Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on out there this week. Today is Saturday, April 22, 2023.
Ukraine’s allies met at Ramstein yesterday “to go through all the different capabilities, systems, supplies that the Ukrainians need to be able to retake more land,” NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg said, just in from Kyiv. He was “confident” Ukraine will retake territory this spring and said Ukraine will join NATO after all this is over. (Viktor Orban tweeted “What?!”)
Consider the distance NATO has come since the Russian invasion. Way back then, NATO was a strictly defensive organization, existing only to protect its members.
Swagger is not a word one associates with the Secretary General, but there it was, the light, Norwegian version. Stoltenberg should try on NATO’s newfound belligerence gingerly, because the Ukraine consensus in the US is starting to change. Political considerations in and outside the Biden administration require the development of new contingency plans.
All countries are concerned with different things. The primary issue, the one that commands the unstinting attention of Ukrainians and Russians right now, is each other. President Macron’s issue du jour, as he has flown to Beijing to proclaim, is to split Europe from the US in the event of a Chinese takeover of Taiwan so that France doesn’t become a US ‘vassal.’ As spring turns to summer, the home truth in the United States is that election season is coming.
The United States has stood as Ukraine’s crucial champion, its chief (and ultimately, sole) guarantor, for a year and more. It has been the primary contributor of aid, training and intense, behind the scenes military-to-military coordination with the Ukrainians.
(Thought experiment: Imagine the French Defense Ministry on the same mission. For that matter, name the French Defense Minister.*)
But the Ukraine consensus in the US is going to change. The US is more distracted than at the beginning of the war, fighting the perennial debt limit battles, parrying in an ill-humored way with China and sending the Secretary of State to call on China’s adversaries.
The Biden administration is staffing up for a reelection effort. It won’t be long before its overarching concern will be getting itself reelected (His team is leaking that he’ll announce next week, probably Tuesday). If and when it feels the need, the administration will be in a convincing position to say, on Ukraine, we did our bit.
You can watch the consensus change by watching thought leaders. The most establishment of establishment organizations, the Council on Foreign Relations, gave Biden advance cover last week:
“The West has so far allowed Kyiv to set the aims of the war, but this policy has run its course as Ukraine’s goals are coming into conflict with other Western interests,” according to Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan. The time has come for the U.S. and its partners to formulate a diplomatic endgame, they write in Foreign Affairs. This endgame should include “a cease-fire as Ukraine’s coming offensive reaches its limits.”
There it is.
All of which makes the endlessly promoted coming Ukrainian offensive unbearably important to everybody, everywhere. As Kyiv’s main ally, the US will run as much of the strategy as it can and will hope alongside the Ukrainians for the best. So it’s instructive to have a look at what assets Ukraine is expected to bring to the fight.
On the Economist’s The Intelligence podcast last week, Shashak Joshi put the state of the troops in plain English:
“With the benefit of leaked American documents, they describe an offensive force of around a dozen brigades, a brigade is let’s say somewhere between three and five thousand men, and of those dozen brigades about nine are armed and supplied by western allies. And those ones will have more than two hundred tanks including the German leopard … about eight hundred other armored vehicles and a hundred and fifty pieces of field artillery in total.”
That’s what they’ve got - a strike force of 60,000 troops tops, 45,000 armed and supplied by allies, 200 tanks, 800 armored vehicles and some field artillery.
The Russians have their defensive capability, and they have this knowledge.
Should Ukrainian perform ineffectually the United States will surely at least entertain some version of Haass and Kupchan’s opt out. Which ought to make everybody nervous about the next few weeks. Because too many of Ukraine’s eggs are in this basket. If it doesn’t work out and the US’s attention turns toward home, all those scoffed-at academics and pundits who claimed Putin could wait it out? They were right.
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There hasn’t been a whole lot to disagree with about Ukraine’s broad strategy so far, but I’m starting to wonder about this nihilist, never ending fighting in Bakhmut. It amounts strategically to not much more than very bloody pride for both sides, and for the Ukrainians, it comes at the risk of leading allies to conclude this is winding up as a war of attrition after all, a forever war that the West can’t support forever.
