear weapons, it’s Taiwan. The rub is how to get them without being blown up first. Furthermore, the fact that Taiwan would benefit from conjuring nuclear weapons out of think air does not imply the U.S. would benefit from providing them.
That ship sailed several decades ago, as I'm sure you know. But one of the arguments used by hawks to justify sending America to war with China in the event of a Taiwan invasion is the old domino theory: If it's Taiwan tomorrow, it'll be Japan next month. I doubt even someone as rash as Xi Jinping would be willing to attack a nuclear armed Japan. This is why I think a highly limited, prudent expansion of the nuclear club might well be in the interest of the United States. Up to now, much of the safety of the free world has depended on the willingness of US leadership to subject its cities to nuclear attack, because only two of our allies possess their own deterrent. I think we may have reached a point where that's no longer in America's interest.
I don't think expanding the number of people capable of unleashing nuclear war is going to ever make people more safe. Nuclear weapons are primarily useful in the hands of crazy people who we think will really use them to get to bully others not to stop bullying.
Ok I’ll bite, why wouldn’t being very clear that we’re willing to trade New York and Los Angeles for Taipei work to ensure not a single boot ever falls on the island and we never go to war over it.
Where is the benefit to ambiguity? It seems to me that the lack of clear, credible we view Taipei as unambiguously free and are willing to end the human habitability of Earth over it would end a lot of the congestion.
And if we’re not interested in doing the whole mutually assured destruction we should be clear about that too and let these countries develop their own defense. It seems we’ve reached a stage where maybe is too dangerous.
I don’t think that position would ever be credible. We are too chicken to send an ambassador to Taipei. Why would we die defending it? Even if one president were absolutely committed to such a policy, he don’t be in office forever.
Also, assume your proposed policy has a 95% chance of success. That would still make it a horrible, evil, sanguinary idea. A 5% chance of nuclear war is worse than a 100% chance of the CCP controlling Taiwan.
>> A 5% chance of nuclear war is worse than a 100% chance of the CCP controlling Taiwan.
The CCP controlling Taiwan means they get to say where every chip produced there goes and how much it costs.
It also means that every EUV tool on the island is right there for the taking, and will be reverse-engineered within the decade.
So you can basically say goodbye to every chip advantage we have left. And winning the Second Cold War will become an even fight instead of a clear win for the West. Congratulations!
>The CCP controlling Taiwan means they get to say where every chip produced there goes and how much it costs.<
Not so. Taiwan's chip sector collapses if CCP takes that island. And no, I'm not referring to damage to fabs (though that could be a factor). Taiwan's advanced chip sector is the pinnacle of a complex supply and support chain involving inputs from multiple countries. These include parts, machinery, tools, software, and technical consulting/expertise. These inputs would cease.
The world is not a game of risk where a country’s productive capacity is transferred, completely intact, to its conquerer.
Is there any historical example of a conqueror using the industrial plant of a subject nation to huge effect? Germany in 1917 benefitted from expropriating crops from western Russia, it benefitted from Saar basin coal mines, but it’s not as if occupied Paris cranked out advanced weapons for the Wehrmacht. Subjugating them was enough of a challenge, even the Nazis came nowhere near turning the French or Dutch or Poles into an efficient workforce in cutting edge industries.
I don't really worry about China getting control of Taiwanese semiconductor facilities. I really doubt that China would be able to take the facilities intact; if the Taiwanese don't destroy them, the US almost certainly will. China will also be under incredble embargo and sanctions that make it very difficult to operate these facilities.
I do think that a bunch of globe-level critical infrastructure being concentrated in Taiwan is a very bad thing, and I've thought for a while that getting high-end semiconductor manufacturing spun up somewhere safer (the US, more stable parts of Latin America and Africa, who knows) would be an excellent policy.
I don’t entirely disagree with your second graph. But if that is the case I think we should support in our allies in East Asia developing their own nuclear deterrent quickly. Especially since the only reason Taiwan doesn’t have them themselves was our assurances.
What I think is fundamentally dangerous though is ambiguity. Maybe it made sense at some point but I think we need to decide if it’s more like West Berlin or Hong Kong. I think it’s more like West Berlin and should be something we’re willing to go to the mattresses for.
But like leaving it in the maybe zone seems to encourage the possibility of war breaking out.
>why wouldn’t being very clear that we’re willing to trade New York and Los Angeles for Taipei work<
Three reasons:
1) Because there's realistically no way to truly be *very clear* (Xi might think we're bluffing), and moreover Taiwan is not a treaty ally of the United States.
2) Because accidents happen. Wars can result from miscalculations.
3) A CCP leader in a tight spot in terms of domestic politics might possibly conclude risking a nuclear war passes cost-benefit analysis if the alternative is regime change. Just because you and I are sane human beings who believe nuclear weapons should never again be used in war doesn't mean Xi Jinping believes this, or absolutely rules out their use when a critical national priority is on the line (Taiwan is just such a priority for most Chinese).
For the record I don't think there's a feasible way for *Taiwan* to acquire a nuclear arsenal or for the US to help it do so. But Japan (and SK, and a couple of others) is a different story.
Poland has other allies with nuclear capabilities. There's no substitute for America in the Western alliance but weaker allies holding on for dear life till Uncle Sam deigns to step in decisively is how prior global conflicts were won.
Seems unlikely to me that France or Britain would start a nuclear war to save Lithuania if the Russians roll in. Of course the Russian roll in capacity seems highly questionable currently.
I would have said before the Ukraine invasion that NATO was something of a bluff and that had Russia invaded Estonia (for instance), we would have reacted similarly to an invasion of Ukraine-- money and weapons, but no troops and no direct war with Russia.
But I suspect the Ukraine invasion has changed that. I assume if Russia invades a NATO country it's World War III now. (Of course I also don't think Russia will invade a NATO country, especially after Ukraine, which has been a fiasco on their end.)
For what it's worth, Japan at least is capable of building nuclear weapons very, very quickly if they decided to. There are a lot of people who think that Japan has already built (but not tested) nuclear weapons and that JAXA exists in part to prepare Japan for nuclear weapon delivery.
I suspect there are a few events that would cause Japan to build nuclear weapons (if they haven't already) and quietly make their existence known; China invading Taiwan is probably one of those events.
My guess is that being "screwdriver turn" nuclear powers is ideal for them. If everyone considers it likely they could put together in handful of nuclear weapons in 90 days or so, they get a lot of deterrent benefit without the hassle of actually being nuclear powers.
Is that a thing? To establish a deterrent, don't you have to prove your nuclear weapons work, that they can fitted onto means of delivery, and that you could actually put them on target?
In other words, you actually have to become a nuclear power.
I'd think that depends entirely how credible it seems that your country could have precisely designed and engineered everything to make a working bomb, etc. If the President of Sao Tomé & Principe says the country has everything necessary to build a working nuclear bomb in three hours, I'm not finding that credible until they successfully test one. If the Prime Minister of Japan or the Chancellor of Germany says their country has everything necessary to build a nuclear bomb in three hours, I think anyone reasonably familiar with the scientific and industrial capacity of those countries would need to treat that as being true when making strategic plans until confirmed otherwise.
Yes, and I would add to this that I don't think delivery would be a showstopper either. The B61 nuclear bomb was developed in 1963 and can be carried by a variety of aircraft flown by Japan/ROK/Poland.
I wouldn't be as sanguine as Matt about the Baltic States. Putin clearly feels the same way about the former USSR that China feels about Taiwan: that it's all rightfully Russian territory and needs to be reclaimed at some point.
Agreed, I feel that the Baltics are a very dangerous flashpoint. All of the danger signs are there: former parts of the USSR, meaningful Russophone populations, land borders with Russia, small populations, strategically important region for Russia.
Russia would be mad to attack NATO members, as this would almost certainly kick off WWIII. But if it happens anywhere, the Baltics will probably be it. I do think that we have at least a five years before the Russian military will be in any condition to even attempt such operations.
Yeah, this is a major contributor to why I roll my eyes at Noah Smith and others who claim Russia is going to move on to conquer Poland if anything less than total rollback happens in Ukraine. Russia might still manage to conquer Ukraine if Ukraine doesn't receive enough western help (and the western powers *should* keep helping Ukraine, I stress), but Russia's capacity for large-scale military operations beyond its borders has basically been destroyed for at least the next decade. (Even pro-Russian sources, AFAICT, effectively concede that Russia is still losing AFVs drastically faster than it can produce new ones and that the Russians are only maintaining as much of an AFV force in the field as they are by rehabbing mothballed T-62s and older tanks. While semi-functional as pillboxes to hold territory, those would be absolutely useless for blitzkrieging to Warsaw vs. NATO armor and airpower.)
Noah has even claimed that Putin wants to attack Berlin. I like his analysis and style of writing on most subjects but on foreign policy he’s frequently an alarmist.
Just to steelman Noah's position, though, Russia will still be able to do more 2014-style invasions. Drezner just pointed out the other day that the war is the only thing keeping Russia's economy going right now.
Thus, the day he agrees to ANY kind of cease-fire in Ukraine, Putin will be staring down the barrel of a deep recession unless he can redeploy his military into a new conflict.
Gotta say that I'm ex ante skeptical of the "war is keeping the economy going" point primarily because it seems like the broken-windows fallacy writ on the scale of a nation-state.
There are presumably stories you can tell about war as a form of macroeconomic stimulus to boost too-low nationwide demand and make use of spare industrial capacity and labor availability, but those seem a lot more convincing in circumstances where you're either less demographically constrained or at a minimum can count on significant technological development to boost TFP as a side effect. At the end of the day it seems relevant that all of this productive output and possible labor force is being blown up for no economic return in the fields of Ukraine.
It's hard to predict what will happen, and I hope a ceasefire is reached one of these days, but it will be better for everyone who opposes tyranny if the eventual deal is agreed to by a Russia that is a spent force. That doesn't look to be the case right now.
"Russia's capacity for large-scale military operations beyond its borders has basically been destroyed for at least the next decade."
I see claims like this a lot, but I don't think the evidence supports it. Russia really has gone all in on a war economy and is producing and refurbishing weapons at a pretty good clip. In fact, it's going to be painful for them to go back to a non-war economy --- both because demobilizing an economy usually is painful (e.g. the recession of 1945) and because some parts of the economy really are hit by sanctions. Edit: and also because a lot of the best and the brightest left.
WRT T-62 tanks, Russia still has a large number of mothballed T-72 and T-80 tanks, which were their main tanks before the invasion. They've mostly been leaving those in storage and pulling older tanks (like T-62) out of storage; I've seen it speculated that's because the older tanks are mechanically and technologically simpler (no autoloader, no gas-turbine engine, etc.), so they're easier to get running again. But if Russia gets a breather, I'm sure they'd switch to refurbishing their T-72s and T-80s --- and could probably do that at a good clip. It would take nowhere near a decade to return their active tank forces to their pre-2022 levels (~3.3k operational tanks).
