The worthlessness of ceasefires

 LITD posts have lately mostly been of a world-affairs nature, haven't they? That's because, for all post-America's other vexations - the utter silliness of both political parties, rampant loneliness, the resistance of the woke apparatus to being dismantled, the debt that is on track to crowd out all other government expenditures in a few short years, not replenishing the country's population, an utter disregard for the transcendent - foreign policy incoherence is the one most likely to take the first bite out of our safety and comfort and the reliability off our institutions.

Because each has been going on for a few years now, we have become inured to the severity of Russia's attack on a sovereign nation, and the savagery Iran, through its proxies, has inflicted on Israel. We assume that, with regard to the over-arching association of rogue players, each with its own ideology and internal agendas, that is bound together by a common intention to end the US-dominated international order that's been in place since 1945, sharp minds are on the case and will see that nothing gets too out of hand. 

Thus, we have clowns in the current administration, and the one coming in in January, coming up with "solutions" to the above-mentioned conflagrations based on an "end wars" mindset.

That's a really stupid way to approach the current situation. There are risks attendant to a goal of the attacked nation-states in each case winning their wars, but they're small compared to the consequences of appeasing the aggressors.

Tell you what. I'm going to quote Seth Mandel's latest column at Commentary in its entirety, because there'd be no point in trying to improve upon its incisiveness:

Buried in a New York Times explainer on the ICC’s issuance of an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu is this helpful nugget: “Gaza has been controlled by Hamas since 2007 and the militant group does not recognize its subjugation to a Palestine state.”

And why? Because Hamas is essentially a hostile occupying force on behalf of Iran. And who else falls into that category? Hezbollah in Lebanon. And for good measure, let’s add one more: Arguably the most troublesome pocket in the West Bank centers on Jenin, and the troublemakers in Jenin are proxies of Iran as well. For all intents and purposes, the city is foreign territory.

Here’s the point: Israel is not in conflict with any of the “host countries,” however generously we use that term, with whom it is supposedly negotiating.

It’s fun to pretend, but it’s not productive. Foolish faith in ceasefire agreements with entities that do not recognize the sovereignty of their own territory is how we got here. Oct. 6, 2023 was the last time a ceasefire’s false sense of security governed Israel’s understanding of the status quo. Oct. 7, 2023 was the result.

Let’s look at the ceasefire deal with Hezbollah announced yesterday.

The deal halts the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah for 60 days. Both the IDF and Hezbollah are to clear their forces from Lebanese territory south of the Litani River tout de suite. Filling the vacuum will be the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers—both of which are compromised by their deference to, and fear of, Hezbollah. A complaint board that will determine compliance with the agreement and adjudicate claims of violations will be under the supervision of the United States.

Yesterday, President Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron crowed that, “after many weeks of tireless diplomacy, Israel and Lebanon have accepted a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon.”

Between Israel and Lebanon? Have there been hostilities between Israel and Lebanon? Because it would be very silly to have Lebanese troops patrol the buffer zone if the buffer zone is meant to separate the IDF from Lebanese troops.

It’s wonderful that “Israel and Lebanon have accepted a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon.” Whoever this “Lebanon” guy is, he sounds nice. But I have no idea what he’s doing here.

Last week, men almost surely hired by Iran murdered in cold blood a Jerusalem-born Chabad rabbi in Dubai. Are Biden and Macron working on a “ceasefire” between Israel and the United Arab Emirates? Of course not, and no one is even suggesting such a thing, because it would be patently ridiculous on its face and arguably a mockery of the victim.

So that’s the conceptual absurdity of this ceasefire. What about its practicality?

“Eight vehicles and a motorcycle carrying Hezbollah personnel arrived at the ruins of Kfar Kila near Matula,” Israel’s Kann News reported this morning. “The IDF force that was on the spot drove them away with warning shots.”

Metula is an Israeli town on the border with Lebanon. Hezbollah had begun the ceasefire by advancing on Israel. Wrong direction, guys! Like legendary Vikings defensive end Jim Marshall recovering that fumble against the 49ers in 1964 and then running 65 yards into the wrong end zone—except on purpose.