Articles like this don’t help:
Ukraine defended Bakhmut despite U.S. warnings in leaked documents
The Jack Teixeira leaks were harmful. Already we’re talking about the idea of Ukraine running out of ammunition as a fait accompli. I recommend an episode of the Politics Decanted podcast titled How Ukraine Can Survive the Exhaustion of Its Air Defense Stocks for illuminating detail on Ukraine’s further options.
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The Russian Duma last week passed sweeping reform to Russia’s system of military conscription and they did it in a big hurry. The deputies took 23 minutes for the second and third readings. Meduza says that in comparison, the discussion of the draft law on tightening the rules for the sale of vapes took twice as long.
Prior to last week, according to Novaya Gazeta’s newsletter, Russia’s military summonses system had been functioning more or less the same way for decades.
Now,
“New digital summonses are to be delivered via Gosuslugi, a government website used by Russians for all sorts of things, from making a COVID vaccination appointment to paying speeding tickets. Additionally, a new database of electronic summonses is about to be created, where all draft notices will be registered and deemed received by any given individual seven days after the upload. This way, the actual act of “receiving” the daft notice will no longer play any role in legal terms: individuals liable for conscription are supposed to check up on their name in the database by themselves, even if they received no printed notice or have no Gosuslugi account, to avoid being considered “draft dodgers”.
Once a person is in the digital register, he is no longer allowed to leave the country. If a person fails to show up at a designated military draft office within 20 days, he will face additional restrictions listed by the new law: he will be banned from driving vehicles, buying or selling real estate, and receiving loans from banks. And that is on top of being a “draft dodger” in legal terms (which has always been present in Russian law), and that also implies punishment varying from a minor fine to a prison term.”
If nothing else, this confirms that Russia is having ongoing trouble with conscription. Eurasia Daily Monitor says Russia has effectively outgrown its Soviet era system of formal residency registration, “And thus, the Kremlin is trying to fix this problem by the technical but still authoritarian measure of creating the centralized database for recruitment.”
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Some hoped the celebration of Eid Al Fitr would afford the chance for a cease fire, but the violence hasn’t stopped in Khartoum, and now at least one American is dead according to a statement from the State Department, which declined to say anything further. US troops are on the move from Europe to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, in case the administration decides to mount some sort of evacuation effort. That would be tricky, since there is fighting at the airport.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has been briefing Congresspeople, reportedly stressing any evacuation effort would be only to get embassy staff to safety and not a general evacuation of Americans.
There has been outside involvement in this conflict from the start. Russia’s rogue Wagner group is said to be supplying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with missiles. The militia leader who controls eastern Libya, Khalifa Haftar, is said to have sent a planeload of military gear to the RSF, and Egypt is reportedly backing the army leader General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan. The UAE and the Saudis stand a little farther back in the shadows. Here is a short look at the positions of various outside interests.
Sudan is just in a tough, tough neighborhood. Consider: there are ongoing armed disputes in Somalia, Somaliland and Ethiopia, and in the wider neighborhood, violent suppression of protests including killings, deaths in detention, and torture in Chad, random violence including the killing of nine Chinese nationals in the Central African Republic last month. Farther west Malian Chief of Staff Colonel Assisi Gita was killed in a suspected jihadi attack near the Mauritanian border on Tuesday. And in response to the continuing brutality in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the UN has decided to paint helicopters.
Dry comment of the week: "This change of colour does not change the basic problem, which is insecurity.” This from Stewart Muhindo, a humanitarian activist in Goma.
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We talked about Macron’s visit to China last week. Macron and Biden have since talked on the phone, and yesterday’s Brussels Playbook contained this:
“While the White House readout of the call says the two leaders discussed “the importance of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” the French one doesn’t mention Taiwan — alluding instead to “the entire Indo-Pacific region.” Likewise, while the French readout says the leaders agreed that China had a “role to play to contribute, in the medium term, to the end of the conflict” (aka Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and the need to “engage with the Chinese on this basis,” the White House readout makes no mention of Beijing’s role.”
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The Tuesday travel columns are usually the most-read articles on CS&W, and I’m happy to talk travel all day long. A few items:
I recommend a short weekly list of new travel opportunities as presented by James Pearson in his Simple Flying Routes Newsletter. Here, for example, Fiji Airways Introduces 1st Canada Route
“In an exciting route development, Fiji Airways introduced Nadi, Fiji, to Vancouver. It's the latest 'different' new route, joining recently launched Air Tahiti to Seattle and Eurowings Discover from Germany to Kruger National Park.