I'll also make a controversial claim: the Russian military is currently stronger than it was before the invasion. This is in some ways a low bar; the pre-invasion military looked good on paper but was actually pretty poorly trained and commanded. The current Russian military is also poorly trained and commanded, but it is both larger and more experienced. For all their faults, they also do seem to be learning lessons from the conflict, and if given a breather, they could improve their training and organization.
What happens next of course depends on what happens in Ukraine --- how much Russia is or isn't ground down --- and what happens to sanctions after the war is over. But Russia is really geared up for war and has a lot of soldiers. Europe has neither. If there's ever a time to invade the Baltic states, it would be relatively soon (1-3 years) after the war in Ukraine is over, and I would not dismiss the possibility that they'd decide to strike while the iron is hot.
"Nizhniy Tagil has been cranking out T-90s like nobody’s business since last summer/fall."
I haven't seen anything suggesting that. Everything I've seen in even the last couple months has indicated that the Russians are producing fewer than 500 new tanks a year. See, e.g.:
He's only in his early 70s. He could be in power for another twenty years. I certainly hope that's not the case. But "hoping for the death of the tyrant" isn't a viable plan.
A personal anecdote: back in the early 70s, when I was a young adult, my best friend got a scholarship to study in the USSR for a semester. He was also a photographer and when he came home he showed us pictures of Moscow and in particular many of the subway stations that he'd seen. (Given the paranoia of that country, I've always wondered about this American kid taking pictures, but I suspect his handlers were making sure he was taking the "right" pictures.) After, at that point, a lifetime of anti-USSR propaganda, it was a shock to see how incredibly beautiful the city and those stations were. He didn't become an apologist for the USSR, since as a poli sci major he was quite aware of the history which it seems Tucker isn't, but he definitely had a respect for the culture that built those things.
This is a well-trodden path on US China stuff as well. Visit -> realize US collective impression of the country is complete nonsense -> become (often overly) skeptical of Western coverage in general
Yes, this is one of the top reasons Tyler Cowen gives that people should do a lot more international travel. Of course, sadly, there's a pretty high environmental cost to that as well.
Maybe I was a weird one, but my visit to China (which was very short and centered in Shanghai) didn't change my impression too much.
I expected China to be huge and to have lots of obvious quick growth; it did have those things.
China was cleaner and less polluted than I expected. Every park seemed to have an old man employed to clean it, and they were immaculate. There also were a ton of EVs, which I suspect means the city air is much better than fifteen years ago.
The trains were great, but I expected that.
There was a lot of obvious police/surveillance presence.
There's definitely a range, but I'd guess you already had a better-calibrated view than the average person. Tons of people believe A: China is East German-style totalitarian* and/or B: China has the level of economic development it did 20 years ago.
*obvious flag here is "social credit score" memery
"There’s a school of thought in Eastern Europe which holds that if Ukraine falls, Lithuania and Poland are inevitably next. That seems a little bit overblown to me." That seems entirely reasonable to me -especially if Trump has the ability to hamstring NATO, we'll have a major land war in Eastern Europe in a decade. And you don't have to take my "right-wing by the standards of Slow Boring readers" word on it, Poland and the Baltics seem to be actively preparing for that possibility.
People like Grassley almost confuse me the most. What's the harm in actual defying Trump. You're a bajillion years old; it's not like you have many senate campaigns to come. Heck, he's basically the conservative version of Feinstein; his cognitive faculties are almost certainly declining and probably shouldn't be in the senate anyway.
Which maybe speaks to something I brought up early, I say people like Grassley confuses me most but he really might be a "true believer". Marinate in a media diet of Fox, right wing radio and right wing think tanks enough and even the most informed person can have their brain fried.
Now that she has no chance of being the nominee, it's time for Nikki Haley to step up on this issue. She's finally become more willing to say that Trump is a terrible person, but until she starts calling out other Republicans who flack for Moscow it doesn't amount to a coherent critique.
She's been hitting Trump very hard on Ukraine/Putin. I'm not sure it's in anybody's interest for her to start calling out other Republicans, though. I suspect part of her calculus now is that, in the wake of a Trump defeat, public opinion may turn against Putin-appeasement. In that scenario Haley looks good. But it won't do her much good in terms of her political future if she's alienated the rest of the party.
Stating the obvious, but it would be great if Democrats could do a better job of making the Russia-love more of a political liability for the GOP. As Matt points out, Russia sucks as a place to live in many ways, not least of which is that if Putin doesn’t like you, he can just have you murdered. They’re classic movie villains, their soldiers commit war crimes routinely, and so on. Maybe I’m naive but it really seems like Democrats could make them pay a political price for this guilty association.
I generally agree with this take. But it's hard to overstate how much the Mueller report's failure to land a big hit against Trump (even though it makes some pretty devastating claims) took the air out of the MAGA/Russia story. From CNN's wall to wall coverage to literal Mueller bobble heads, Democrats prepped the public for a clear cut collusion story. And now it's hard to go back to that playbook after it didn't land really the first time.
I mean, they impeached him! If something like that didn't land, what possibly can? The public has been desensitized.
No see this is the same mistake people make on the right, is thinking Trump was impeached over Russia, or Mueller, or something. He wasn’t. “We would like you to do us a favor though” was unrelated to anything found by Mueller.
Trump was impeached over misuse of his foreign policy authority with respect to Ukraine, a country that had been awarded an aid package by Congress in order to enable to defend itself from Russia. If you want to say he was impeached over Ukraine rather than Russia, I wouldn't object.
That’s exactly what I’m saying, since the post you’re responding to was talking about the failure of the Mueller Report to hurt Trump over allegations of Russian collusion in the campaign (allegations that I think were largely substantiated).
I think with respect to Trump, the whole Russia issue goes way beyond.simply the Muller report. That’s the point I was making. he’s paid no political price, because the public, tragically, is insufficiently concerned with the danger of Russia and the fate of Ukraine.
Agree not straightforward but I just have the conviction that if the roles were reversed and somehow Democrats were overtly sympathetic to a hostile foreign country the Republicans would hardly break a sweat running the table.
For starters, maybe people need some more explicit reminders that the Russians are bad guys. I think some Democrats think they can just draw a line between the Republicans and Putin and that’s all. But maybe people need some more reminders of exactly the horrific things the Russians are doing and would do if they were victors. How about doing hearings to document Russian atrocities, finding witnesses to testify to what’s been done, and make the Republicans in the House look them in the eye?
It's already happening on China.
We'll, thankfully we live in a free society governmened by laws which you actually have to break in order to be punished, and we can't just hang people because they say stuff you don't like.
Your eagerness to dole out pain to those not falling in line with your political desires feels very... Russian.
You really can't see the downsides of actually going after Carlson criminally rather than just mocking him for his credulousness???
I said in another post; a huge GOP delegation spent Independence day in Moscow in 2017. Most of whom are still in Congress (including Ron Johnson). It is an insane failure from
Democrats to not highlight this more. If Bernie had won the 2016 nomination there is no way the airwaves wouldn’t have been flooded with stories of him honeymooning in Moscow.
So among the very first comments I read this morning pivots directly to telling the Democrats what to do, with the implication that the Democrats are falling short.
I know this is meant as constructive advice to us on the Democrats' side, but maybe just this one time we can keep our focus on what a historically horrible thing the Republican party is?
This was literally my first thought as well. I absolutely hate being a partisan hack but, seriously guys, is there any problem in objective reality that isn't Dems' fault?
Dem voters absolutely need to be self-critical, and I agree that Dems should hammer the GOP on Russia more. At times though it just gets pathological and self-flagellating in this comments section though. My shoot-from-the-hip, immature speculation is that it's just uncool to criticize the GOP. It's passe. People, this country has one responsible political party, can we just for one freaking time acknowledge that the Dems are clearly superior to the GOP? Saying that doesn't make you a blue haired, DEI-pilled rioter. We can still fix the issues with the Dems without needlessly laying blame for all faults on Earth at their feet.
I think it’s more that it’s pointless to criticize the Republican party. The vast majority of their voters don’t have the IQ required to read and understand Slow Boring and the few that do are unrepentant fascists who want to turn America into Russia or, the slightly less insane ones, into Hungary. You can’t reach them, you can only beat them. Repeatedly, until they give up.
Wow, great point. Republicans are not shy about calling liberals traitors, but I don’t see many, or really any Dems hurling that insult to the right. Seems a pretty apt descriptor.
Dems are way too shy about cloaking themselves in the flag and attacking the current Republican party for being anti-American in words and deeds
I think internal Dem politics prevents this. Things that might help in the general election probably hurt in the primaries. If moderate Dems took a stronger stand regarding patriotism generally (as lots of these articles have advocated) the calculus might shift and make this a more plausible strategy.
I sincerely believe it can be done. To some degree it has been done in the business world. As Rep. became more extreme there has been a general shift in terms of businesses becoming major funders and important allies to the Dems.
The other parts of this I can get behind, but how is a congressional delegation going to Russia a big deal? They have visited lots of countries, including Russia, China, Turkey, Syria, etc. Biden traveled to Russia on multiple occasions as a Senator...
Call them out for many things, but if you are going to say there was something fishy about this trip, can you be more explicit than just saying they went there?
I mean optics matter a lot here. But again, to my point, a number of those same lawmakers are basically pro Russia. To not even address, to not even make this part of any Democratic messaging is just such dereliction.
Meh, hammer them for the positions. Teaching Congress that they shouldn't visit other countries because they might take a position later and be hit over it is a long term bad we should avoid.
Is “Democratic messaging” even a thing? People I follow on social media who are Democrats have howled about Russian influence since 2017 while “conservatives” claim it’s all a hoax. The public seems to regard this as strictly a partisan matter. Basically one’s partisan identification determines whether it’s treason or a nothingburger, and no one trusts “mainstream media” to sort it out.
A lot of truth here. But this is why someone like me rants and rails at the political desk at the New York Times. I know there is now an upteenth woke left out of control article on the Atlantic right now. But something Matt noted on Twitter is that the super leftists at places like the Times are very often NOT the political reporters but the reporters for say tech, movies, culture etc. But as I've noted many times, the most important desk at the Times for affecting national discourse (by far) is the political desk and the political desk is very very firmly entrenched in "both sides" framing on everything. Which is part of the problem and where people like me shout "if one side says it's raining and the other side says it isn't, your job is to put your hand out the window and see if one side is right or not".
Let's say that the NYT political desk ran a front page article tomorrow directly saying what you have here about Trump and Republicans being sell outs, traitors, and agents of the Russian government.
Who would you expect to have a different opinion about Republicans the following day/month?
There has been no president who has been called out as much as Trump has been (for good reasons!), and he's running slightly ahead of Biden in polls. Is there any theory of politics that has been disproven more than if you just shout louder and harder you will convince more people?
half-baked theory here but is the NYT politics desk sort of an analog of the problem advocacy groups run into where Democrats care what they say and so they attack Dems for not going quite far enough on their pet issue instead of Republicans for actively opposing them?
Basically "NYT says Trump bad" is sort of a "dog bites man" story whereas "NYT questions Hillary's emails" is a "man bites dog."