And Israel’s response was to fire warning shots, because anything more aggressive—anything actually appropriate to the threat, in other words—would have triggered condemnation from the very allies that negotiated this ceasefire.

The Lebanese Armed Forces cannot enforce this ceasefire. If they could, they would have already cleared the area of Hezbollah, which has been operating with impunity for four decades. And the UN peacekeepers are Hezbollah’s trusted allies—that may sound harsh but it is just plain fact.

Yes, Israel is hoping to run out the clock on the Biden administration and have freer range of action once Donald Trump takes office. But Hezbollah knows Biden is on his way out, too, and that Trump is on his way in. And the enemy always gets a vote. Sometimes that vote is expressed by a nine-vehicle Hezbollah convoy encroaching on Israel’s sovereign border, in contemptuous contravention of a ceasefire signed by “Lebanon.”

And now, let us look at Keith Kellogg, the Very Stable Genius's choice for a guy to impose defeat on Ukraine: 

Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, President elect-Trump's pick for special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, has pushed a proposal to end the war between the two countries through Ukraine ceding land to Russia.

Why it matters: Trump named Kellogg as his choice for special envoy on Wednesday, months after Reuters reported on Kellogg's policy plan in June. The plan for a ceasefire signals U.S. support for the war effort would be scaled back.

• It also would mark a shift from the Biden administration's stance on the war and could be met with pushback from European allies.

Zoom in: Kellogg, who served as national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, co-authored a research report detailing his Ukraine policy proposal with former NSA chief of staff Fred Fleitz.

• "The United States would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement," Kellogg and Fleitz state in the plan.
• But future U.S. military aid will require Ukraine to participate in peace talks with Russia, according to the report.
• To convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to join peace talks, "President Biden and other NATO leaders should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees," the pair wrote.

The big picture: Trump has vowed to end the war in Ukraine using his personal relationship with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to get a peace deal.

Here's how the VSG thinks about such things:

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to end Russia's war with Ukraine if elected, saying in September that he would negotiate a deal "that's good for both sides." He also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and questioned further U.S. assistance to Ukraine.

"Good for both sides." What the hell kind of formulation is that? Russia is the aggressor in this situation. The West has no business dangling a nice outcome before Putin. The only way to speak of Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine is in terms of defeat.

All the F-16s, ATACMs, mines and Storm Shadows should have been provided no later that March 2022. Yes, it's great that they're arriving now, but their ability to be game-changers is badly diminished.

Trump, of course, views the whole thing transactionally. He wants to wind this up with minimal bad effect on what he perceives to be Putin's high regard of him. 

Ceasefires are nothing but a tamping-down of wrongs that will come back in another manifestation at some point. Fifteen years after the 1953 armistice that stopped fighting between North and South Korea, the crew of the USS Pueblo spent a year in captivity in the Kim dynasty's worker's paradise. Nixon's "peace with honor" in Vietnam led to the April 1975 crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon by tanks from the North, and the still-repugnant scene of desperate Vietnamese trying to hang on to the runners of the last helicopter to take off from the US embassy roof. 

If Ukraine and Israel don't achieve total victory over Russia and Iran respectively, we will have abandoned the world stage to Dodge City status. 

Post-America has decided it  has no use for moral clarity. Bad things will result. 

The lightning rod that is Ukraine

 The world waits with bated breath to see how the incoming Trump administration is going to handle Russia's continuing savaging of Ukraine.

At the recent Halifax security conference, representatives of various nations searched for signs of continuity between Biden's policy and Trump's, but one participant says it had more the feel of a therapy session. 

I don't know a whole lot about Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), but I'm impressed by the priorities and fealty to the Constitution that seems to be guiding him on this matter:

South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds has dismissed calls for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, suggesting Russian President Vladimir Putin could not be trusted to honor such an agreement.

"As much as I would like to believe we can negotiate with a tyrant, I suspect we may be deceiving ourselves," Rounds said in reference to Putin at the Halifax Security Forum on Friday.

