The 1980s Are Calling to Say We Might Need Their Foreign Policy

Dear Weekend Jolter,

Twosday's gone, and so is the post–Cold War order.

Perhaps that assumption will prove premature, but the horrifying conflagration across Ukraine combined with other autocratic advances gives the unmistakable impression that we are living through a transition of lasting consequence — how lasting is likely to be determined at a later date by the way China reads the situation. "The Cold War's been over for 20 years," Barack Obama famously reminded Mitt Romney in 2012 in response to his Russia concerns, snarking that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” That was half true. For America, the war was over. Not, evidently, for Vladimir Putin.

His unhinged pre-invasion speech was a grievance-airing like few others. Before releasing Part Two, coinciding with a nationwide military assault, Putin lamented the "disintegration of our united country" and the "injustices, lies, and outright pillage" he claims Russia has endured. Kyiv now hangs in the balance, along with Ukraine’s democratically elected government, as Russia attempts to drive into the capital — all because of the grandiose paranoia and territorial rapacity of one man.

It appears we could use some of that 1980s foreign policy about now (hold the support for blood-stained actors in Latin America, please) — in the sense of replacing for good the Russian "reset" with hard-nosed realism and a posture that reflects it. Romney could not resist noting that "the '80s called' and we didn't answer." America's options now are limited, but available.

Mark Wright offers nine steps to counter Russia's aggression, not the least of which is to sideline the nation from the international organizations it has helped turn farcical. NR's editorials propose the following:

The White House should implement all of the measures it has prepared in recent months right now. It needs to make public all the lists of Putin-aligned oligarchs it has and take measures to cripple Russia's military-industrial base through sanctions on high-tech imports. And it needs to accelerate the effort to arm the Ukrainians to the teeth, increasing the military price that Russia will pay for its invasion.

More broadly, it should ask Congress for massive increases in defense spending, continue to shore up frontline NATO members, and unleash the American oil and gas industry so we aren't in the position of begging OPEC+, including Russia, to increase production.

Biden on Thursday announced a new round of sanctions, stopping short of cutting off Russia from the SWIFT global financial system. America and Western allies must go further; in the near term, hope rests on Ukrainians’ ability and will to fight back, which they are doing, and the strategy of making this evil war too costly for the despot who chose it.

The Hudson Institute's Arthur Herman writes also of a missed opportunity in Munich, where he says the program should have involved a recommitment to NATO nations' defense-budget targets, plans for NATO expansion, plans for pursuing the missile-defense system in Eastern Europe that Obama scrapped, a strategy for reversing Europe's reliance on Russian energy, and more. On NATO, Michael Brendan Dougherty counters that the West is now reaping the consequences of past expansion, leaving a "Russian foreign policy moving in a direction decidedly not to our liking." Whether "more NATO" is the answer is a debate that will divide the West in the years to come.

Either way, what Western civilization has little use for is the kind of meme ops that the State Department seems to regard, without much reason, as tactically devastating. As Robert Zubrin notes, the spin war and the real war are very different things. Or, as Mark Wright says more bluntly, "sh** posting memes while Russian tanks are massing for a major invasion of a European country and while Russian troops are currently engaged in a deadly serious occupation of several parts of eastern Ukraine is, frankly, embarrassing."

What the moment calls for is seriousness, and recognition that even as the U.S. has no plans for direct military intervention, the physical distance between unrest abroad and America, as the past 20 years have demonstrated, can be illusory. Jerry Hendrix argues that the post–USSR hopes for "Perpetual Peace" have passed and observes that Putin is on a path to permanent pariah-ship. Whether this leads him toward even more reckless behavior will be clear soon enough.

We should heed the words of those who know this regime. In his book Red Notice, investor-turned-activist Bill Browder recalled the counsel that Ukrainian-born tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who exposed sprawling corruption and died in prison for it, gave as their saga started: "Russian stories never have happy endings."