I can only imagine the reaction if Democratic politicians had done the same - it’s all we would have heard about for weeks.
There is defo huge opportunity for corpo mainstream press to debunk the "anti-war" isolationism that is being sold by Rebs and contrarians all of a sudden, (as inevitably enabling more war.) You have folks like Elon, or David Sacks, or Tucker, or Glenn Greenwald, and the occasional other leftie yahoo, saying that defunding Ukraine as a pro-peace move, without explaining what Russia will do if given free reign. And then what other rivals and near peers will do if they don't see any benefit to minding America's moralities. They intentionally don't extrapolate it farther, and squashing that lie is pretty low hanging fruit.
I've even seen comments in here suggest more isolationism could be a reasonable way to resolve the issue for Dem prospects in November.
I'm glad we are supporting Ukraine (and my industry indirectly benefits from it)...but my hackles get raised whenever someone acts as if we have an obligation to support them.
They are not a NATO country. There is no obligation.
If they go on to attack NATO members afterwards, that's a different story due to Article 5.
And our role as world police is soon to be untenable anyways. The post Cold War unipolar superpower days are ending.
"acts as if we have an obligation" is doing a lot of work here to be a vague policy principle based on perception. It's designed to get hackles up, because it can manipulated.
Whether a nation is part of NATO or not, doesn't make the murder and of these people less horrid. Nor the strategic benefits of preventing an ethnic cleansing less real.
Again, another easily digestible talking point people spread, even though the implications of it are worse than what we have now.
(After all, if someone invaded or nuked Ireland, it's not like we'd be wringing our hands over what's America's obligation)
There are wars going on all over the world, including some in Africa that have killed far more people than the Ukraine conflict. What are our obligations in those places?
I think that's a fair argument. But fundamentally, it's about where U.S. military aid can a.) defend U.S. interests the most and b.) give us our most bang for buck.
Our assistance is literally holding the Ukraine cause together. And delivering a humiliating defeat to one of our greatest geopolitical enemies(or at least bogging Putin down in a struggle akin to Afghanistan) is just a great military investment.
Completely agree. We are involved in Ukraine not out of obligation, but because it benefits us. But that's fundamentally a different rationale for supporting Ukraine than the US operating as the world's police and getting involved where we don't have strategic interests.
For what we were spending in Afghanistan in 2018, we can support Ukraine grinding Russia's military into pieces, and have no American casualties. This is an obvious American strategic win and we'd be absolute fools not to do it...
It depends. :)
Putin is prepping to force NATO's commitment to Article V over something like Svalbard. He is rearming, he is substituting inputs from China, and there will be a demographic bump for Russia in the next ten years.
Letting Putin win in Ukraine is just another Munich Agreement.
Svalbard? He's going to mess with Norway over an island, where our vast (vast) naval and air superiority comes into play?
It would be playing to Russia's weakness and NATO/US's strengths. At least with a land war he can take advantage of our aversion to attrition.
If he actually attacks a NATO nation, the drums of war will sound, and we basically have no choice but to answer. It's WW3.
The idea is to call NATO’s commitment over defending members over something that Russia can plausibly pull out of. The Lapland or Arctic are places to test that commitment. Asymmetrical risks to undermine treaty commitments, especially if Republicans are in power.
What the Republicans are doing is worse than Chamberlain and Munich.
I'm not saying this will lead to the equivalent or worse than WW2 but that in rational and moral calculation terms, it is a less defensible position. One can argue that Chamberlain had a rational case to make in September 1938 (and one widely supported by the British people): war is too horrible to contemplate after seeing what WW1 was like, we are weak and need some breathing space, if we go to war now we shall pay a vast price including among our civilian population.
By contrast, the Republicans' betrayal of Ukraine is based on . . . what? Because we're spending too much money on American jobs in the American defense industry? We are being asked to make no sacrifices, to take no risks, but simply to provide some aid to people giving their all in support of our strategic interests. Republicans oppose aid to Ukraine simply because the Orange God demands it -- at best. At worse it's because they want to see Russian aggression and savagery triumph.
Chamberlain was wrong, terribly so. But the desire to avoid war, or avoid war as long as possible, was understandable. There is no, zero, zip, nada defense for the Republican actions. It is simply evil, through and through. I hope history gives them the judgment they deserve.
If you are making a Munich analogy in foreign policy, you are making a bad argument. Really, not even Munich was Munich (Britain frantically re-armed during the time the agreement was in effect and it also bought time that increased the likelihood of Soviet and US entry into the war). But even assuming we take the conventional view of Munich, nothing else is Munich because nobody else is Hitler. It's a bad analogy that can literally be used to justify hawkishness in any situation, and people need to retire it. (Especially since, as noted above, all sorts of aggression is going on in the world that we "appease", in places we don't care about.)
This is just an argument against ever arguing from analogy, but I’ve seen you argue from analogy before; everyone does, yet when we see an analogy that disagrees with us we become very particular about this and that difference. In this case though you aren’t even arguing what makes the Russia situation different other than Putin not literally being the same person as Adolf Hitler.
Munich analogies specifically have killed millions of people. That's what makes them different.
We throw around Godwin's Law as a joke enough that we don't realize that in fact there are good reasons for not willy-nilly comparing everything to Hitler.
As far as literal Munich, I don’t understand the relevance of Britain using the time to rearm—so did Germany! It would surprise me to find out that the time between 1938 and 1939 was a net positive in terms of Britain’s munitions relative to Germany’s, let alone enough of a positive to make up for the loss of Czechoslovakia from the coalition—in David Lloyd George’s words, a million troops all gone. I also don’t see why the passage of time increased the likelihood of Soviet entry into the war, but this may be genuine ignorance; in actual fact Molotov-Ribbentrop happened, but were alternative outcomes likely?
" It would surprise me to find out that the time between 1938 and 1939 was a net positive in terms of Britain’s munitions relative to Germany’s"
How about Britian's + the US's + the USSR's relative to Germany's + Italy's? Britain in 1938 didn't have the allies it needed.
But also, you are ignoring the starting point. Britain had very little military capability and was invested in the remnants of a far flung empire. So even a not gigantic German force could have done a ton of damage in 1938. Germany already had its war machine going for several years by that time. Britain going to war alone against Germany in 1938 could have resulted in a loss.
Who knows what really goes on in Putin's head, but my understanding is that his great dream is to basically form a Slavic super state.
Which would be, you know, terrible because it would involve all/most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans being absorbed.
But even that is a far cry from Hitler's goals of exterminating whole peoples and taking their land so that they can be replaced by his own.
Absolutely, and even with respect to what Putin wants, you have to analyze both capabilities AND desires here. A man's reach often exceeds his grasp, as Robert Browning observed. The issue is what does Russia both (1) want and (2) have the capability to achieve. And to be clear, that doesn't let Russia off the hook-- they've done enormous damage and destruction in Ukraine. They are very dangerous. But that doesn't mean that unless we take the most hawkish possible position against Russia, they'll take over all the Slavic countries, or even that the most hawkish possible position would even work.
>and there will be a demographic bump for Russia in the next ten years.<
How so?
He's not wrong that there's a trough at 20-24 year olds right now and a bulge in younger ages, but I'm skeptical that it's going to translate into that much of a bump in effective Russian military power: https://www.populationpyramid.net/russian-federation/2024/
There was a bump in fertility in the early 2000s relative importance to the slump of the 1990s. There is a higher number of teenagers relative to current group of conscript-able males. Right now there has been a huge push to indoctrinate and politicize children for Putin’s imperialist agenda. This is contrast to the previous policy of depoliticization.
>my hackles get raised whenever someone acts as if we have an obligation to support them.<
Far better for the liberty/tyranny line to run between Ukraine and Russia than between (a conquered) Ukraine and Poland.
Our obligation to help Ukraine is first and foremost to ourselves, and our children.
I agree. It is in our best interest to help Ukraine.
But it doesn't amount to any formal obligation.
I feel that way about Taiwan—in my view a more dangerous situation for America (and we've already got Marines stationed there).
I'll admit that I have mild isolationist tendencies that make me biased (especially when things get too messy), but it really does seem like the state department/foreign policy 'Blob' is constantly trying to manipulate/pressure the nation in more and more foreign entanglements.
They aren't satisfied with our network of official alliances, but look for any nook and cranny that can be leveraged to de facto 'obligate' our country get more involved than our legislature has agreed to.
"Formal interests" means less than one might think. Nations will always do what is in their interest, no matter what treaties they have signed.
Neither is Israel, yet the US seems to have an ironclad obligation to defend Israel at all costs. Netanyahu knows he can thumb his nose at us and still count on US support, no matter what.
There is substantial support among the US populace for Israel, and has been for a long time.
And I know it is fraught to even point this out, but that popular support is amplified by some well-financed and well-positioned support from wealthier Jewish folks in the media.
I'd also say that Israel is surrounded by hostile countries that, if they thought they could get away with it, would happily exterminate them...so maybe they deserve more support.
What is the relevant difference that you see for Ukraine and Taiwan? None are treaty obligations. All have these features.
To Susan's point, I don't care about Bibi being rude or showing insufficient deferrence to Biden...but Israel has been caught doing pretty egregious espionage stuff to us over the last few decades.
It's galling that they've faced few consequences for that.
The Ukrainian and Taiwanese diasporas in the US aren't as powerful/influential?
And they just don't have the historical support. Though for Israel that is partially for religious reasons among evangelicals.
Finally, neither Ukrainian nor Taiwanese are realistically facing extermination. Conquest and oppression under would-be totalitarian regimes, yes, but not extermination.
Can we just go back to calling people who support Russian imperialism commies and pinkos? (Or at least “Comrades”)? I mean, sure it isn’t laundered through the Soviet Union any more, but the hostile imperialism and autocracy seem like they were always the far more relevant considerations of the Cold War than state control of heavy industry.
Normally I’m not on board for abuse of language in a way divorced from its formal meaning so I have reservations about adopting this, but it seems like it may be warranted in this instance (1) because it’s an anti-Russian smear of the type that’s supposed to be the sort of thing that movement Republicans historically care about, so it’s not just the outgroup calling them things that are primarily concerns of the outgroup, and (2) notwithstanding the level of formal continuity between the current Russian Federation and Soviet Communism, “expansionist successor state of the USSR run as an autocratic dictatorship headed by a revanchist ex-KGB agent” seems like it’s good enough for government work as far as invoking the slur goes.
It seems pretty obvious to me why the Dems have a hard time going after the right wingers for suddenly deciding to go full Chomsky-ite.
One of the reasons Democrats can't successfully do this is because of the wing of the party that supports the stuff outlined in this fortuitously timed article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/war-profiteering-defense-industry-ukraine-war/677572/
(Thanks, Bernie)
It’s unfortunate that someone like McCain isn’t around to provide moral clarity here. But in fairness, when he did he was called a HAWK by the left.
Now Trump has positioned himself as both tough and a proponent of peace. He’s the anti-war dove that no one wants to mess with because he’ll punch you in the face. It’s actually one of his more nuanced and brilliant postures. It’s a really unique place for a politician to get to.