Vancouver is Fiji Airways' fourth North America route this winter, alongside Honolulu, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The carrier has 2 weekly Vancouver flights using 273-seat A330-200s.
While the local Vancouver-Fiji market is small, three times as many people flew from Vancouver to Fiji as from Seattle in 2019, including tourists and a good amount of Fijian diaspora (around 80,000 in Canada). The route is also timed for transit passengers: Vancouver to/from Australia and New Zealand and particular South Pacific destinations.”
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The AP reports that it will be easier than ever to visit Kosovo as it enters Schengen:
“BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union lawmakers on Tuesday gave the green light for citizens from Kosovo to travel freely in Europe without visas from next year.
The move means that Kosovo’s citizens will be able to travel in the 27-nation Schengen passport free area, which includes most EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, for periods of up to 90 days every six months.”
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This is not really travel news, since pretty much no one goes to Turkmenistan, but it caught my eye, from Eurasianet:
“John Reese, the vice president of Nicklaus Companies … is in Turkmenistan once again hawking golf courses. The country opened its one and only golf course in 2017, but the U.S. company linked to the eponymous sporting legend Jack Nicklaus, is reportedly eager to add three more. Fresh alarm over looming potential water shortages caused by a major canal project in neighboring Afghanistan is unlikely to deter the Turkmen government from spending large sums on an irrigation-hungry sport that almost nobody in the country watches or plays.”
I once inquired about a visa to Turkmenistan and was turned down flat. No reason given except something like ‘the government is not issuing visas right now. (Consider the plight of the independent travel agent in Ashgabat, if there is such a thing).
I once had the idea of sailing across the Caspian Sea from Baku, probably after reading an account from someone who went before. Here’s one. And another from Bruno Maçães who, for reasons known only to him, blocked me on Twitter. And one more I just love, which includes the advice: “If there is no boat that day, keep trying until a boat eventually leaves.”
Every time I check in on Turkmenistan it’s worth it.
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In Scandinavia this week:
“STOCKHOLM, April 6 (Reuters) - A state actor's involvement in the blast of the Nord Stream pipelines last year is the "absolute main scenario", though confirming identity will prove difficult, the Swedish prosecutor investigating the attack said on Thursday.
"We believe it will be rather difficult to determine who did this," prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist told Reuters in a phone interview.
"The people who did this have probably been aware that they would leave clues behind and probably took care so that the evidence would not point in one direction, but in several directions," he added.”
Of course, “investigators have reasons not to share findings, which can reveal their intelligence capabilities.” NYT
Also in the region, a joint investigation by Nordic public broadcasters has determined that Russia operates a fleet of spy ships scoping out how to sabotage underwater cables and wind farms.
This may be alarming but it is surely not surprising. More surprising would be if the United States and its allies are not using appropriate assets to develop contingency plans to do the exact same kind of thing to Russian strategic assets.
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In Asia this week:
A new poll shows Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha’s United Nation Party may be in trouble. This is one of those instances when you should be careful what you wish for, but Prayut seized power in a 2014 military coup, so few will weep at his downfall. His party trails in the race, in third place at 12.84 percent in a poll last week.
Wee tiny only problem is that the leading opposition Pheu Thai party is led by Paetongtarn Shinawatra, daughter of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra who was was overthrown in a coup in 2006, his party outlawed, and who fled into exile, and the niece of Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand's first first female PM, who was removed from office in 2014 by a Constitutional Court. Fireworks to come.
Something to watch: whether a prospective fall from power by the Thai Prime Minister threatens Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the man who seized power from Myanmar’s elected government just over two years ago.
Some 1.5 million Burmese live in Thailand as refugees and migrants.
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Ahead of next week’s state visit to the US, Reuters has this:
“South Korea might extend its support for Ukraine beyond humanitarian and economic aid if it comes under a large-scale civilian attack, President Yoon Suk Yeol said, signalling a shift in his stance against arming Ukraine for the first time.”
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Have you been to any town more than 100 times? Hank Paulson has been to China more than 100 times.
