He’s back. Or rather, it’s back. Hunter Biden’s laptop is in the news again. (See story here.) Given its dodgy provenance (see Wikipedia comments here), it’s far from a sure bet that the water-soaked laptop allegedly dropped off, and then abandoned, at a rabid (and legally bl[...]
Archive for the ‘Foreign Affairs’ Category
4 things Putin got wrong
Kirill Rogov, a Russian political analyst (C.V. here), says Putin’s Ukraine war is “lost” and an “epic failure,” and propounds 4 major mistakes: “The mistake was the notion that the West was unwilling to resist aggression, that it was lethargic, greedy and divided.” “[...]
Trump issues threat to Putin
Trump claims Putin invaded Ukraine because Biden is “weak,” Huffington Post notes (see this story here). So how would he deal with Putin? Like this, he says: “Sending American nuclear submarine patrols into Russian waters” to threaten him. (See that story here). Uh, okey-doke[...]
March 17th, 2022 - 3:31 am § in Foreign Affairs, Russia
What’s Putin fighting for in Ukraine?
“When Vladimir Putin shattered the peace in Europe by unleashing war on a democracy of 44 million people, his justification was that modern, Western-leaning Ukraine was a constant threat and Russia could not feel ‘safe, develop and exist,'” BBC News says (here). That’s consis[...]
The GOP’s amazing Ukraine flipflop
Remember 2019, when Trump was impeached for extorting Ukraine, and virtually every Republican defended him? Or that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort (photo, left; profile here), now a disbarred lawyer and pardoned felon, was on the payroll of Putin’s Ukrainian frontman? (If you do[...]
Putin and Trump
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Sorry about your yacht, have a Big Mac
The NATO countries’ swift move against Russian assets in the West apparently caught Putin and his pals by surprise. You can’t uproot a Miami mansion or Manhattan penthouse, of course, but superyachts are at least somewhat mobile (although the bigger the boat, the harder it is to secure a[...]
How Trump changed America’s nuclear strategy
America’s 14 Trident subs, 8 operating in the Pacific out of Bangor, Washington, and 6 in the Atlantic, are now armed with some low-yield “tactical” warheads. This warhead, dubbed the W76-2, has about one-third to one-half the explosive power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. De[...]
A brief history of the Ukraine war
It wasn’t inevitable, until Western policy mistakes made it so, but like a train moving down the tracks it had a lot of inertia and wasn’t going to stop on a dime. It was a long time coming. This conclusion is based on a piece in the Guardian (read it here) by Keith Gessen (pictured [&he[...]
March 9th, 2022 - 9:56 pm § in Economics, Foreign Affairs
Global military spending (chart)
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