Yeah, I'm no fan of Trump's, but I have to concede that he managed to get through four years without starting any new wars, when I presumed that he would at least get the US involved in a major military confrontation (if not a full-scale actual war) with Iran.
They definitely suck, but I was really surprised to have a convo with a few friends this weekend who were left, very left, and center left…all were skeptical that we should send aid to Ukraine and their reasons were that it prolongs a deadly war, or the conflict doesn’t affect us directly let Europe worry about it. They of course aren’t pro Russian but maybe it’s one of those things where going all out talking about the Russia issue may not be a slam dunk for Biden.
This is an important point. There is a real contingent in the Democratic party that is pro-surrender.
So the very first comment I read this morning pivots directly to telling the Democrats what to do, with the implication that the Democrats are falling short.
I know this is meant as constructive advice to us on the Democrats' side, but maybe just this one time we can keep our focus on what a historically horrible thing the Republican party is?
One problem Democrats have is that a lot of left-leaning Democrats still have a fondness for the Soviet Union or anti-anti-Soviet feeling and that crosses the wires. Jacobin usually Soviet iconography for example, and so a lot of "progressives" are emotionally pro-Russian and anti-nationalist, so anti-Ukrainian. You see it even on this site.
As with making the GOP's general authoritarianism more if a liability, I want it but am honestly not sure what we can do. These topics are being pushed but Conservatives dismiss it out of hand and Independents seem equally divided on whether it even matters in the polls. I'm not saying we give up, I just don't know what the "something" in this "do something" is.
How?
>Stating the obvious, but it would be great if Democrats could do a better job of making the Russia-love more of a political liability for the GOP.<
The Senate should be holding hearings, at minimum.
The question I'd have is how salient the issue is with marginal voters. I've always felt that popularism needs two steps to really find the issues to target: first find what's popular, then find what's salient--whether it's something that voters are really revved up about. I don't know what the salience answer is here, I hope it would be high, but I fear it could be low.
Dems are bad at political campaigning because they refuse to get tough and mean when necessary. They should call out Republicans for being Putin-loving, anti-American traitors night and day. If and when the Republicans change back to becoming a relatively normal right wing party they should let off and tampen down the rhetoric, but with the current Republican party it is a battle for the future of American democracy and the rhetoric needs to reflect that.
"Dems are bad at political campaigning because they refuse to get tough and mean when necessary."
If you only knew how many times I've heard the same thing about Republicans it would astonish you...and I think that it makes a fundamental mistake in thinking that "if only people heard the message stronger it would convince them."
The fundamental flaw of all political actors and messengers is that they don't line up completely with what I want said and done.
Sorry, but there will be zero pickup of any Dem discussion of Russia. The media want TFG back at all costs - good for biz.
I’ve been banging my head against the wall for now 3-4 years but there’s an Occam’s razor explanation for why certain Republicans and certain members of right wing media (like Tucker) seem to be actively helping Putin; they are being paid.
I know, I know, it’s now cringe to say this. What are you full blown devotee of Rachel Maddow? Ha ha ha. But one of the unfortunate by products of Bill Barr misrepresenting the contents of the Mueller report is shift the goal posts on the “Russia stuff” from “a lot of left of center punditry about Trump and Russia is exaggerating or misrepresenting the extent of hard evidence” to “there is absolutely nothing to Trump and GOP and Russia.”
But I’m sorry there really is a lot “there”. I’ve repeated this before but a huge chunk of GOP congressmen and senators spent July 4th 2017 in Moscow (it drives me crazy Democrats don’t bring this up), NRA is in serious legal jeopardy due to financial ties, go look Madison Cawthorn and honeypot.
And in regards to Tucker. Honestly, what is a better explanation for why he’s doing what he’s doing? Did any of you watch his videos? Matt is understating how insane they are. At one point Tucker goes into a Russian McDonalds and decides to have a full meal of McDonalds in his SUV. The video is (I guess) to show how cheap McDonalds in Russia but it’s basically just him going crazy about how tasty McDonalds is and how tastes like American McDonalds. Like dude, this is actually showing the extent of American cultural and economic power. And yet it’s framed as this way Russia is so great. Like honestly, the best explanation I can think of is Russians behind Putin propaganda told him to do this. It’s basically an informercial.
Sorry, more ranty than usual. But it drives me nuts that too many Democrats and centrist pundits seem reticent or pull their punches when talking about GOP and Russia.
You forget Hanlon’s Razor, friend.
Fair! For people like MTG, I suspect this is the much likely explanation; I honestly think if a reporter asked her to provide the most basic facts about anything involving Russia, Ukraine, Trump and Biden she would actually struggle.
But yeah for others, I just think we're too afraid to go "there".
As a pretty related example, see Elon Musk who right now as far as I can tell is actively helping Russia and quite frankly I think should be seen as a traitor at this point.
Matt is pretty insistent that for Elon this is all this craziness is just a way to get someone in office to cut his taxes. Pure financial gain. That he doesn't actually believe what he's spouting. And to be frank, I find this really hard to believe given timeline of events. I keep bringing up the fact you can mark Elon's right wing turn to the moment his non-binary child openly declared he's disowning him. And then soon after suddenly Elon is wading into these debates about transgender issues and talking about how "woke" has gone too far. Like this isn't hard to figure out and yet it's just not talked about. Also, as Matt's new "frenemy" Will Stancil points out, there is a ton to suggest that Elon has a pretty serious drug problem that likely is partly explaining this turn to boosting actual Neo-Nazis on his platform.
>>But yeah for others, I just think we're too afraid to go "there".
I think the basic underappreciated fact here is that the underlying right-left media asymmetry produces a mistaken self-perception by Democrats that whenever they "go there", it rarely yields the results they want, so why bother?
To wit, Fox News and its successors are unconstrained by any commitment to basic journalistic and editorial integrity. It's a political operation from top to bottom. This allows for a remarkable unity of purpose and action among their politicians. When a headline story comes across Fox News, every elected Republican receives the information that day, and can pretty straightforwardly decide on their individual course of action in response, and then they know exactly where to go to publicize that response. They don't have to all agree on those responses, but the straightforwardness, speed, and centralized, open platform allow the entire party to signal its opinions, gauge public opinion, and then iterate accordingly within the space of minutes, days, or weeks. When all's said and done, even if the Fox News headline is based on a complete, provable lie, some not-insignificant minority of the party faithful will believe that lie forever.
This shit doesn't happen on the Democratic side. When a big op-ed gets published in the NYT, the first thing that happens is that Slate, the Atlantic, Vox, and a number of other big-name publications all get to argue about it. The Twitterverse and academia get their say, too. A Democratic politician then has to weigh dozens of different takes, decide on their own personal take -- remember, they're expected to have PRINCIPLED takes, not just base them on any old crass political consideration -- and THEN decide whether to actually publish that take. Because SOMEONE out there will disagree deeply, and because those someones are usually pretty well-educated and informed liberals, that disagreement will be pretty well-grounded and well-argued, which means that internal backlashes genuinely hurt party cohesion. If and when they publicize their opinion, there are dozens of venues to do so in, and even the biggest, most centralized ones like PSA barely reach a plurality of the Democratic faithful, let alone swing voters etc. To the extent that the base ever comes away with a belief about the news story in question, those beliefs can vary wildly and will be seeds for future disagreements.
The net effect is the asymmetry that whenever Democrats "go there", most efforts fizzle, but when Republicans do, there's a much better chance of it going viral and turning into yet another brainworm.
Strong take
Liberals and centrists now have substantially higher IQ than conservatives, in today’s America, as GOP/conservative media has polarized voters according to education and IQ. Long term this will be bad for Republicans to have lost intelligent people who can see reality somewhat clearly and reform the party, but short term they can get away with whatever crap they want by distracting their base with conspiracy theories and nonsense.
What scares me is that the short term can have a way of becoming the long term if it persists enough.
The two basic outcomes are that (A) they take down our entire society, or (B) they fizzle out.
The problem is, they feed on the zero-sum mentality, and most of the institutions that we might use to defeat them are zero-sum themselves. In past episodes where the right has attempted to take over the country... well, we had to resort to violence in the Civil War, but then the right successfully established its own authoritarian sub-state when it ended Reconstruction, and then they fizzled out during the run-up to WWII. So we're only 1-for-3!
As Mr. Big used to say, "Abso-fucking-lutely".
Turns out ignorance *is* strength.
I basically agree with all of this. There is another aspect which is Fox (and equivalents) see themselves as supporters of the GOP in a way that publications like the Times just don't. And that also has to factor in.
Indeed! And I don't want to come across as too fatalistic here, either. Democrats need to start flexing this muscle more.
I know I probably sound like a broken record, but the one big bright spot of hope right now is the Bulwark. These guys get friendlier and friendlier by the day with Pod Save America. They're already starting to osmose most of the Democratic Party's mainstream positions, albeit with their own small-c conservative bent on them. They aren't hidebound hacks like the Douthats and Stephens' of the world, misguidedly laundering sanewashed and horrifically mistaken GOP talking points into the mainstream media. And they don't hesitate to call out the GOP's shame every single day.
Mark my words, this is going to be one of the major drivers of rejuvenation of the Democratic Party in the next 10-20 years.
I just want to add that I continue to be baffled at how genuinely smart people like Matt and Ezra always feel the need to say that a Douthat take is "smart" because he sort of pretends to engage with arguments, when he is in fact the hackiest of hacks.
It kind of scares me how much more comfortable I am with the Bulwark than any other source of views and analysis. I'd like to think that's because they're moving closer to me than the opposite.
How the heck does Musk having a drug problem -- no matter how serious -- "partly explain[] this turn to boosting actual Neo-Nazis on" Twitter? Even if the value of Twitter drops to $0, he still would have enough money to party like it's 1979 at Sudio 54 every day for the rest of his life.
Uhh, I thought the implication was pretty clear, but I'll take a stab for Colin...
He seemed to be saying that the drugs are fueling a paranoia complex where Musk began to feel persecuted for having a subset of heterodox beliefs. Unlike Matt, who is sober-minded and not a billionaire and thus responded by simply striking out on his own Substack, Musk responded by doubling down on his heterodoxies and also doing more drugs.
Eventually, because we ALL have a natural human tendency to osmose the beliefs of those we surround ourselves with, Musk started to believe some of the more insidious propaganda of the Neo-Nazis whose free speech rights he saw himself to be doubling down on, and kept doing more drugs to cope with the stress of being considered more and more objectionable in the mainstream liberal eye.
Sorry, I thought the implication was that Musk is getting desperate to generate revenue for Twitter in part because he needs money for drugs.
Gotcha. NBD.
Pretty much nailed most of it.
The only thing I'll add is that prolonged drug use has very real effects on the brain that fuel paranoia. "Brain imaging studies have also suggested that long-term substance use weaken the brain’s prefrontal cortex and it’s links to other parts of the brain, especially the reward centers that are excessively stimulated by substance use. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for higher functions like self-control, attention, planning, and emotional regulation. When working properly, it moderates the emotional responses generated in the older areas of the brain. However, excessive substance use weakens this area, making you vulnerable to emotional swings."
