Great 20 Minute Catch-Up on Putin's Nuclear Threat

Bring yourself solidly up to date on current analysis of Putin's nuclear threats via recent thoughts from two of the experts most qualified to opine...in under 20 minutes.

Tom Nichols has long been a top authority on nuclear strategy, specifically with regard to Russia. Read his thoughts, intelligent and insightful as ever, in this short essay for The Atlantic (written yesterday). He's worried but not super-worried.

Alexander Vindman lacks Nichols' decades of speciality in nuclear issues, but knows more about Putin and the Ukraine conflict. He deems nuclear deployment even less likely. Listen to this podcast interview, recorded Thursday, here (the nuclear topic starts 17 minutes and 50 seconds in).

Listening to both is edifying. Lots of stuff you likely had never considered. They're also soothing, as neither seems particularly alarmed.

Reframe or Die: The Shift of Perspective Required to Deter the Coming Civil War

Remember how a few years ago I started going on and on about framing? The detour repelled 75% of my previous readership, most of whom were here for food porn, not to hear the jolly chow guy expound abstract philosphical bullshit.

The rest of you were dubious but patient (and I thank you). You figured I was indulging some obsessive yaya, even when I linked it in with such practical concerns as human happiness, autism, addiction, depression (here and here), creativity, art, theology, messiahs, and much more.

Well, here is the opening message of this year's CPAC, the most important mainstream American conservative gathering and forum:

I shudder at the prospect of existing in 2022 America without some acquaintance with framing. Because framing is how we got here. Without that, it's just "THEY'VE ALL GONE CUCKOO!!"

Historians will shrug fatalisticaly and explain that everyone went crazy. Or, my favorite, "BRAINWASHING!!" But we're actually alive, so we have on-the-ground experience, and know that our MAGA friends and neighbors, who were always super nice people (just never never engage them on politics!), are still entirely themselves...aside for their propensity to swallow the spin and regurgitate the talking points. I have baseball superfan friends who hang up phone calls with "Go Cubs!" and live or die on a foul call. This is the same thing. Neither is crazy or brainwashed. Everyone's got a Thing, and everyone's allowed their Thing, and this is just another Thing, despite the appallingness and the danger of it all.

None of it is deep. We are still who we are, despite our Things. But, as I explained last time, light fixations, aggregated en masse, can yield heavy real-world ramifications. And, sorry folks, but everyone gets to fixate as they'd like. The bedrock individual human right is to choose your Thing, and everyone is as free to do so as you are. If you imagine restraining someone's stand - their framing; their fandom; their Thing - because "they're wrong," that's even more fascistic than what they're unwittingly supporting. In fact, brutishly imposed morality is a big part of what provoked all this.

Anyway, now do you understand why I've been stressing framing? And encouraging people to foster a more lithe perspective? It helps you understand (and perchance empathize with) people who seem to have lost their rockers. Baseball fans and proudly self-described "Domestic Terrorists" and all the rest are just playing.

Don't abstract real people into cartoons. Don't hate the seditious radicals. That's the reaction of a frozen perspective, and frozen perspective leads to civil war.

Civil wars arise when righteous-feeling people shut down any empathy for The Other within neighborhoods, social circles, and even families. Everyone in a Civil War feels righteous and sane, though no one actually is. If you feel wholly righteous and sane, you're the bad guy. You're sending us over this cliff. The MAGAs are NICE PEOPLE. If you don't know any, shame on you for your insularity! And whoever you are out there, you're believing/supporting really awful stuff (as a Centrist, I see you all clearly). The extreme right's going Fascist, but the extreme left's going Stalinist. Each clearly sees the awfulness of the opposite extreme while remaining willfully oblivious to the excesses of their own side's extreme.

It's hard to see. But it's essential to see. Hopefully I've made it easier by urging you consider how everyone frames a different world; how those framings are highly socially contagious; and how each of us owns a universal remote control that allows us to easily (easily!!!) blink into someone else's worldview.

The goal is to gain some detachment from your own worldview so you can see how fucked up it is, and, rather than crumble in despair and futility, keep enjoying your brief residency on this colorful planet - generously stocked with free oxygen, water, and sunlight - along with the other loonballs, who you love and tolerate.