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

Putin may well win this battle, but that does not mean the war won't ruin him: Vladimir Putin's Gamble

The West, meanwhile, should make his military pursuits as painful as possible: The Ukraine Catastrophe

ARTICLES

Michael Brendan Dougherty: Vlad's War of Choice

Kevin Williamson: How the Imperial Presidency Hurts American Foreign Policy

Mark Antonio Wright: What to Expect Next in Ukraine

Ryan Mills: Civilian Effort to Rescue Americans from Ukraine Underway

Charles C. W. Cooke: Foreign-Policy Dissent Is Not Treason

Charles C. W. Cooke: Biden's Dismal State of the Union

Nate Hochman: Trudeau Government Moves to Make Expanded Surveillance Powers over Financial Transactions ‘Permanent’

Sally Pipes: Stalled in D.C., the Single-Payer Fantasy Makes Its Way to Blue States

Madeleine Kearns: Lia Thomas Is No Jackie Robinson

Rich Lowry: BLM is a Moral, Political, and Policy Disaster

Kyle Smith: Trump's Ukrainian Outrage

Isaac Schorr: Senate Democrats Rail against Corporate Influence While Accepting Piles of Tainted Cash

Dan McLaughlin: How Republicans Should Respond to Ketanji Brown Jackson

Caroline Downey: Teachers’ Union Heavyweight Mocks Parental Calls for Transparency, Demands Report on What Kids Learn at Home

Ryan Ellis: The 'Skin in the Game' Fallacy

Andrew McCarthy: Manhattan DA's Trump Investigation Appears to Have Cratered

CAPITAL MATTERS

Tom Hebert notices a lesson for antitrust warriors in the Meta stock turbulence: Stock Plunge Shows the Folly of Legislating By Market Cap

Stephen Moore follows up on this topic: Antitrust Legislation Would Hurt the U.S. and Aid China

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Armond White flags the "first amazing movie of 2022": Jeunet's Amazing, Insightful Big Bug

In a peculiar bit of timing, a spectacular Russian collection of art is on display in Paris, with a nod from Putin. Brian Allen explains: Cézannes, Van Goghs, Gauguins Galore, from Russia to Paris

A joint memoir from the Howard brothers (Ron and Clint, that is) is full of touching anecdotes and insights. From Kyle Smith: Hollywood's Most Fortunate Sons

SAMIZDAT, CONT'D

What happens now? Nobody can know for sure, but Mark Wright is providing valuable military analysis — and argues that hope is not lost for the Ukrainians:

The Russians have, so far, acted in a somewhat restrained manner. They have, compared to the Russian army's operations in Syria, for example, appeared to be trying to avoid civilian casualties. To that end, they have avoided a direct assault on Kharkiv, a city of more than a million people that lies close to the Russian border. And they largely bypassed the southern town of Kherson in an effort to leapfrog forward towards the city of Mykolaiv. If they want to try to end the war quickly, however, Russian troops will have to storm a city center — likely Kyiv, a city of more than 3 million souls. How will the ground troops handle this? There are already rumors of low morale in the Russian ranks. Indeed, there are reports that Russian POWs have told their Ukrainian captors that they didn't even know they would be sent into combat to kill Ukrainians!

As armies throughout the bloody 20th century discovered, urban combat is hell. If faced with an opponent willing to dig in and fight it out, mechanized units and infantry can get chewed up, and fast. Faced with high casualties, would Russian troops be willing to turn to sheer fire power to blast their Ukrainian cousins out of the rubble like they did the Chechen rebels in Grozny? Would they be willing to fight block by bloody block? Would they be willing to turn rocket artillery barrages and white-phosphorus shells on a people that Putin calls essentially Russian?

War is not a game of Risk. This isn't chess. A Ukrainian "victory" in the streets of Kyiv would be a horror and a bloodbath. But victory — defined as forcing the Russian army to call it quits, perhaps aided by a growing anti-war protest movement in Russia — is not utterly impossible if the Ukrainians are willing to pay its terrible price.

Michael Brendan Dougherty sets aside the questions over whether the West could have quelled Putin’s rage and examines the implications of one inarguable fact:

A thousand flimsy orthodoxies and assertions die after the action begins. But we have so far one certainty: Russia's attack on Ukraine is an aggressive war of choice.