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Southeast Asia and China are hot this week, physically hot. Thailand recorded its hottest temperature ever about a week ago, 114 (45.4 C) along the Burmese border in the northwest at the provincial capital of Tak.
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Southeast of Thailand in Saigon, Branded as part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection, there’s a new hotel atop Vinmark 81, Saigon’s (and Vietnam’s) tallest building. Branded as part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection, prices for a club room with lounge access next week (all rooms have floor to ceiling windows) start at around $250.
As it happens, we were last in Saigon as Vinmark 81 - the building - was grand opening. Here is the view from the top:
The hotel comprises 34 floors of the 81 floor building. The restaurant is on the 66th floor, so views won’t all be from as high as this photo, which is from the 81st floor observation deck.
But really, Saigon is a city for the senses, a place to live on the street, not cloistered so high above town that you can’t even hear it.
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There was speculation about who caused the Vikings to disappear from the eastern settlement in the mid-15th century. I wrote about it in my 2017 book Out in the Cold.
CNN reports that “now, a team of researchers from Harvard University and Pennsylvania State University say they have uncovered another key factor that could explain why the Vikings fled: a rise in sea levels.
Using a computer model based on geological and climate records, the team found that sea levels would have risen by up to 3 meters (9.8 feet) during the the four centuries of Norse occupation of the eastern settlement Vikings established in Greenland in 985 AD.
The researchers calculated that 204 square kilometers (79 square miles) of land would have been been flooded during the period the settlement was occupied, making Norse communities more vulnerable to storms and coastal erosion as they also lost fertile lowland.
The loss of habitable land would have been compounded by a trend from warmer temperatures toward cooler, drier temperatures in Europe that ultimately led to what is known as the Little Ice Age, which began around 1250 AD. A study detailing the findings published Monday in the scientific journal PNAS.”
Here’s the pertinent excerpt from Out in the Cold:
THE END OF NORSE GREENLAND
The Dorset people yielded to the Thule, then the Inuit. Inuit settlements died out over the centuries in bad winter or bad hunting years, save for a few thousand tenacious, remaining souls.
Over the course of hundreds of years the fearsome Norse cast their mighty presence clear across the North Atlantic from the Scandinavian peninsula to North America.
But by around 1500 the Norse had disappeared from Greenland. How did it come to pass? Once they had been invincible. At Lindisfarne they were so fearsome they caused the English theologian Alcuin to wail, “is this the beginning of the great suffering ... before the end of the world?”
They ran the Westmen off from Iceland. They founded communities in Greenland and all the way to Vinland in today’s Newfoundland (We will visit the settlement site shortly). Yet they abandoned Vinland after only a few winters and for this, I think the explanation is clear enough.
Simply, Leif, son of Eirik the Red, and his band of explorers of North America, never mustered enough fellows for robust settlements and the settlements they did establish came under attack from the local Skrælings, as we shall see. They were at the tenuous end of a grown-thin supply line.
But what about Greenland? What caused its demise? What ill swept down upon those once entrenched souls to consign them to their demise? Evidence suggests the Greenlanders became detached from the east. How did it come to pass?
Leif’s expeditions west were probably in search of resources like wood. It was easier for the Icelanders to go to Norway for lumber than to sail around to the far side of Greenland, and in Norway there were other goods they wouldn’t find in Greenland.
Kristen Seaver thinks that “wealthy and ambitious Icelanders became increasingly drawn into the orbit of Norwegian power politics and in the end appear to have lost all interest in their Greenland cousins.”
She believes that the Greenlanders never stopped crossing the Davis Strait to North America for lumber. For one thing, driftwood long soaked in salt water, their only other source of wood for building, lost its bendability, becoming less worthy of use in shipbuilding than “seasoned lumber that could be made to take a proper curve.”
She thinks that aside from a costly shipload all the way from Norway, the only decent-sized logs at the Greenlanders’ disposal were those washed up by the sea - or those known to be available across the Davis Strait.
So without their Icelandic cousins, perhaps they did fall out of touch and orient themselves to the west. One way or another, the settlements at Brattahlíð and farther north disappeared.
Jared Diamond’s theory has all the Norse Greenlanders dying after burning all their firewood. The Pulitzer prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel uses the same argument for the demise of the Mangarevans who settled Rapa Nui.