Easy-peasy. If you don't freeze your perspective. If you retain your ability to reframe at will.

It will need to get much, much worse before most people (even most Slog readers) really buy it and develop some empathy for The Other and some distance from their own kookiness and some sense of perspective and priority (all of which comprise re-framing). It's all in place, all perfectly clear to anyone watching thoughtfully. But some people refuse to budge their perspective until their world blows up. Why wait for that?

Some people can spot a doomed chess position from a mile away. Others must hear "Check" hollered a bunch of times and see one player turn frowny. Still others need to actually hear the word "Checkmate". Me, I never wait around for that. In fact, as a child, I made a deliberate effort to remind my future self not to dawdle around a solved maze.

Europe at War

One demagogue psychopath rising to power can always do this. And will.

The Steven Pinkers of the world who see an irreversible moral shift away from violence and toward our "better angels" may be correct. But that's a shift of the median, while there will always be edge cases forcing themselves into power - on the backs of a dumb, aggrieved mob, ripe (per Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer") for manipulation.

Putin in Ukraine

There are three more El Salvador installments to come. But returning to global events....


It appears that, thank god, I was wrong about a two-headed move on Ukraine and Taiwan.

So then what, exactly, is going on?

Here are the theories I've heard from experts I follow (mostly via my carefully curated "Must-Read" Twitter list)

Inch by Inch
A little-reported nugget:

Georgia - 2008/ Ukraine - 2022. Putin did not even have to write a new decree. pic.twitter.com/MGnroOo4Ta

— Alona Shkrum (@Aly_shkrum) February 21, 2022

Putin's order on Ukraine is a nearly exact copy of his 2008 order on Georgia. It's almost like he's calling plays from a playbook.

It appears he's trying to reassemble something more or less like the old USSR one chunk at a time, moving slowly enough that the rest of the world isn't quite moved to shoot him in the face. Doing what he feels he can get away with.

After all, he's done unthinkable things (Crimea, Skripal, false-flag apartment bombings) and we haven't hurt him badly for it. He's emboldened to take further well-chosen, well-spaced, carefully-tuned steps, and this is the latest. He sees a weakened, divided West, and surmises that he can get away with it.

He also wants his pieces well positioned in case his minion is reinstalled to the oval office in 2024. And even if the latter chokes on a cheeseburger before then, bets are hedged via Tucker Carlson - avidly demonstrating his slobbering synchronization with Putin's agenda on prime time TV - positioned as the standby Republican candidate.

One opportunistic step at a time. Doing what he feels he can get away with. I once won a ping pong tournament, as an extreme underdog, that way.

Madman
Rattled by Putin's speech yesterday, which was apparently completely unhinged, some smart people are thinking he's gone nuts.

This comes up a lot during the tortured ravings that are his mid-atrocity trademark. Back in 2014, when he launched his Crimea operation, Angela Merkel told Obama, after her phone call with Putin, that "she was not sure he was in touch with reality."

He's not crazy. Just because someone's blathering doesn't mean they're nuts. For one thing, sometimes there's benefit to being seen as nuts (anyone remember Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who wandered around Little Italy in an unkempt bathrobe?).

If your intentions are evil beyond all plausible deniability, there's no sense trying to spin it plausibly. But you’ve got to say something, so you offer ridiculous credo that domestic "patriots" can latch onto, which also serves the purpose of dirt thrown into the eyes of onlookers.

You'd think Americans would, at this point, be familiar with the tactic of the "bullshit tornado". Putin is deliberately confusing foreigners who have way more of a stake in established order and crisp rationality than he does. He's zestfully screwing the world, while we consider his perspective and try to "negotiate". Hilarious!

Kookie rantings and ahistorical pretext are an autocrat's stock in trade. Think of Kim's impenetrable juche dogma, or Hitler's credo of Lebensraum. That crap's never meaningful, never reality-based, nor does it need to be. It's empty fluffy complication for your enemies to waste time and energy trying to parse. The bullshit tornado somehow still has its uses, so using it tactically is crazy like a fox.