I would be skeptical of any claim that any particular behavioral change could be attributed to “excessive substance use” with no specificity about the substance. Cocaine and cannabis and alcohol and mdma and heroin and lsd are going to do very different things to you.
This is very well-said.
It would help if there were a falsifiable version of the blame-Russia-for-everything-Republican shtick, but there isn’t. Laundering all of Republican concerns over Biden’s corruption through a nebulous cloud of “Russian intelligence” as a way of bulletproofing one’s claims is a trick that got old in 2017. The FSB are not sci-fi spy geniuses, and Americans did way more damage to each other arguing over this crap than the Russians ever could on their own.
Is it cringe that some Republicans daydream of what they could accomplish if the US were more like Russia? Absolutely yes, also ignorant. But Dems seriously need to unlearn the Russiagate blue anon lies and all the lies built upon them.
The Occam's razor part for me focuses on Trump: he knows or at least fears Putin could easily provide records of financial improprieties—I'm thinking primarily of money laundering—involving Trump's dealing with Russian organized crime. Trump also personally admires strong men who have no time for the niceties of democratic norms. So there's a valorization factor. Trump has also long been a skeptic of NATO—I don't think it's a stretch to call him an enemy of NATO. And, well, Putin is also an enemy of NATO.
And the rest of the GOP falls in line because they're like ringwraiths to Trump's Sauron.
I think it's time we drop the idea that Trump supports Putin in part or whatever because he's afraid of being blackmailed. What could Putin possibly have on Trump that would be worse than all the stuff that has come out on Trump over the past nine years? And has any of that stopped him?
Your second sentence nails it: he supports Putin because he admires him, loves strongmen and wishes he could be just like him.
Was Trump's NSC uniquely deferential to Russia or China? I don't remember this happening, so it sounds like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are being conned if there's a deal going on. In fact, there probably isn't a deal going on and Biden is just screwed because the Ukrainian counter-offensive failed, even though similar to Afghanistan, a second term Trump would've plausibly taken a very similar approach.
The thing Matt was right about is Saudi and Israeli interests; they really do like Trump more than Biden. But the US really does care about keeping cheap oil and trade going in the Middle East, and part of the Dems still agree with the GOP on this. So they've curiously discussed this obvious foreign influence to get Trump reelected far less than Russia, where the evidence is much weaker.
Are Democrats moving on from the Middle East because of Iranian propaganda? Who knows. But I think sticking to the facts is more useful than Hunter Biden/Russiagate/whatever investigation the opposition party is launching getting ahead of evidence. Even in an election year where everyone has clear interests.
I don't know if Trump's NSC was uniquely deferential to Putin or Xi but Trump absolutely was. Just look at what he said.
I don't understand what you're saying about Ukraine -- Trump would have taken a similar approach? If that's what you're claiming it strains belief past the breaking point.
Israel and Saudi Arabia clearly prefer Trump and say so openly. What they don't do, unlike Putin, is break our laws and use various forms of subterfuge to anonymously screw with our electoral process.
I don't think Democrats are moving on from the Middle East because of Iranian propaganda. (I can't imagine how that would work.) Democrats are moving away from the Middle East because of two horrific wars (honorary Middle East membership for Afghanistan) and because, as we move away from fossil fuels, our last strategic interest in that region is disappearing. Oh, and because they hate supporting authoritarian and right-wing rulers.
It's telling nobody ever says we should judge Trump's approach towards China based primarily on what he said about Xi Jinping. It wouldn't really help us understand what his NSC or Congressional Republicans think about China.
"What they don't do, unlike Putin, is break our laws and use various forms of subterfuge to anonymously screw with our electoral process". No they don't need to; in the Saudi case the bribery is pretty out in the open. $2 billion to Trump's son in law. And as for Trump himself:
"From December 2016 through February of 2017, Saudi government lobbyists reserved blocks of rooms at Trump’s D.C. hotel, “paying for an estimated 500 nights at the luxury hotel in just three months,” and spending at least $270,000 at the property in total. Trump continued to benefit from Saudi business in office. When the Saudi Crown Prince visited New York in 2018, several members of his entourage stayed at the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan. Earnings from the room rentals caused revenue to spike 13 percent, putting the hotel “back in the black” after two years of decline. Weeks before the murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi government, Trump’s business partner in Indonesia signed an agreement for a Saudi-backed company to work on a development with Trump-branded elements. Asked about the deal, “an official with the Saudi-tied firm also said they expect to be involved in the development of a different Trump-branded project in the future.” Trump returned the favor, shielding Saudi leaders from criticism after Khashoggi’s murder and going so far as to allege Khashoggi was tied to terrorist groups."
I hope the $2 billion bribe to Jared at least wins his vote. :)
None of that helps Trump get elected. It would certainly guide policy *if* he is elected. That seems like a classic Middle East approach to me.
I would respect them more if they were paid to support Russia. Being members of a fanatical cult is a hell of a drug.
I think the better Ockham's Razor explanation is even more troubling. The reason why US conservatives support Putin is that Putin is a type of conservative, and US conservatives share a lot of agreement with his political philosophy. The further right you go, the more people would favor a Russian system of government over the system of government we currently have in the US.
Some of the may be getting paid too, I don't rule it out. But that doesn't mean they disagree with the ideology. It's much easier to get someone to accept a bribe to support someone or something that they already sympathize with.
I could be wrong but I’m not sure how much dems are underplaying their hand wrt Russia. I have some center friends and mostly left friends and we talk about politics quite a bit these days and I’m always interested to hear why they vote left and are so worried about the right. Out of all the major issues- race, economics, social justice in general, abortion, Palestine, Russia- by far the issue they care least about is Russia. Very nonscientific but I really think between abortion and Russia people care about 100x more about abortion and it takes so much explaining and energy to hammer home the Russia issue (bc many just aren’t paying attention to it) that it might not be worth the investment.
>Putin is already indebted to Iran for helping him out with lots of missiles and to China for being by far his country’s most important ally.<
This is the part that's the real head-scratcher for me, and pushes the GOP's embrace of Putin's Russia firmly into the realm of cognitive dissonance. It just doesn't make sense. Sure, for some reactionary Republicans of the Bannonite-Miller faction, there's the blood and soil appeal of Putin's rule. But these weirdos are hardly the whole GOP, and, more importantly, the Republican Party in its entirety is deeply hostile to Communism, and Communist China. But Russia is China's (by far!) staunchest and most important ally, providing Xi and the CCP with huge quantities of grain, hydrocarbons, minerals—and also a lethally nuked up military ally.
The GOP has become ardently pro Putin because of the personal preferences of their God-Emperor Donald Trump. But it makes no *strategic* sense whatsoever in terms of national interest (or even in terms of the narrower ideological goals of movement conservatism). The Republican Party is simply barking mad on the topic of Russia.
I think we underestimate how many elite GOP officials and pundits have drunk the Trump kool-aid. Yes many know he’s a POS and will apparently say so privately. But I suspect many really think he’s subject to a “witch hunt”.
One of the more noxious ideas from 2016 is that Trump’s super fans are almost entirely the white working class or non college educated. And yes that clearly is a group he probably has most appeal. And I’ll admit to a certain degree I was a bit this way, but there was a belief that conservative “elites” know better and their support is entirely transactional. What people entirely underestimated is number of elites that are “true believers”.
By the same coin, I think your take underestimates how many of them are true believers in *winning*. The Trump win was a major windfall for them, and they stick with the movement because they think their loyalty can buy them another win.
None of them want to be caught flat footed again by another surprise win.
"many of them are true believers in *winning*"
You would think so. But apart from a black swan squeaking through to the presidency in 2016, Trump has been electoral bad news for the Republicans in every election since then. The problem (for fixing the Republican party) is that most of those defeats have been close, so the Republicans don't learn the lesson. They're like bettors on a losing streak who think one more roll of the dice will change their luck as they see their money slowly dribbling away.
Completely agreed. To be clear, I never wanted to imply that their worldview was correct, I just pointed out that they don't want to miss out on another bonanza. You're absolutely correct that they're tantalized by the prospect of squeaking out wins despite the rest of the country hating them.
>I think we underestimate how many elite GOP officials and pundits have drunk the Trump kool-aid.<
I think it's mostly fear of primary challenges.
I think fear of primary challenges is how they start, but once someone says something in public enough times, they tend to convince themself to believe it.
It's just really hard to buck the community you live in. Read David French about living in red Tennessee or the Tim Alberta book.
The increasing primacy of “anti-wokeness” in right-leaning thought probably plays a role here too. The bundle of ideas, practices, language norms, etc that get classified as “wokism” are mostly from the US (eg: intersectionality and critical race theory came out of American legal academia), so if you sincerely think that it’s the greatest threat to civilization (which a lot of right-wingers seem to), you’ll be less concerned about foreign adversaries, and maybe even inclined to ally with them.
The Trump Cult takes its position on Putin and Russia based on what Trump wants, rather than having its own opinion like it does with vaccines.
I've some recent first hand experience with the pro-Russia stance from some of the members of my extended family.
And while I don't think they've really thought it through much at all, the only explanation that 'connects the dots' among their disparate views is that they've basically gone isolationist and are overwhelming focused on the culture wars and making sure that 'our country isn't lost'. Justified or not, it is causing a lot of real despair.
The fact that Putin nominally touts traditional social values makes him an ally. Or at least an enemy of an enemy.
Though 10 years ago they were firmly anti-Russian and mad that Romney was being jeered at by Obama and liberals for saying that Russia was our main geopolitical adversary. So maybe there really is nothing rational connecting the dots. Maybe it's just Trump.
I don't think isolationism is the answer. I live in Vietnam. I have a friend who grew up in South Africa, then lived in England for a decade, before moving here for work a decade ago.
US isolationism has nothing to do with him because he has no dog in this fight.
He's pro-Trump soft on Russia.
I think, at the end of the day, there's just a very strong lure of "my team". Quarterback plays for a division rival and you hate him and talk up his flaws. Then one day he gets traded to you...you don't switch your fandom. You just switch your talking points about the quarterback.
For my friend, at least, it is entirely the same thing. Since he's obviously not voting. But he still cares deeply about the upcoming US election and talks about Biden, Trump, and culture war stuff in the US nearly every time we catch up.
I can't help but think many in the US are the same.
I don't think they are naturally that inclined towards isolationism, but kind of fall back into it as a defensive posture because they are so focused on the culture war stuff.
"Get our own house in order before engaging heavily with the outside world" kind of thing.
But, once again, it could just be Trump.
The Republicans *seem* to be isolationist. But if so, why do they continue to support high defense spending? What's the purpose of the big military?
At least in the 1930s, the Republicans were *both* isolationist and against military spending, so points for consistency.
