The Old-Fashioned Way to Mess with Putin

A Slate article on U.S. strategy for Ukraine caught my interest in part because it includes a fundamental point from my original Crimea post: There are no U.S. vital interests in Ukraine that justify the risk of a shooting war with Russia.

Beyond my point about it not likely the main Crisis hotspot, Fred Kaplan suggests that the best victory there is helping Kiev win economically. Support their economy, make them more successful than Russia, and then ... actually, it's not clear what then, except that Putin wouldn't like it. Although it wouldn't be as easy to say the country is a Western puppet if the main support is Apple computers - much less affordable in Russia anymore - rather than Boeing munitions.

The extra fun part of that, of course, is the replay of the Reagan Cold War strategy, this time against Russia rather than the USSR: Make them see that their way leads to a crappy life, and they'll give it up on their own. It's like the fable of the sun and the wind, who had a bet to see who could get a man's coat off. The more the wind blew, the harder the man held on; when the sun shone, he took it off himself.

If we're going to get involved, we should aspire to be like the sun.

A Quick Thought on ISIS

There are people around talking about how Chamberlain is agonizing again, knowing from his current vantage that we are re-making his mistake.

I'd say, though, that this doesn't feel like Munich. There's no appeasement - indeed, anything that ISIS does seems to make their situation worse. The United States staying out of it is a matter of realpolitik,  not cowardice or misguided optimism.

There is a resemblance, though, to Bleeding Kansas - well-meaning changes in the political situation causing law and order to take a quick downward slope. Evidently skirmishes continued in the area until the Civil War started. Which doesn't mean they stopped, then, just that they were less significant by comparison.

If that is the appropriate analogy, what's next? We can expect ongoing fighting in area, until the decision comes to make these "skirmishes" irrelevant.  Unless it turns out this was never the real battlefield for the United States at all, and the REAL Crisis will come from a different direction. Which seems quite possible.

A Slow Crisis Day

Under Crisis, we have mostly repeats: Japan hostage crisis, Ukraine insanity crisis, a call-back to the financial crisis (noted there as starting in 2007) and eventually a reference to the Ebola crisis. Plus this Brian Williams controversy or crisis or whatever people want to call it.

A number of items under Cloverfield, mostly about the movie itself or people related to the movie. And a callback to the K-cup issue previously noted.

Apocalypse is staying about the same: the X-Men movie, again, plus the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moving the doomsday clock up another minute.

Shouldn't mind it though. We've had enough days where every day it is something new.