Fatal Hubris
The Soviet Union planted the seeds of its own destruction when it invaded Afghanistan; a step too far in their hegemonic momentum. Putin, trying to Make Russia Great Again (and cling onto power), is similarly overreaching.

This is a middle ground between the "Scheming Incrementalist" theory and the "Madman" theory. And it's surely right (there's no denying the guy's hubris). But it's not really a theory.

The smartest observation about Putin goes way back: he's terrific at tactics but has no gift for strategy. You need to destabilize something, or smother something, or crack heads, he's your guy. A true KGB man, he can cagily pull off missions, but overarching gameplans - big, stately, visionary thinking - are beyond his ken.

So, yes, he'll overreach, either now or later. But so long as he gets another twenty years or so without being shot in the head in a ditch like Saddam, he'll chalk it up as a win. Big flowery aspirations are always window-dressing, pretext, and/or rallying cry for his MRGAs. Like Trump, he's all about getting to tomorrow via feral desperation, canny leveraging of power, and the superpower of shamelessness. That's all he does; all he knows.

Ukraine/Taiwan Connection?

A quick break before we return to El Salvador.


The only way Putin's adventure with Ukraine makes a lick of sense is if he's orchestrating a joint mission with China, which would invade Taiwan simultaneously. That would make a huge, bold anti-US statement and usher in a new phase of world history. That seems very Putinesque.

I've been hesitant to go public with this opinion, because, first, what the hell do I know. This is very far from any of my areas of expertise. An experienced defense analyst might easily point out technical reasons why it's not feasible. So this may be nothing more than random ignorance. So take it with a grain of salt.

However I follow a bunch of very smart and diverse national security analysts (mostly as part of the mix of my Twitter Must-Read List "of centrists, moderate Dems, and anti-Trump Republicans + generally smart not-very-partisan people"). Articulate and non-partisan Russia experts like Michael McFaul (former ambassador), John Sipher (former CIA Russian station chief), John Schindler (former NSA), Tom Nichols (Russia expert at Navy War College), and Molly McKew (a well-respected itinerant expert/advisor/writer on military and security issues), along with international relations wisdom from Robert E Kelly, the famous "BBC dad" (I came for the antics, but stayed for his superb analysis on N Korea and beyond).

I've been reading them for a long time now, and I'm following them on recent events, and while none pushes this prediction, they're all perplexed about Putin's thinking. He appears to have cornered himself. This all strengthens NATO. He's in danger of having his pipeline canceled in Germany (remember: natural gas is pretty much his only resource). And the last thing his people (who aren't over WWII yet) want is another Afghanistan-style insurgent slog.

War makes no sense, and if this is strictly extortion, that doesn't make sense either, because, as he well knows, none of his asks are remotely possible (we won't block Ukraine or other sovereign nations from applying to NATO). By process of elimination, the only thing that makes sense is a two-headed move with China that has him so excited that he's willing to bear the consequences.

But, again, what do I know?

Another View of Iran's Nuclear Program

I'm far from knowledgeable about nuclear weapons, generally, or Iran/Israeli dynamics, specifically. But Christian Stork's oft-forwarded article, "The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Iran And The Bomb, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Facts" seems well-argued, if one-sided.

If you've heard nothing but alarmism about Iran's nuclear program, and would like to get some balance from another informed point of view (backed up by heavy hitters in the American and Israeli governments as well as nuclear regulatory bodies), I very highly recommend this five minute read.

Whether it changes your mind or not, it's an undeniable good thing to hear another side of the story, copiously referenced and logically argued. Even with our vaunted free press, we don't often get that sort of thing around here. And as Storks says:

"Given how easily the American public and media were manipulated into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, this moment should give us some pause. The disastrous effects of that $3 Trillion Dollar War are still being felt across the world. For those not interested in seeing a much-bloodier, costlier sequel, I offer this introductory course in intellectual self-defense. The only way to rebuff and dismantle propaganda is to be aware of the truth on which it claims to comment."

Note: have a look at the comments

Iran Attack Imminent?