To me America First means an America willing to use it's (imagined) might to throw its muscle around to achieve short-run material and symbolic gains. Trump threatened to pull out of NATO, but he also massively increased US bombing of the Middle East, compared to his predecessor. He doesn't support neocon-nation building, but he does want to just steal Iraq's oil. It's a dumb, incredibly short-sighted, and self-defeating impulse, but it makes sense. It thinks that America should be more of a bully on the world stage, and that'll get us what we want.
"Rah rah America, no one better mess with us or else?"
Nah, isolationism has been at the conservative grassroots ever since the Iraq War shifted to being a political failure.
I was just talking last weekend with one of my relatives who's a veteran, and is now working a civilian job where he's still in the presence of other veterans and active service members. Suffice to say, that's a crowd that defaults to leaning heavily GOP. He's been trying really hard to point out all the crazy things Trump says about NATO, Russia/Putin, and so on to get them to see Joe Biden as the lesser of two evils. So far, sounds like his efforts have been mixed, which was actually better than I was expecting to hear.
At least among my extended family, everyone admits that Trump is a horrible person.
They still see him as the best hope against teh libs, and as being unjustly persecuted. (It doesn't make sense, but that's tribalism brain)
The idea that conservatives are persecuted is more deeply embedded than tribalism. It’s such an extremely long-running narrative it may actually be older than Biden.
I wish I could force them to sit through a documentary of what happened in Bucha.
No, I think it's actually very rational. Putin is a conservative, so it's unsurprising that American conservatives root for him. Of course there are many policy disagreements between American and Russian conservatives, which is only natural since our societies are very different. But they're aligned on the most important policy goals - for example, that rich people should pay low taxes and never have to face criticism or judgment from the non-rich. Plus, many conservatives in both countries are not mainly motivated by policy per se, so much as by their convictions about the proper structure of government. The further right you go, the more that people agree with Putin's political philosophy and prefer his system of government to our own. If you took a conservative out of 19th-century Europe and showed him the American and Russian systems of government in 2024, he'd find both to be a little strange but he'd clearly prefer Russia's.
The weird thing is not that conservatives support and admire Putin today, but that they didn't 12+ years ago. I think that was just because they didn't know as much about Putin back then. If you take their ideological priors as given, they were ignorant and wrong back then, and they are correct now.
Eh, they were staunchly anti-Russia in the past. What's changed?
I guess the fact that Trump is in fact connected to Russia makes this make sense. They like Trump, so now they like Russia.
I have to wonder how far along things have to get before Very Serious Conservatives like Douthat, Stephens et. al. cut the crap and actively start campaigning against the KG-I mean GOP and actively campaigning FOR Democrats to utterly defeat them. The GOP is clearly in need of a reckoning and the only way the reckoning can occur is once Trump is utterly defeated and thoroughly discredited.
The analogy I like to use is that of a neighborhood. The GOP family allowed Cousin MAGA to move in. Problem is Cousin MAGA is an arsonist and burned the house down. For some strange reason Cousin MAGA now just parties in the burned out shell of the old GOP house and is probably gonna start burning the rest of the neighborhood soon. The responsible members of family GOP are standing outside talking to family Democrat about how terrible this all is. Democrat offers them a place to stay and help rebuilding their old house once Cousin MAGA is handled, but GOP just finding things to complain about like wall colors and shrubbery and making snide remarks about how really it's the poor landscaping in Democrat house that let Cousin MAGA do all this.
Anyways. Fable over. It's maddening. Kudos to the FSB for the most successful psyop ever.
Douthat, Stephens et al don’t represent a nontrivial real-world constituency. They have jobs because a significant subset of prestige publication readers like ideological diversity but wouldn’t want to deal with the intellectual dishonesty and general unpleasantness that you’d get if you put somebody actually representative of contemporary American right politics (eg: Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza) on the op-ed page.
If Douthat and Stephens just became Democrats, they couldn’t fill the fantasy of intellectually engaging and reasonable opposition anymore. Douthat is a good enough writer and has an interesting enough point of view that he would still get work, but he wouldn’t fulfill the same niche.
"I have to wonder how far along things have to get before Very Serious Conservatives like Douthat, Stephens et. al. cut the crap and actively start campaigning against the KG-I mean GOP and actively campaigning FOR Democrats to utterly defeat them."
There are a bunch of "Very Serious Conservatives" who are already doing that -- Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol, etc. -- so it seems like that is in progress as we speak.
That's fair - I just think we need like Mitch McConnell, Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney types to get on board. Bigger fish who in their hearts loathe Trump and Trumpism but haven't been able to muster the courage to act in a meaningful way.
Mitt Romney became the first same-party Senator to _ever_ vote to convict on impeachment. Could he do more? Sure - he could always do more - but I'm not sure how much it would help.
McConnell is the one I blame here.
He could endorse and campaign for Joe Biden
That's true.... although if he were going to do that, he should wait until Biden and Trump are the actual nominees.
Incidentally, he ruled out endorsing Haley or anyone else because he didn't want to sink their chances.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/10/mitt-romney-2024-presidential-election
I think the only way Douthat and crew officially support Biden and the Democratic Party is if the Democratic Party disavows pursuing radical progressive policy change until the threat of Trump has passed. That isn't going to happen, so Douthat and crew will continue voting third-party/write-in.
I think Douthat's position at the New York Times depends on his being an iconoclast and an Explainer of the Others to befuddled New York Times readers. I bet in his heart of hearts he would prefer to see Biden win over Trump but that won't pay the bills, and if he said so publicly he would just become a somewhat more centrist Jamelle Bouie and why would the NYT still need him?
Douthat’s purpose has been to pretend there’s a real debate about issues, rather than alignment with Trump on whatever Trump does or says, ever since 2016.
There are real issues to debate! It’s a shame that no one on the Republican side of electoral politics wants to do it.
I mean, there are real issues but there’s no possible debate about them because only one side actually has them as a priority at all.
You can see this in the scale of backlash, really. There is a kind of agent-less quality to it because there’s no cohesive strategy or leadership. Look at how fast Republicans get surprise wins they immediately hate having. Literally: tired of winning.
We have issues the same way other countries have corruption: they’re a byproduct of the people in charge but there’s not really a discussion possible.
> Democrat offers them a place to stay and help rebuilding their old house once Cousin MAGA is handled, but GOP just finding things to complain about like wall colors and shrubbery and making snide remarks
Back in real life, Democrats have taken the opportunity to move significantly to the left during the Trump era. You could imagine some kind of Grand Bargain party that ran the rightists from the Obama administration and won 60% of the vote to shut Trump out, but that's not what we have, and there's no chance that's what we're going to get. Revealed preference is that the DNC prefers shifting the Overton Window at the expense of an elevated risk of Trump being elected.
I'm with you until the "DNC" part. There is no big dial party leaders are turning to decide how left-wing to become. Just like the Republicans, Democratic leaders are being pulled to the extreme by small donors, hyper-online activist groups, etc.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-parties-cant-decide
I definitely take your point, but I'll hold firm on using "DNC" as long as they are boosting Trumpy candidates to increase the odds of the Dem winning the election. Not interested in litigating whether it's "fair" or whatever, but just pointing out that the strategy here is still definitely that the risk of Trumpism is outweighed by the benefits to the party winning more marginal seats.
Wait, though, that's a totally different question from the DNC moving left or not. I do see how it's inconsistent with a possible grand bargain with anti-Trump Republicans, but then again, Peter Meijer wasn't going to vote against Kevin McCarthy, right?
I don't think it's totally different. When it comes to the question "are you willing to trade a higher % chance of Trump victory for a lower % chance that you control the NLRB," the answer has been no. I'm not judging that, just pointing out that there isn't a world where the Douthats are going to sign on for the Democratic platform on abortion just because Trump sucks.
I think that's exactly why it *is* totally different! The DLC wants to win elections. There are two ways to increase your chances in elections: run more electable candidates, and face less electable opponents. Boosting Trumpy candidates is an attempt to face less electable opponents. That's the *opposite* of moving left, which makes the Dems' candidates less electable, not more. When Democrats boost John Gibbs over Pete Meijer, they're accepting a greater risk of Trumpist power in exchange for a greater chance of Democrats holding the House. When the Sunrise Movement makes the Biden Administration swear off fossil fuels or whatever, they're accepting a greater chance of Trumpist power (because that's who's running against the Democrats) AND a reduced chance of Democrats holding power, in exchange for getting candidates to take the more left-wing position. Boosting Trumpy candidates is tactical; forcing candidates to take unpalatable positions is anti-tactical.
Also, although I continue to maintain it's a separate question, my understanding is that the Democrats' method of "boosting" these Trumpier candidates isn't to, like, funnel money into their war chests Iran-Contra style. It's to run ads saying "this candidate is totally wackaloon," which the candidate is. It's not Democrats' fault that the GOP primary electorate prefers wackaloon candidates in many places. As long as it's the case, maybe it's better to just rip off the band-aid? How much ability will Meijer have to caucus with Democrats if he's holding a seat where Republican primary voters prefer someone wackaloon?
This is complaining about the shrubbery. Our house isn't burned down. We don't have an arsonist in our family. Deal with it.
I cannot possibly roll my eyes at this comment hard enough. There's no "dealing with it," the Very Serious Conservatives are not going to join your movement just because you came up with a more colorful description of Trump. They really do care about abortion, it's not an act.
Do they care more about abortion than living in an authoritarian country? It's all a question of priorities.
Yes, of course. Just like the Democrats care more about Lina Kahn running the FTC than they care about living in an authoritarian country. Obviously nobody *actually* thinks Trump can institute an authoritarian state, because otherwise they would be offering compromises to their nearer opponents in order to make common cause to defeat him.
Who is "nobody"? Democrats negotiated a border bill and Republicans killed it because Trump told them to.
It's funny, I actually used the metaphor of a crazy neighbor burning down a house and threatening the neighborhood when negotiations about the debt ceiling were occurring.
Hence my question for this week's mailbag. The husk that is the current GOP cannot hold people like Douthat, the Dispatch crew and most of the "traditional" conservatives even at the National Review. They won't join the Democratic Party -- only the Bulwark people have -- so will they create an alternative to the MAGA GOP or remain disconnected from any possible representation?
Currently, Trump is capturing about 76% of the vote in national primary polls. I think that the 24% of the Republican electorate not currently going for him would, at least in the near term, a de facto ceiling on an anti-Trump conservative party’s support, especially if it was as ideologically right-wing as the NRO is. (Indeed, they’d likely be to Trump’s right on abortion and entitlements). With about 12% of the overall electorate, this hypothetical party would have a hard time winning outside of a small group of geographies unless they pivoted really hard to the center.
It's about 60% in most recent primaries. Nikki Haley has a substantial following in Republican primaries.
Eh, that’s only been true in her home state and in New Hampshire, where unusual demographics and an open primary structure helped her a lot. She’s doing okay for a protest candidate, but people who like her and hate Trump shouldn’t self-deceive too much.
I feel like this is an example of where left-of-center discomfort of singing America's praises has come back to bite us.
It shouldn't be uncomfortable to describe Russia as a shithole country. Because it is.