In fact, Russian president Vladimir Putin did not even attempt to disguise that he was engaged in a war of choice. Despite months of U.S. intelligence reports warning that Russia would use false-flag attacks — faked outrages in Ukraine's contested territories, meant to gin up Russian support for an invasion — nothing of the sort happened.

On Monday, Putin gave an address that made it sound like his military buildup and the forthcoming war were meant as a way of teaching Ukrainians and the rest of the world that Ukrainian identity and its national tradition are faked — the product of the policy of a handful of people who "distort the mentality and historical memory" of entire generations. It was followed by outlandish accusations of various plots for Ukraine to attack Moscow. . . .

For all these reasons, this appears to be Putin's war and Putin's choice. It comes after Putin's failures to get Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements, and his failure to deter Ukraine from collaborating more with NATO members such as the United Kingdom and Turkey. Which means Putin's entire legacy and prestige is wrapped up in this campaign. That certainly makes him dangerous. But if it goes poorly, or if the costs for Russians are too high, Putin himself will be a juicy scapegoat for the regime and the society that has lived under and endured his leadership. The exact same brotherly ties between Ukraine and Russia that Putin wrote about in an essay on their historical unity may cause a significant number of Russians to recoil if the war becomes long, or particularly bloody.

Wars of choice are risky things — even for dictators.

In "other news," Biden announced his Supreme Court pick. Dan McLaughlin provides a roadmap for Republicans:

Here are three ways Senate Republicans should approach the nomination.

First, be realistic. Democrats have 50 votes, and they have Kamala Harris to break a tie. That means that Republicans cannot stop Jackson's confirmation unless they can peel off at least one Democrat who voted to put her on the D.C. Circuit. Even Democratic mavericks such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have been reliable votes for progressive judges. . . .

Being realistic means three things. It means that Republicans should aim to use the nomination to impose political costs on Biden and on senators voting for Jackson. It means that Republicans don't need to try desperate stunts to win. And it means that their audience, if there is a chance of sinking Jackson, is Democratic senators, and their argument in that regard must be specific to Jackson rather than generally about constitutional philosophy. By contrast, the more remote the odds of stopping her, the more Republicans should talk to the voters about that philosophy in order to highlight the stakes in Senate races. . . .

Second, don't play for revenge. It may feel good, emotionally, to play the "you made these rules" game and try for scorched-earth personal destruction of the type deployed against Kavanaugh. But that backfired on Democrats. In a Democratic wave year, multiple Senate races swung toward Republicans down the stretch. A lot of people were horrified by the Democrats' antics. It is highly likely that some far-right figure will try to gin up a fake sexual-misconduct charge against Jackson, just for the revenge factor. For reasons of both politics and principle, we should urge the Senate to evaluate any personal charges of scandal of any kind against Jackson by the same standards of fairness and rigor we urged for Kavanaugh and for Joe Biden.

Third, don't obsess over race and gender. Voters who know that Biden excluded everyone but black women from his search already disapprove of that. Of course, some voters are just tuning in now, so Republicans may remind them. But beyond that, voters do not need more convincing, and harping on the "affirmative-action pick" language is more likely to make people sympathize with Jackson. Focus instead on her deficiencies as a judge, her judicial philosophy and worldview, or her service on the board of a racially discriminatory college. Democrats want the conversation to be about "conservatives disrespecting a black woman," not about Jackson in particular as a jurist. Don't give them that.

ICYMI, this update from Nate Hochman on Canada's financial-surveillance measures tore through the Internet earlier this week:

As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau's administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level.

The Trudeau government's financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority.

In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden "the scope of Canada's anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use." That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., "Fintrac"). "As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac," Freeland said. . . .

Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had "highlighted the fact" that digital assets and funding mechanisms "weren't captured" by the Canadian government's pre-existing surveillance powers. As a result, she said, "the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis." . . .

All this, of course, flies in the face of Trudeau's promise that the Emergencies Act powers would be temporary. When he announced his invocation of the order, he promised the Canadian people that his expanded authorities would "be time-limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address." Not a single part of that sentence has proved to be true.