Reza Aslan is, as many of you know, a soft-spoken, highly intelligent guy, and one of the country's leading experts on Iran (he was born there, but is fully Americanized). He explains Iranian issues - and issues in Moslem world in general - with a refreshingly non-strident tone. Rational. Reasonable. Good-humored (listen to this superbly insightful radio interview to get the idea).

That's why I'm unnerved that he sounds so alarmed about the possibility of an impending attack on Iran. In that link, he urges, with uncommon intensity, immediate contribution to a group called the NIAC, which is pushing for this attack not to happen. Aslan says, convincingly, "we must act now and not wait for war to start to then try and stop it. We must prevent it."

Aslan is a grounded pragmatist, and I trust his assessment that the NIAC are the right guys (they've been working for Democracy and human rights in Iran, and with Jewish-American and peace groups to avoid US-Iran war). Read their blog to see where they're coming from. And please consider donating, and upping your donation amount to the pain point. As with the Iraq invasion, we've been prepared for this scenario so thoroughly that it's easy to assume it won't actually happen. But elsewhere in the world, people share Aslan's fevered fear of the horrendous mistake that may be about to be made. A Bahranian friend just told me the following:

If the US or Israel bombs Iran, we (Bahrain) are going to be the 2nd to suffer (after Iran, obviously.) First thing Iran will do is bomb the U.S base here, to make sure the U.S doesn't use it to attack (which is basically why they're here in the first place.) We are so small as a country that one bomb will make us sink, literally. Anyways - we are freaking out, in a few years you can bet that we'll be as bad as present-day Iraq. On one hand Iran is funding terrorist attacks in this country, and militant organizations. On the other hand we have the USA who, also, couldn't care less about our lives and is just using this place as a strategic location. We don't trust anyone and are just kind of waiting to see what happens.

God forbid, if anything does in fact happen - this will involve way more than just the USA, Israel and Iran - there's also Syria, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, other than Bahrain. I imagine Turkey will act upon its threats to Israel too and do something. We're basically fucked.

Please Tell Me They Won't Attack Iran...

Will someone please protect us from the neo-cons and Israelis who are frothing at the mouth right now about attacking Iran (latest examples re: the former and the latter)?

Yes, the issue has been foaming for years now, and many of us may have grown complacent with the notion that it's just sabers rattling. But there are indications this nightmare may come true. As with Iraq and Afghanistan, the result would be diametrically opposed to its intention: it would prop up the wobbly Iranian regime and spur them to pursue nukes at full speed and at any cost. And while most experts agree that it's absurd to expect Iran to nuke Israel, a preemptive strike by Israel would certainly set the stage for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By the way, I point you to that first article not for its coded railings about the "Israeli lobby" (the latest euphemism for "the Jewish conspiracy"), but for the way it captures the spreading perception that wheels are moving faster and faster in some circles.

Counter-Insurgency Warfare Tipping Point

In deciding whether to commit a large number of troops to Afghanistan, President Obama must weigh two prospects. The first is that the Army is correct in insisting that it's learned to fight counter-insurgencies, and that it can rebuild Afghanistan, shape public opinion there, and make things work out smoothly if it just has 40,000 more troops. The second prospect is that this is mere hubris, and no quantity of troops can "fix" Afghanistan.

To be sure, when the military started its adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, it knew embarrassingly little about counterinsurgencies. Hence all the failure and carnage. But a new crop of military planners, oriented less toward shock-and-awe and more toward psychological and political subtleties, has moved into power. This post-Petraeus generation believes it's figured out how to put Humpty back together again once he's been shattered by our copious firepower (for more on this, listen to a fascinating interview with Washington Post reporter Greg Jaffe on Fresh Air, or read his book, "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army").

I'm against the surge, but not because I doubt that the Army has "hacked" counterinsurgency warfare. The thing is, if it has, I don't want to know it. And I don't want the generals to know it. And I don't want the world to know it. Why? Because I don't want the Huckabee administration or the Palin administration (and others going forward) to have nation-building in its pocket as a proven viable option. Much as I wish we'd never exploded those atomic bombs, this is a Pandora's Box that should remain shut for as long as possible. Because if we can make this sort of thing work, we will see a resurrection of Neo-Conservatism, with its American exceptionalism and kookie utopian meddling...and it will be the death of us.