Correct.
The popularity of European-inspired leftism has been a disaster for this country. It just imports issues we simply don’t have and makes them central parts of left identity.
It’s not just the left, either. The US right has been wholesale importing European right-wing ideologies lately as well. But it’s a much longer standing dynamic on the left.
What? European leftism means - at least in a Scandinavian context - muscular social democracy that is patriotic, populist, popular, center-left on economics and centrist on cultural issues, immigration and crime. As well as electorally extremely successful.
It’s American leftism that is all about identity politics, wokeness, open borders and defunding the police. When European leftist parties import these ideas they lose.
Yes, definitely.
Importation of European views on nationalism is a real problem. Everything about the usual objections aside, it’s just irrelevant here.
Nationalism addresses real questions in Europe, therefore has real tradeoffs and issues. It doesn’t do any work for Americans, the rhetoric around it is what’s attractive. But for exactly that reason, it’s just a dry hole, a deep waste of elite social capacity that’s been invested in arguing about nationalism.
That's not the right axis of criticism of the metro stuff (it really is massively better than any US system). To counter it, you need to point to other scary foreign lands (allied with us) that do it even better, while being democracies
Tbh Vancouver has a better transit system than anywhere in the US ex-NY and is even less "carceral" on drugs than the US west coast. Because we suck so much, you really can improve while satisfying any set of desires!
Right, it's a giant gas station with a GDP per capita that's lower than Guyana's. It's a shit hole by any reasonable definition.
This is just the "flood the zone with shit" strategy at work.
These haters just need something new to talk about every day, and it doesn't need to hold up. The fact checks don't make it into their bubble.
Instead, low-information voters are left with the impression "Every day I hear details of Biden committing more crimes. Most corrupt president ever."
Tucker Carlson’s Russia peons are truly mind-bogglingly stupid. Not just in the sense that talking up an oppressive revanchist dictatorship is totally oppositional to the values he claims to espouse (and which America stands for), but also in the sense that the arguments he is making are extremely dumb. Pouting to Potemkin villages as proof of quality of life or suggesting a fortnight’s groceries for $100USD are a good deal (in a country where that represents 10% of monthly income) are asinine.
Also 1 USD = 92 Rubles. Of course stuff is cheap at that exchange rate.
Can confirm after a trip to Poland a couple weeks ago, they are scared shitless that they are next, and firmly believe that Trump winning will make this far more likely.
Thanks for the report! What had you traveling to Poland?
Work, have a lot of team members in Poland. Was worried about the weather but it was really not bad!
Seems like the weather would be similar to the Upper Midwest or Upper New England? That can be bad in the winter, but could be worse.
A lot of Russian misinfo has legs because it’s convenient for the US right’s overall worldview as well as its political priorities. “Joe Biden is corrupt” and “this foreign country is a utopia because it’s anti-woke” validate their core beliefs in the same way that the utopian Cuba narrative validated Marxist-Leninist beliefs. Misinformation is a demand-driven phenomenon, and the FSB has gotten better at identifying what sort of narratives Americans are hungry to buy.
Would add that an overlooked reason why social media has been an accelerant for misinfo is that it lets liars rapidly prototype and test out new narratives and see which ones stick. The KGB or Nixon’s dirty tricks team could plant fake stories, but they couldn’t assess which ones would quickly gain traction in real time.
We’re making it too complicated; it’s the Republican version of “but her emails”. Think about what happened right before the 2020 election, and the fact that the key aspects of that Hunter Biden story turned out to be true.
Imagine: right before the election, the entire “normal” media and a bunch of guys from intelligence services deemed a negative story about Donald Trump Jr to be Russian misinformation, social media companies wouldn’t even let you link the story, then Trump won the election and the story turned out to be true. At what point would Democrats believe a story about Donald Trump Jr ACTUALLY IS Russian misinformation? At what point would a Congressional Democrat tell their voters “actually, this time . . .”?
Not to mention maybe one or two other “huge if true” Russian stories that didn’t pan out. Also, after the FISA issue and the Nunes memo mess, you have to wonder if there isn’t a very deep and real mistrust between Congressional Republicans and the FBI.
The Hunter Biden story *is* a Russian operation, though. The emails may be real. If you believe the story of how they came to light, please come to my poker night! I'd like to discuss with you some lucrative real estate investment opportunities.
Except that, if the contents of Hunter's computer are real, then it doesn't seem to matter how they came to light?
Look, if I'm selling you diet pills, are you more or less likely to think they work if I tell you they're from the planet Zoltan? The people scolding the media for not immediately swallowing the Hunter Biden laptop are asking them to believe that, with all the horseshit around, there must be a pony somewhere.
Your comment I was responding to seemed to suggest that the e-mails should be disregarded regardless of whether they are real or not because of how they were recovered.
I conceded they're real, just like John Podesta's emails and Trump's leaked tax returns. I'm just responding to the assertion the story "turned out to be true". It did, if you ignore the fake parts.
To anyone discussing the "story" of any of those documents, they're referring to the contents of the documents, not how they were supposedly discovered.
I'm suspicious of any kind of dirty story that comes out right before the election, and that applies to the Donald Jr scenario. There is simply not enough time to vet and properly process the information before the election and so I would be happy to see it not contaminate the airwaves.
Chuck Grassley in particular disgusts me. Far from being an elder statesman, he laundered false Russia propaganda after the FBI very publicly told him not to trust it, and has yet to issue even the slightest mea culpa. It’s borderline treasonous.
"There’s a school of thought in Eastern Europe which holds that if Ukraine falls, Lithuania and Poland are inevitably next. That seems a little bit overblown to me."
Russia has all the time in the world to move to the next target - the US is not confidence inspiring in their commitment to alliance right now.
Noah Smith is calling for Poland (and South Korea and Japan) to develop a nuclear arsenal. I can't really say I disagree with him.
Noah Smith would happily get us all killed defending Taiwan. He enjoys traveling there, clearly there’s some cultural affinity and his thinking is more sentimental than rooted in American material interests.
I disagree with Smith on his more hawkish pronouncement regarding Taiwan. But in general, the fact that more of our allies possess nuclear weapons (if it became a fact) should make direct US involvement in a kinetic (and potentially nuclear) war with China or Russia less, not more, likely.
If anyone needs nuclear weapons, it’s Taiwan. The rub is how to get them without being blown up first. Furthermore, the fact that Taiwan would benefit from conjuring nuclear weapons out of think air does not imply the U.S. would benefit from providing them.
>If anyone needs nuclear weapons, it’s Taiwan.<
That ship sailed several decades ago, as I'm sure you know. But one of the arguments used by hawks to justify sending America to war with China in the event of a Taiwan invasion is the old domino theory: If it's Taiwan tomorrow, it'll be Japan next month. I doubt even someone as rash as Xi Jinping would be willing to attack a nuclear armed Japan. This is why I think a highly limited, prudent expansion of the nuclear club might well be in the interest of the United States. Up to now, much of the safety of the free world has depended on the willingness of US leadership to subject its cities to nuclear attack, because only two of our allies possess their own deterrent. I think we may have reached a point where that's no longer in America's interest.
I don't think expanding the number of people capable of unleashing nuclear war is going to ever make people more safe. Nuclear weapons are primarily useful in the hands of crazy people who we think will really use them to get to bully others not to stop bullying.
Ok I’ll bite, why wouldn’t being very clear that we’re willing to trade New York and Los Angeles for Taipei work to ensure not a single boot ever falls on the island and we never go to war over it.
Where is the benefit to ambiguity? It seems to me that the lack of clear, credible we view Taipei as unambiguously free and are willing to end the human habitability of Earth over it would end a lot of the congestion.
And if we’re not interested in doing the whole mutually assured destruction we should be clear about that too and let these countries develop their own defense. It seems we’ve reached a stage where maybe is too dangerous.
I don’t think that position would ever be credible. We are too chicken to send an ambassador to Taipei. Why would we die defending it? Even if one president were absolutely committed to such a policy, he don’t be in office forever.
Also, assume your proposed policy has a 95% chance of success. That would still make it a horrible, evil, sanguinary idea. A 5% chance of nuclear war is worse than a 100% chance of the CCP controlling Taiwan.
>> A 5% chance of nuclear war is worse than a 100% chance of the CCP controlling Taiwan.
The CCP controlling Taiwan means they get to say where every chip produced there goes and how much it costs.
It also means that every EUV tool on the island is right there for the taking, and will be reverse-engineered within the decade.
So you can basically say goodbye to every chip advantage we have left. And winning the Second Cold War will become an even fight instead of a clear win for the West. Congratulations!
>The CCP controlling Taiwan means they get to say where every chip produced there goes and how much it costs.<
Not so. Taiwan's chip sector collapses if CCP takes that island. And no, I'm not referring to damage to fabs (though that could be a factor). Taiwan's advanced chip sector is the pinnacle of a complex supply and support chain involving inputs from multiple countries. These include parts, machinery, tools, software, and technical consulting/expertise. These inputs would cease.
The world is not a game of risk where a country’s productive capacity is transferred, completely intact, to its conquerer.
Is there any historical example of a conqueror using the industrial plant of a subject nation to huge effect? Germany in 1917 benefitted from expropriating crops from western Russia, it benefitted from Saar basin coal mines, but it’s not as if occupied Paris cranked out advanced weapons for the Wehrmacht. Subjugating them was enough of a challenge, even the Nazis came nowhere near turning the French or Dutch or Poles into an efficient workforce in cutting edge industries.
I don't really worry about China getting control of Taiwanese semiconductor facilities. I really doubt that China would be able to take the facilities intact; if the Taiwanese don't destroy them, the US almost certainly will. China will also be under incredble embargo and sanctions that make it very difficult to operate these facilities.
I do think that a bunch of globe-level critical infrastructure being concentrated in Taiwan is a very bad thing, and I've thought for a while that getting high-end semiconductor manufacturing spun up somewhere safer (the US, more stable parts of Latin America and Africa, who knows) would be an excellent policy.
I don’t entirely disagree with your second graph. But if that is the case I think we should support in our allies in East Asia developing their own nuclear deterrent quickly. Especially since the only reason Taiwan doesn’t have them themselves was our assurances.
What I think is fundamentally dangerous though is ambiguity. Maybe it made sense at some point but I think we need to decide if it’s more like West Berlin or Hong Kong. I think it’s more like West Berlin and should be something we’re willing to go to the mattresses for.
But like leaving it in the maybe zone seems to encourage the possibility of war breaking out.
>why wouldn’t being very clear that we’re willing to trade New York and Los Angeles for Taipei work<
Three reasons:
1) Because there's realistically no way to truly be *very clear* (Xi might think we're bluffing), and moreover Taiwan is not a treaty ally of the United States.
2) Because accidents happen. Wars can result from miscalculations.
3) A CCP leader in a tight spot in terms of domestic politics might possibly conclude risking a nuclear war passes cost-benefit analysis if the alternative is regime change. Just because you and I are sane human beings who believe nuclear weapons should never again be used in war doesn't mean Xi Jinping believes this, or absolutely rules out their use when a critical national priority is on the line (Taiwan is just such a priority for most Chinese).
