3/9/2025

Sunday, March 9, 2025

D+122

1945 334 US B-29 Superfortresses attacked Tokyo with 120,000 fire bombs

1962 US advisors in South Vietnam joined in a  firefight

1964 Supreme Court issued NY Times vs Sullivan decision: public officials must prove malice to recover damages in libel actions

1974 The last Japanese soldier, a guerrilla operating in the Philippines, surrendered 29 years after World War II ended

1980: Flemish and Walloon battled in Belgium; 40 injured

1989 US Senate rejected President George H. W. Bush's nomination of John Tower as Defense Secretary

In bed by 9:15, awake and up at 4:53 CDT so 'really 3:53 CST) feeling terrible, headache, pain an didscomfort arcomoound pelvic girdle, right shoulder,  emerging from a vivid dream of DSB and I in the Marines in SVN with hundeeds or thousands of SVN k'indigenous' and SNAFU conditions.  Friday I told Caela I never dream about SVN; she told me her freind Dick does frequently.  Dick's story (SVN, purple hearts, son, daughter, even Caela) is a sad one  34° outside, high of 56°.

Prednisone, day 322, 4 mg., day 5/21, Kevzara, day 5/14. 2 mg. prednisone at 4:15 a.m. and 5:3  p.m.  Other meds around 8 a.m.is    

Can Ukraine—and America—Survive Donald Trump?: The historian Stephen Kotkin analyzes what a President who governs in the style of professional wrestling gets wrong—and right—about an unstable world.  The New by David Remnick in The New Yorker, March 9, 2025.  An interview with Stephen Kotkin, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  Excerpts:

(Kotkin)  I’m not validating anything here, but Trump has revealed some truths about American power and America’s place in the world, and the European place in the world here, that are valuable truths. And he did it in his Trumpian fashion.

(Remnick) What are those truths?

So the truths are as follows: Zelensky is looking for security guarantees, which means that not just Ukrainians will die—that people from other countries, European countries especially, will die. The Europeans have not sent a single soldier to the front during the war, and they’re fighting over whether they’re going to send any soldiers, even if there’s a peace deal, an armistice. Poland, which is Ukraine’s biggest backer, has refused to agree to promise to send peacekeepers after the fighting stops, let alone during the fighting. So Europe, God bless, is playing charades. Trump, for all his Trumpy qualities, and we all know what they are—there’s no need to reiterate them, and I’m sure your magazine is full tilt in going after them—has nonetheless shown that it’s put up or shut up on the European side. And even though Putin couldn’t get the Europeans to get their act together, maybe Trump will.

. . . 

And so the question for us is, going forward, how much of this American power is going to be used effectively, competently, as the world is changing, and how much can America rely on others? Because, let’s be honest, European power has declined, Japanese power has declined. It’s not American power that’s declining. It’s our alliances, our allies, who are declining. Our adversaries are not necessarily declining. We can argue about Russia, how deep its decline might be, but in the case of China, we clearly have a peer adversary.

And so what’s the plan? There’s unlimited demand for American power. Hey, let’s bring Ukraine into nato! Hey, let’s do a security treaty with the Saudis! Everybody wants more and more American power, but American power can’t fulfill all its current commitments, let alone make new ones. You remember when our strategic doctrine was to [have the ability to] fight two major wars in two major theatres simultaneously. Then Obama comes to office, and he reduces that to 1.5 major wars in major theatres. Have you ever seen half a major war? I haven’t.

Then Trump comes along, and he reduces it to one major war and one major theatre. So we have alliance commitments—obligations to allies—in at least three major theatres. Our strategic doctrine is we can do one at any one time. Trump is revealing, and in some cases accelerating, a process, where America’s commitments exceed our capabilities, not because we’re in decline but because the alliances that we’re in—those countries, Germany, Japan, and a few others—are not punching at their weight. You can say that Trump is wrong in his analysis of the world. You can say that Trump’s methods are abominable. But you can’t say that American power is sufficient to meet its current commitments on the trajectory that we’re on—and we didn’t even get to the fiscal situation. 

 since the fall of 2022, when the Russians were evicted from Kharkiv, it was really just riot police that were chased out of Kharkiv province. It was not some combined arms operation that the Ukrainians beat—but nonetheless it was successful and impressive. Since then, Russia has controlled nineteen per cent, roughly, of Ukrainian territory, more or less. That’s more than two years. They’ve lost seven hundred thousand people [dead and wounded], gaining nothing in those two-plus years.

Now, you ask yourself: How sustainable is that over the really long term? And the answer is, Putin keeps throwing lives into the meat grinder—now it’s North Korean lives—because the Ukrainians have fewer lives to throw up against him. Ukraine doesn’t need Abrams tanks. They got them and they didn’t help. It doesn’t need F-16 planes because they can’t fight in the battlefield against Russian anti-aircraft. Ukraine needs five hundred thousand eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, and nobody’s sending them. But again, Russia needs the same thing. They need either to get Ukraine to capitulate, which it’s refused to do, remarkably, or they need to get others to force Ukraine to capitulate, which I don’t think anybody can do. So Russia’s in this holding action. Putin is willing to go as long as it takes, but Russian society—maybe not.

(Remnick): Then how does this end?

Who thinks it’s going to end? It started under Catherine the Great, when, in 1783, she conquered Crimea. We’re in the middle of a longer-term trajectory here. People think this is going to end: Ukraine can take some territory back, and Russia’s going to capitulate. They’re going to win on the battlefield. The primary problem of this from the beginning has been the idea that Ukraine was going to win this on the battlefield, rather than somehow apply the kind of political pressure to force an armistice that was favorable to Ukraine, meaning they could retain the sovereignty that they defended when they defended their capital, Kyiv, and they could invest in reconstruction and attempt the kind of South Korean trajectory from the armistice in the Korean War. That’s been the play from the beginning. It’s still the play now. 

(Remnick) In other words, the outcome that’s possible, and that ends the meat grinder, is like a divided Korea: a divided Ukraine.

That’s the good outcome. The bad outcome is Ukraine loses its sovereignty; it recognizes Russian annexations of the territory that Russia controls and even beyond the territory Russia currently controls; it’s forced to put limits on the size of its military so it’s defenseless; it cannot join an international security alliance or form any security alliance whatsoever. Those limits on Ukrainian sovereignty amount to capitulation. That’s not peace; that’s peace-on-the-knees, right? That’s what Putin is now “willing to negotiate.” He was not willing to negotiate a peace in which Russia kept control over Ukrainian territories but nobody recognized them as Russian. Ukraine put no limits on its military so it could defend itself if fighting resumed, and Ukraine could join any organization that was willing to take them and that they were qualified for, whether currently existing or future existing. That’s the favorable armistice that we’ve been hoping enough political pressure on Putin would deliver. We are nowhere near that right now. We should have been working toward that for years now, and we haven’t been.