"Do you believe that this tyrant, if you offer him a part of a free country, do you think he's gonna stop?" Rounds said.

"I wish I could say there's an easy way out, there's not."

The Republican's sentiments stand in contrast with those of President-Elect Trump, who has previously claimed he could end the conflict in one day.

Rounds also bemoaned the restriction placed on Kyiv in its response to Russia's full-scale invasion.

"I just feel so frustrated that we have not been able to provide them all of the equipment that they need, and all of the weapons systems that they need, in order to respond to the absolute tyranny coming from Russia," said Rounds, who did reportedly stress that his views were not those of the incoming administration.

(As a side note, I also dig his recent introduction of legislation  to dismantle the Department of Education. Progressives are going to use this to conflate actual conservative policy with Trumpist yay-hoo-ism. And the Trumpists will say, "This is conservatism now." This is why I write my occasional "wheat from chaff scoreboard" posts over at Precipice. )

I have to imagine that he's going to get upbraided by the drool-besotted throne sniffers for showing an  independent streak. In fact, that's already started. The disgusting Laura Ingraham tweeted that Rounds was "already undermining" the Very Stable Genius. Sorry, toots, but the legislative branch is independent of the executive.

We. of course, have no idea what the VSG would actually do to achieve this peace in 24 hours he speaks of. Presumably, he's confident that his personal charm would be the deciding factor in a sit-down with Mad Vlad and President Zelensky. You know, like the way the summits and beautiful letters changed North Korea into a legitimate member of the international community.

The Trumpist excuses for not seeing that the Ukraine and Israel situations are morally identical range from "America First" isolationism to the argument that we need to focus all our world-threat attention on the way China is breathing down Taiwan's neck. Another argument is that support for Ukraine drains resources from the effort to seal the southern US border. (The actual truth is that, given our $36 million debt, we don't have the money for anything. But for the world's only superpower ostensibly committed to a stable, Western-oriented world order, expenditures must be made anyway.)

There's also the "start World War III" argument, articulated recently by Joe Rogan  and Donald Trump, Jr. who, for good measure, trotted out the hackneyed term "military industrial complex." As if it's okay not to do the right thing because there's some attendant risk.

There's a more sinister line of argument that tries to let Putin off the hook for the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the more general war against Ukraine he commenced in February 2022. 

That matters a great deal at present, given the VSG's nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to the DNI director position.

Let's have a look at her track record on this subject:

n the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.

Her journey from anti-war Democrat to Moscow-friendly Maga warrior began in Syria. The devastating conflict was sparked by pro-democracy uprisings in 2011, which were brutally crushed by the Assad regime. It descended into a complex web of factions that drew extremist Islamists from around the world and global powers into the fray.

You will note that peacenik lefties, libertarians and Trumpists all have in common this emphasis on the ickiness of war, untethered to moral considerations. 

Within Europe, there's less than a unified stance on the matter. So far in the war, Romania has proven a stalwart supporter of Ukraine, but that looks to change with the probable election of isolationist Calin Georgescu as Romania's president.

Something else to consider: the war in Ukraine is ratcheting up, and eye-opening developments could well occur between now and January 20. That could change some players' calculus.

In any event, let's be clear-eyed about the fact that not everyone wants to see the acceptable outcome - Ukraine's total defeat of Russia - take place. 

Lotta variables in a very volatile situation.  

 

There's a palpable Cuban-missile-crisis-y feel to the present moment

 I think the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 is still considered the moment at which the world came closest to nuclear war. Maybe that's just because I live through it and remember grownups discussing it. I was alive for the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, which, in retrospect, was another moment when the danger level was pretty heightened, but I was an infant. We're finding out that we weren't all that far away from such a point of peril in Vietnam in 1968.

But in recent years, that hair-trigger tension level has abated:

For more than three decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies faced no serious nuclear threats.