For the record I don't think there's a feasible way for *Taiwan* to acquire a nuclear arsenal or for the US to help it do so. But Japan (and SK, and a couple of others) is a different story.
Poland has other allies with nuclear capabilities. There's no substitute for America in the Western alliance but weaker allies holding on for dear life till Uncle Sam deigns to step in decisively is how prior global conflicts were won.
Seems unlikely to me that France or Britain would start a nuclear war to save Lithuania if the Russians roll in. Of course the Russian roll in capacity seems highly questionable currently.
I would have said before the Ukraine invasion that NATO was something of a bluff and that had Russia invaded Estonia (for instance), we would have reacted similarly to an invasion of Ukraine-- money and weapons, but no troops and no direct war with Russia.
But I suspect the Ukraine invasion has changed that. I assume if Russia invades a NATO country it's World War III now. (Of course I also don't think Russia will invade a NATO country, especially after Ukraine, which has been a fiasco on their end.)
For what it's worth, Japan at least is capable of building nuclear weapons very, very quickly if they decided to. There are a lot of people who think that Japan has already built (but not tested) nuclear weapons and that JAXA exists in part to prepare Japan for nuclear weapon delivery.
I suspect there are a few events that would cause Japan to build nuclear weapons (if they haven't already) and quietly make their existence known; China invading Taiwan is probably one of those events.
Yep. "A screwdriver turn away" is the phrase that comes to mind.
If Trump wins and I was the leader of those nations, I would most definitely consider it.
My guess is that being "screwdriver turn" nuclear powers is ideal for them. If everyone considers it likely they could put together in handful of nuclear weapons in 90 days or so, they get a lot of deterrent benefit without the hassle of actually being nuclear powers.
Is that a thing? To establish a deterrent, don't you have to prove your nuclear weapons work, that they can fitted onto means of delivery, and that you could actually put them on target?
In other words, you actually have to become a nuclear power.
I'd think that depends entirely how credible it seems that your country could have precisely designed and engineered everything to make a working bomb, etc. If the President of Sao Tomé & Principe says the country has everything necessary to build a working nuclear bomb in three hours, I'm not finding that credible until they successfully test one. If the Prime Minister of Japan or the Chancellor of Germany says their country has everything necessary to build a nuclear bomb in three hours, I think anyone reasonably familiar with the scientific and industrial capacity of those countries would need to treat that as being true when making strategic plans until confirmed otherwise.
Yes, and I would add to this that I don't think delivery would be a showstopper either. The B61 nuclear bomb was developed in 1963 and can be carried by a variety of aircraft flown by Japan/ROK/Poland.
I wouldn't be as sanguine as Matt about the Baltic States. Putin clearly feels the same way about the former USSR that China feels about Taiwan: that it's all rightfully Russian territory and needs to be reclaimed at some point.
Of course part of Poland was once Russian too...
Agreed, I feel that the Baltics are a very dangerous flashpoint. All of the danger signs are there: former parts of the USSR, meaningful Russophone populations, land borders with Russia, small populations, strategically important region for Russia.
Russia would be mad to attack NATO members, as this would almost certainly kick off WWIII. But if it happens anywhere, the Baltics will probably be it. I do think that we have at least a five years before the Russian military will be in any condition to even attempt such operations.
While this is true, Putin only has so long to live. The next neo-tsar might not share his revanchism.
Yeah, this is a major contributor to why I roll my eyes at Noah Smith and others who claim Russia is going to move on to conquer Poland if anything less than total rollback happens in Ukraine. Russia might still manage to conquer Ukraine if Ukraine doesn't receive enough western help (and the western powers *should* keep helping Ukraine, I stress), but Russia's capacity for large-scale military operations beyond its borders has basically been destroyed for at least the next decade. (Even pro-Russian sources, AFAICT, effectively concede that Russia is still losing AFVs drastically faster than it can produce new ones and that the Russians are only maintaining as much of an AFV force in the field as they are by rehabbing mothballed T-62s and older tanks. While semi-functional as pillboxes to hold territory, those would be absolutely useless for blitzkrieging to Warsaw vs. NATO armor and airpower.)
Noah has even claimed that Putin wants to attack Berlin. I like his analysis and style of writing on most subjects but on foreign policy he’s frequently an alarmist.
Just to steelman Noah's position, though, Russia will still be able to do more 2014-style invasions. Drezner just pointed out the other day that the war is the only thing keeping Russia's economy going right now.
Thus, the day he agrees to ANY kind of cease-fire in Ukraine, Putin will be staring down the barrel of a deep recession unless he can redeploy his military into a new conflict.
Gotta say that I'm ex ante skeptical of the "war is keeping the economy going" point primarily because it seems like the broken-windows fallacy writ on the scale of a nation-state.
There are presumably stories you can tell about war as a form of macroeconomic stimulus to boost too-low nationwide demand and make use of spare industrial capacity and labor availability, but those seem a lot more convincing in circumstances where you're either less demographically constrained or at a minimum can count on significant technological development to boost TFP as a side effect. At the end of the day it seems relevant that all of this productive output and possible labor force is being blown up for no economic return in the fields of Ukraine.
It's hard to predict what will happen, and I hope a ceasefire is reached one of these days, but it will be better for everyone who opposes tyranny if the eventual deal is agreed to by a Russia that is a spent force. That doesn't look to be the case right now.
"Russia's capacity for large-scale military operations beyond its borders has basically been destroyed for at least the next decade."
I see claims like this a lot, but I don't think the evidence supports it. Russia really has gone all in on a war economy and is producing and refurbishing weapons at a pretty good clip. In fact, it's going to be painful for them to go back to a non-war economy --- both because demobilizing an economy usually is painful (e.g. the recession of 1945) and because some parts of the economy really are hit by sanctions. Edit: and also because a lot of the best and the brightest left.
WRT T-62 tanks, Russia still has a large number of mothballed T-72 and T-80 tanks, which were their main tanks before the invasion. They've mostly been leaving those in storage and pulling older tanks (like T-62) out of storage; I've seen it speculated that's because the older tanks are mechanically and technologically simpler (no autoloader, no gas-turbine engine, etc.), so they're easier to get running again. But if Russia gets a breather, I'm sure they'd switch to refurbishing their T-72s and T-80s --- and could probably do that at a good clip. It would take nowhere near a decade to return their active tank forces to their pre-2022 levels (~3.3k operational tanks).
I'll also make a controversial claim: the Russian military is currently stronger than it was before the invasion. This is in some ways a low bar; the pre-invasion military looked good on paper but was actually pretty poorly trained and commanded. The current Russian military is also poorly trained and commanded, but it is both larger and more experienced. For all their faults, they also do seem to be learning lessons from the conflict, and if given a breather, they could improve their training and organization.
What happens next of course depends on what happens in Ukraine --- how much Russia is or isn't ground down --- and what happens to sanctions after the war is over. But Russia is really geared up for war and has a lot of soldiers. Europe has neither. If there's ever a time to invade the Baltic states, it would be relatively soon (1-3 years) after the war in Ukraine is over, and I would not dismiss the possibility that they'd decide to strike while the iron is hot.
"Nizhniy Tagil has been cranking out T-90s like nobody’s business since last summer/fall."
I haven't seen anything suggesting that. Everything I've seen in even the last couple months has indicated that the Russians are producing fewer than 500 new tanks a year. See, e.g.:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/01/10/russia-might-be-running-out-of-tanks/?sh=7f6d367a1027
He's only in his early 70s. He could be in power for another twenty years. I certainly hope that's not the case. But "hoping for the death of the tyrant" isn't a viable plan.
A personal anecdote: back in the early 70s, when I was a young adult, my best friend got a scholarship to study in the USSR for a semester. He was also a photographer and when he came home he showed us pictures of Moscow and in particular many of the subway stations that he'd seen. (Given the paranoia of that country, I've always wondered about this American kid taking pictures, but I suspect his handlers were making sure he was taking the "right" pictures.) After, at that point, a lifetime of anti-USSR propaganda, it was a shock to see how incredibly beautiful the city and those stations were. He didn't become an apologist for the USSR, since as a poli sci major he was quite aware of the history which it seems Tucker isn't, but he definitely had a respect for the culture that built those things.
This is a well-trodden path on US China stuff as well. Visit -> realize US collective impression of the country is complete nonsense -> become (often overly) skeptical of Western coverage in general
Yes, this is one of the top reasons Tyler Cowen gives that people should do a lot more international travel. Of course, sadly, there's a pretty high environmental cost to that as well.
Maybe I was a weird one, but my visit to China (which was very short and centered in Shanghai) didn't change my impression too much.
I expected China to be huge and to have lots of obvious quick growth; it did have those things.
China was cleaner and less polluted than I expected. Every park seemed to have an old man employed to clean it, and they were immaculate. There also were a ton of EVs, which I suspect means the city air is much better than fifteen years ago.
The trains were great, but I expected that.
There was a lot of obvious police/surveillance presence.
There's definitely a range, but I'd guess you already had a better-calibrated view than the average person. Tons of people believe A: China is East German-style totalitarian* and/or B: China has the level of economic development it did 20 years ago.
*obvious flag here is "social credit score" memery
"There’s a school of thought in Eastern Europe which holds that if Ukraine falls, Lithuania and Poland are inevitably next. That seems a little bit overblown to me." That seems entirely reasonable to me -especially if Trump has the ability to hamstring NATO, we'll have a major land war in Eastern Europe in a decade. And you don't have to take my "right-wing by the standards of Slow Boring readers" word on it, Poland and the Baltics seem to be actively preparing for that possibility.
Within a decade? We have a major land war in Eastern Europe right now.
truth fact.
Can confirm, my colleague in Poland has had a bug-out bag packed for 2 years
People like Grassley almost confuse me the most. What's the harm in actual defying Trump. You're a bajillion years old; it's not like you have many senate campaigns to come. Heck, he's basically the conservative version of Feinstein; his cognitive faculties are almost certainly declining and probably shouldn't be in the senate anyway.
Which maybe speaks to something I brought up early, I say people like Grassley confuses me most but he really might be a "true believer". Marinate in a media diet of Fox, right wing radio and right wing think tanks enough and even the most informed person can have their brain fried.
Now that she has no chance of being the nominee, it's time for Nikki Haley to step up on this issue. She's finally become more willing to say that Trump is a terrible person, but until she starts calling out other Republicans who flack for Moscow it doesn't amount to a coherent critique.
She's been hitting Trump very hard on Ukraine/Putin. I'm not sure it's in anybody's interest for her to start calling out other Republicans, though. I suspect part of her calculus now is that, in the wake of a Trump defeat, public opinion may turn against Putin-appeasement. In that scenario Haley looks good. But it won't do her much good in terms of her political future if she's alienated the rest of the party.
I wonder if there’s a way to safely call out a few individuals.
Tucker Carlson. It's not as if he's being nice to her