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2022-03-23 Home Front: Politix

Niall Ferguson: BIDEN IS MAKING A COLOSSAL MISTAKE in thinking he can bleed Russia dry, topple Putin and signal to China to keep its hands off Taiwan.

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Posted by Elmains Angeamp5213 2022-03-23 00:00|| || Front Page|| [9 views ] Top

#1 Ferguson's a sharp guy, its always worth giving him a hearing. The article's behind a paywall. Does anyone have a link to the full piece? Thankee

Posted by Muggsy Whinegum5809 2022-03-23 03:22|| 2022-03-23 03:22|| Front Page Top

#2 BIDEN IS MAKING A COLOSSAL MISTAKE in thinking

Thinking? Niall gives him far more credit than what most can observe.

Posted by Procopius2k 2022-03-23 08:17|| 2022-03-23 08:17|| Front Page Top

#3 Drop the headline into the Google search app, Muggsy Whinegum5809. Here ae a few key parqgraphs:

“The language people speak in the corridors of power,” former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter once observed, “is not economics or politics. It is history.”

In a recent academic article, I showed how true this was after both the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 and the “9/15” bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Policy makers used all kinds of historical analogies as they reacted. “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today,” President George W. Bush noted in his diary, late on the night of the attacks, to give just one example, though many other parallels were drawn in the succeeding days, from the Civil War to the Cold War.

What kind of history is informing today’s decisions in Washington as the war in Ukraine nears the conclusion of its first month? A few clues have emerged.

“American officials are divided on how much the lessons from Cold War proxy wars, like the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, can be applied to the ongoing war in Ukraine,” David Sanger reported for the New York Times on Saturday.

According to Sanger, who cannot have written his piece without high-level sources, the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation … CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted Ukrainian military units, according to American officials. But as of now, Mr. Biden and his staff do not see the utility of an expansive covert effort to use the spy agency to ferry in arms as the United States did in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s.”

Reading this carefully, I conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going. The administration will continue to supply the Ukrainians with anti-aircraft Stingers, antitank Javelins and explosive Switchblade drones. It will keep trying to persuade other North Atlantic Treaty Organization governments to supply heavier defensive weaponry. (The latest U.S. proposal is for Turkey to provide Ukraine with the sophisticated S-400 anti-aircraft system, which Ankara purchased from Moscow just a few years ago. I expect it to go the way of the scuttled plan for Polish MiG fighters.) Washington will revert to the Afghanistan-after-1979 playbook of supplying an insurgency only if the Ukrainian government loses the conventional war.

I have evidence from other sources to corroborate this. “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.”

I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.

Posted by trailing wife 2022-03-23 08:44|| 2022-03-23 08:44|| Front Page Top

#4 /\ Washington will revert to the Afghanistan-after-1979 playbook of supplying an insurgency only if the Ukrainian government loses the conventional war.

Revert? It's an active, ongoing effort.

Posted by Besoeker 2022-03-23 09:34|| 2022-03-23 09:34|| Front Page Top

#5 Do "British figures" have similar dumpster fires underway, which the war's smoke will help obscure?

Like Brandon's dumpster fire of disasters, I mean.

Posted by Bobby 2022-03-23 11:34|| 2022-03-23 11:34|| Front Page Top

#6 Biden. Brandon can't even ride a bicycle.

Posted by swksvolFF 2022-03-23 11:37|| 2022-03-23 11:37|| Front Page Top

#7 The biggest mistake in my view is the west (especially Captain grabby McPoopy pants) immediately pushed Putin into a corner by calling him a war criminal and pushing for regime change.

Never find out how hard a man can fight when you give him no other choice than death.

I would have preferred an approach where you gave Putin a way to climb down gracefully. Sanctions stay in place and weapons flow into Ukraine until you leave. The moment you do the weapons stop flowing and we can talk about how to remove the sanctions. Then sneak weapons into Ukraine after the Russians go.

At this point Putin has no place to go but to go for broke and that means nukes are in play. At the beginning of this war I mentioned to not underestimate the ability of our "leaders" in the west to stumble into WWIII. I hate being right.

Posted by DarthVader 2022-03-23 16:54|| 2022-03-23 16:54|| Front Page Top

#8 Putin was never backed into a corner. He has plenty of buyers for his oil, tonnes of gold, no rivals to his rule and all the time in the world. He just announced Russia will demand payment in rubles. The ruble is soaring and foreign hedge funds will pour back into Russian securities tomorrow.

Just like they did 2 years after 1998, the last time the Russian market was written off for dead. 2000 was Putin's first year as president. The Russian economy soared for most of the rest of the decade, and rebuilt Russia's military during that time. Another commodities supercycle is starting. Putin and the smart money see this.

Posted by Phuting Forkbeard3833 2022-03-23 17:09|| 2022-03-23 17:09|| Front Page Top

#9 Yeah... ruble soaring....

1.00 Russian Ruble =
0.011 US Dollar

Go tickle someone else's balls RussBot.

Posted by DarthVader 2022-03-23 19:30|| 2022-03-23 19:30|| Front Page Top

#10 So sad, that riff. From scintillating, needle-sharp Merrick touting stocks at dollars on the dime, to penal battalion point man Private Pyle here quibbling over a few rubles, in, what, a month? I could cry.

Posted by Whimp and Company7902 2022-03-23 20:03|| 2022-03-23 20:03|| Front Page Top

#11 Heh - I got it last time and then I posted links.

Posted by Frank G 2022-03-23 20:36|| 2022-03-23 20:36|| Front Page Top

#12 You might as well wipe out #14 too. Very vulgar. Not fit for polite and well reasoned discourse. :p

Posted by DarthVader 2022-03-23 20:41|| 2022-03-23 20:41|| Front Page Top

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