But no sooner do Madelyn Creedon and Franklin Miller, writing at Foreign Affairs, assert as much, than they follow it with this splash of cold water:

Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been rattling his nuclear saber in a manner reminiscent of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Chinese President Xi Jinping has directed a dramatic buildup of China’s nuclear arsenal, a project whose size and scope the recently retired commander of U.S. Strategic Command has described as “breathtaking.” The Russian and Chinese leaders have also signed a treaty of “friendship without limits.” North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is supplying weapons and troops to support Russia’s war in Ukraine, and North Korea is improving its ability to strike both its neighbors and the U.S. homeland with nuclear weapons, as it demonstrated with an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test launch on October 31.

Europe is particularly on edge.

The Nordic countries tell their citizens "prepare and we ain't foolin'":

On Monday, millions of pamphlets landed in Swedish homes eerily titled: "If Crisis or War Comes," while other nations issue their own chilling advice to fearful citizens.

Stockholm has warned of what they call the worsening security situation - otherwise known as Russia's bloody invasion of Ukraine - and urged Swedes to prepare for conflict.

Meanwhile neighbouring Finland have published its own chilling advice online to prepare "for incidents and crises".

In a scarily detailed section on military conflict, the digital brochure describes how the government and president would respond in the event of an armed attack.

The Finnish brochure stressed that its authorities are "well prepared for self defence".

Norwegians also received a pamphlet urging residents to know how to manage on their own for a week in the event of extreme weather - or war.

In summer, Denmark's emergency management agency put out a warning to Danish adults detailing the water, food and medicine necessary to get through three days of crisis.

Sweden and Finland recently gave up neutrality to join Nato after witnessing the atrocities Putin has unleashed in Ukraine since 2022.

Norway was a founding member of the Western defensive alliance on the other hand.

Germans, too:

Germans have been put on high alert for a potential World War 3 scenario with Russia following renewed threats of a nuclear strike from Vladimir Putin. The situation has escalated after US President Joe Biden authorised Ukraine to use long-range missiles against Russia, which Moscow claims has already targeted a weapons warehouse in the Bryansk region.

Putin warned in September that if Western countries allow Ukraine to strike deep inside Russiawith their longer-range weapons, "it will mean that NATO countries, the US, and European countries are at war with Russia."

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has since stated that Russia poses not just a military but also a hybrid threat and that Europe needs to adopt a comprehensive approach to defence.Germany's Foreign Minister has also pledged that the country will not be "intimidated" by Putin, following revelations that Germany would serve as a NATO staging ground should the conflict escalate further.

According to a 1,000-page document titled 'Operationsplan Deutschland', Germany would host hundreds of thousands of troops from NATO countries and act as a logistics hub for dispatching military equipment, food, and medicine to the front lines. The German army is also advising civilians and businesses on how to safeguard infrastructure and prepare to defend the country against potential sabotage, drone attacks, and spying operations.

Germany is setting crisis plans into motion, assigning responsibilities for emergency actions and creating diesel stockpiles, following the lead of Scandinavian nations. Defence Minister Mr Pistorius announced on Tuesday that officials suspect sabotage caused damage to two undersea data cables in the Baltic Sea, one terminating in Germany, although evidence is yet to be found, reports the Mirror US.

Italy, Spain, Greece and the US have closed their Kyiv embassies for at least a day as Ukraine anticipates yet another brazen missile assault from Russia. 

Some bracing words from Sergey Markov:

The US has been given a chilling 'WW3 by Christmas' warning by pro-Putin spokesperson Sergey Markov.

Western allies, also including Britain and France, have taken a “big jump” towards a nuclear conflict by giving Ukraine permission to fire Western long-range missiles into Kremlin territory, Markov claims.

A regular Putin “mouthpiece”, Markov warned that the shock move by President Joe Biden could mean that Britons could be facing a Christmas in shelters.

But Putin lackeys routinely indulge in nuclear bluster, don't they?

Those in favour of the move have noted that the Kremlin and its mouthpieces in the state-controlled media and academia had threatened nuclear war every time the West had stepped up its support for Ukraine, including when it provided tanks, fighter jets and other sophisticated weapon systems.

