Historian Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, speaking on Bari Weiss podcast on “Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Roundtable“:

In Russian literature, there is a great novel: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

Biden is the idiot.

The reason this happened is because the Biden administration slowed down deliveries of armaments to Ukraine, lifted the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was supposed to bypass Ukraine, signaled to Russia that the U.S. would not support Ukraine militarily, and therefore made it clear to Putin that he had an opportunity to take military action with only sanctions to fear.

The administration’s strategy was to threaten the worst sanctions—as if sanctions were going to deter Putin. Then they tried something even crazier, which was to say, “You’re going to invade, and we know the date”—as if that was somehow going to stop him from invading. And the worst thing they tried was to get the Chinese to dissuade him from invading, when the Chinese had given him the green light on the condition that he didn’t go until after the Beijing Olympics.

This has been a debacle that has allowed a massive war to break out, one that could have been prevented had there not been such clear signs of weakness.

(Joe Biden apologist, Francis Fukuyama, disagrees.)

Ferguson later adds:

The problem is that we created the possibility of Ukraine’s joining NATO and joining the European Union. But our actual attitude was like that New Yorker cartoon of the guy on the phone who says, “No, I can’t do Thursday. How about never?” We never seriously meant for them to join NATO or the EU. We didn’t supply nearly enough armaments for them to deter Russia from attacking. And as a consequence, we have a massive geopolitical crisis that could have been avoided. Telling people that you saw it coming is not an act of strategic genius. It’s an act of strategic feebleness.

The consequences of this are far-reaching indeed. First of all, in the administration’s anxiety to avoid even higher inflation, they’re desperately trying to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal and get Iranian oil back onto the world market in the process, making all kinds of concessions that I think will come back to haunt them. Meanwhile, in China, Xi Jinping is watching this fiasco and saying to himself, “Well, if the most I have to fear is the threat of sanctions, then if I decide to take control of Taiwan, I’m in good shape.” And when Putin took out his little nuclear saber and rattled it, we were immediately deterred. The Europeans were so terrified that they immediately canceled the plan to make fighter jets available to the Ukrainians, which they had offered in the early days after the invasion.

Listen to the podcast.

***

As an aside:

Italy’s main University in Milan just banned teaching Fyodor Dostoevsky because he’s a Russian writer.

Dostoevsky was sent to a Siberian labour camp for reading banned books in Tsarist Russia.

We are reaching levels of hatred and stupidity that I thought were never possible.

— Alessandra (@alessabocchi) March 2, 2022

Michael Shellenberger on how green ideology empowered Putin and when it comes to understanding the relationship between energy independence and political-economic security Putin is “smart” and Europe and much of the West has been “dumb”:

How has Vladimir Putin—a man ruling a country with an economy smaller than that of Texas, with an average life expectancy 10 years lower than that of France—managed to launch an unprovoked full-scale assault on Ukraine?

[…]

Missing from that explanation, though, is a story about material reality and basic economics—two things that Putin seems to understand far better than his counterparts in the free world and especially in Europe. 

[…]

The reason Europe didn’t have a muscular deterrent threat to prevent Russian aggression—and in fact prevented the U.S. from getting allies to do more—is that it needs Putin’s oil and gas. 

[…]

For all his fawning over Putin, Donald Trump, back in 2018, defied diplomatic protocol to call out Germany publicly for its dependence on Moscow. “Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia,” Trump said. This prompted Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, who had been widely praised in polite circles for being the last serious leader in the West, to say that her country “can make our own policies and make our own decisions.”

The result has been the worst global energy crisis since 1973, driving prices for electricity and gasoline higher around the world. It is a crisis, fundamentally, of inadequate supply. But the scarcity is entirely manufactured.

Read the rest…

Related:

From “Lawmakers fear Russian invasion could increase Chinese threat to Taiwan” (Washington Examiner):

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm that Russia’s attack on Ukraine could increase the threat of China invading Taiwan, with some calling for the United States to ramp up its efforts to deter an incursion. These concerns spiked after China’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday that “Taiwan is not Ukraine,” arguing it has “always been an inalienable part of China” and refusing to call Russia’s actions an invasion.

[…]

House Foreign Affairs ranking member Micheal McCaul said he believes it is “only a matter of time” before China invades Taiwan, noting that at least nine Chinese military jets have already been seen crossing into the self-governed island’s airspace. “I think we all saw this unholy alliance coming together at the Beijing Olympics, where Putin and [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] were hand-in-hand condemning NATO’s ‘aggression’ and calling for the West to stay out of the South China Sea and Taiwan,” the Texas Republican said in an interview.

“So these two events are interconnected and intertwined, and I think Putin has always wanted to do this, it was all about the right time. And I think Xi has always wanted to take Taiwan — it’s about basically going back to the glory of their empires.”

[…]

McCaul said that after speaking with military officials, he believes the U.S. needs to help provide Taiwan with the resources necessary for the island to prepare for an attack.

“Deterrence is always a key. I didn’t really see any deterrence with respect to Ukraine. In fact, waving the Nord Stream 2 sanctions [last May] was, in my judgment, a really bad mistake and emboldened Putin,” he said in an interview.

Recommended:

• The Mind of the Dictator
• Today’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
• Why is the Chinese Government Terrified of Tennis Player Peng Shuai?

Bill Maher says that Justin Trudeau’s rhetoric against those who oppose his viewpoints makes him sound like Hitler (though we think Trudeau looks more like Fidel Castro).

For those who wish to learn how Germany turned into Nazi Germany (and how to avoid it) see Leonard Peikoff’s The Cause of Hitler’s Germany, and The Ominous Parallels.

“The NBA, Hollywood and many big companies make ads saying “speak up on injustice.” Yet they’re happy to ignore atrocities committed by China, because they want the money.” – John Stossel

Comments Gren Reynolds in the NY Post:

So we’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.

Naturally, the left hates it.

For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.

A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police. [“Truckers are starting a working-class revolution — and the left hates it“]

 

I am sure everyone saw that Putin was eagerly meeting with Xi at the Olympics. Maybe there was some discussion of economic cooperation, but the real reason was revealed by the Washington Post: they want to make the world safe for dictatorships!

The dictators use double-speak: we are democracies but we have a different definition of democracy. The dictators’ implicit definition includes one-party rule, no free elections. no freedom of speech, no separation of powers, and punishments for “political” crimes. “Consent”  in this context means” obedience insured by the gun.

I wonder if the dictators are feeling some moral pressure now? Even the UN was not happy about Russia’s threat to invade the Ukraine (which Russia denied planning). Another aspect of dictators’ double-speak is that attempts by the free world to make defense treaties and arm themselves against aggression are labeled provocations while their own arms buildups and threats are labeled self-defense.

Ayn Rand said that morality was the strongest of all intellectual powers. Maybe the dictators’ are feeling the heat. Let us hope so. – Edwin A. Locke