However, Markov, currently the Director General of Russia's Institute for Political Studies, was convinced the move was different as it would mean that Western militaries would be directly involved in the conflict for the first time - Ukraine would require their assistance to use the precision guided missile systems.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4, he said: “My reaction [to the White House’s decision] was awful, I couldn't sleep well because I am just afraid nuclear war is coming.

“This decision of United States, Great Britain and France is not a step towards nuclear war it is a big jump to nuclear war, nuclear catastrophe."

What's the latest with Iran's nuclear ambitions? 

 Iran has defied international demands to rein in its nuclear program and has increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels, according to a confidential report by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog seen Tuesday by The Associated Press.

The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency said that as of Oct. 26, Iran has 182.3 kilograms (401.9 pounds) of uranium enriched up to 60%, an increase of 17.6 kilograms (38.8 pounds) since the last report in August.

Uranium enriched at 60% purity is just a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.

The IAEA also estimated in its quarterly report that as of Oct. 26, Iran’s overall stockpile of enriched uranium stands at 6,604.4 kilograms (14,560 pounds), an increase of 852.6 kilograms (1,879.6 pounds) since August. Under the IAEA’s definition, around 42 kilograms (92.5 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60% purity is the amount at which creating one atomic weapon is theoretically possible — if the material is enriched further, to 90%.

The reports come at a critical time as Israel and Iran have traded missile attacks in recent months after more than a year of war in Gaza, which is governed by Hamas, a group supported by Iran.

It may be time to reassess the above-mentioned instances' status in the history of nuclear danger. Our present moment seems to offer enough to go around. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dirty pool the Very Stable Genius is considering resorting to to make recess cabinet appointments

 Eye-opening stuff from the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Ed Whelan at The Washington Post:

President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to turn the Constitution’s appointment process for Cabinet officers on its head. If what I’m hearing through the conservative legal grapevine is correct, he might resort to a cockamamie scheme that would require House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to play a critical role. Johnson can and should immediately put an end to this scheme.

Yes, the president's power to make recess appointments is provided for in the Constitution, but Hamilton regarded it as “nothing more than a supplement” to the “general mode of appointing officers of the United States” and is to used “in cases to which the general method was inadequate.” 

Here's what seems to be getting cooked up:

It appears that the Trump team is working on a scheme to allow Trump to recess-appoint his Cabinet officers. This scheme would exploit an obscure and never-before-used provision of the Constitution (part of Article II, Section 3) stating that “in Case of Disagreement” between the houses of Congress, “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”

Under this scheme, it appears that the House would adopt a concurrent resolution that provided for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate. If the Senate didn’t adopt the resolution, Trump would purport to adjourn both houses for at least 10 days (and perhaps much longer). He would then use the resulting intrasession recess to appoint Gaetz and other Cabinet nominees.

Ten years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia labeled the president’s recess-appointment power an “anachronism” because “modern forms of communication and transportation” make the Senate always available to consider nominations. Along with three of his colleagues, Scalia also argued that the president’s power to make recess appointments is limited to intersession recesses and does not apply to the intrasession recess that the Trump scheme would concoct. The justice, who died in 2016, would be aghast at the notion that a president could create an intrasession recess for the purpose of bypassing the Senate approval process for nominations.

Whelan conclude with what is obvious to anyone with a working moral compass: that Speaker Johnson must make clear that flimsily justified recesses ain't happening.  

Yeah, yeah, I found the first few appointments interesting (I absolutely love Marco Rubio's hallway exchange about his views on a Gaza ceasefire with a "peace activist"), but about the time the Very Stable Genius got to prolific procreator (with several different women) Pete Hegseth, I had questions. Then came Tulsi Gabbard, she of the 2017 visit to Syria and some strong evidence of coziness with China and Russia.  Then came Matt Gaetz.

It's pretty clear that the VSG intends to surround himself with a covey of yes-people as quickly as possible so the machinery is in place for any further damage to Mr. Madison's document he feels he needs to do.