He imagines the European Greenlanders allowing their imported cattle to trample any budding replacement wood. The short growing season would have worked against tree replenishment.
Diamond blames the Norse for, unlike the Inuit, never learning how to use seal and whale oil to light and heat their homes, which would have saved burning trees. He makes a solid case that the Inuit adapted to the land more fully than the Norse, learning to make buildings, igloos, out of snow, hunting a wider variety of animals for food, using sled dogs for transportation and animal skins to stretch over boats, allowing for sea hunting of whales.
There is another possibility.
Kristen Seaver: “... it was more than a coincidence that the Norse Greenland colony came to an end just when North Atlantic exploration touched it closely.
In the late 15th century, besides Columbus and his Caribbean adventures, business interests organized to explore the lands to the west, including shippers from Bristol, England (including the best known, the Italian John Cabot), and Portuguese sailors. These two groups crossed paths.
Her conclusion is that some remaining Greenlanders fell in with those expeditions that came after and were inspired by Cabot:
“... both circumstantial evidence and common sense suggest that the Greenlanders, who had so clearly taken active part in the North Atlantic economic community throughout the fifteenth century, had remained opportunists to the end and joined the early-sixteenth-century European surge toward North America.”
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New in my reading stack this week is Cracked Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian. See if this review by Jodi Dean piques your interest. She writes: “Rather than extending connections in a networked society, the thinkers in his book champion withdrawal and secession. They don’t want to conquer the state; they want to unravel it, “underthrow” it, by carving out exemptions.”
You should read another Jodi Dean article, also in LARB: Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism. Read it and marvel how this 2020 article from Dean, compliments a 2020 book, The Coming of Neo Feudalism by Joel Kotkin.
Dean writes from the left, in places like The Nation and The New Left Review, and her book titles include The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, Comrade – An Essay on Political Belonging and Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing.
Kotkin’s website cites his work for UnHerd, Quillette, National Review and City Journal, decidedly not left-leaning outlets, so it’s interesting where they come to a general agreement, namely that the push toward a neo-feudal order is being led by tech oligarchs with vast wealth who are eager to set up their own set of laws - or lack of them. Which is apparently also the point of Quinn Slobodan’s Cracked Up Capitalism. Which was the original point here.
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In the UK this week:
All of these British royals just lose more and more legitimacy as time goes by. This … this is just a cartoon. Please.
A series of quotes from the British press this week. Starting with the Guardian:
“Michael Gove has been taking his smoking breaks in a special hut built for him on the roof of his departmental office, after he was stalked by a terrorist and heckled in the street.
The taxpayer-funded smoking den was built specifically for Gove shortly after he was appointed levelling up secretary in October 2021 and he was heckled by anti-lockdown protesters.”
However
“Gove, 55, signalled his support for banning young people from smoking last year. He told Times Radio that he was “open-minded” about stopping everyone below a certain age from ever buying cigarettes.
“We do need to take steps to improve public health,” Gove said. “I do think that enlightened public health measures which are backed by strong scientific evidence, which follow the lead of the doctors, the clinicians – we should look seriously at them.”
The Sun:
“The hut has been erected on top of his Levelling Up Department as there is no other appropriate outside space apart from the roof.”
The London Economic:
“It is not known how much the smoking hut cost, but the bus shelter-like structures can sell for around £5,000.”
The Times:
A June 2022 article in the Times reports “Michael Gove has opened a cabinet split by signalling support for banning all young people from buying cigarettes.” It doesn’t mention that Gove is a smoker.
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One more thing. According to Axios “Ten months after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the West remains united in its staggering support for Ukraine.” or, to the New York Times, “the West is struggling to maintain a united front.”
All clear there.
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That’s it for today. For next Tuesday’s travel column we’ll bounce around the world a little exploring time:
“Suppose that next Tuesday you wake up on the equator. Swinging in your hammock on the beach and turning with the earth, you will travel the earth’s full circumference, 24,901 miles that day (not counting the swinging).
Pull your calculator from your bathing suit, divide 24,901 by the length of a day, 23 hours, 56 minutes and four seconds, and you find that you have been traveling 1,040 miles per hour.”
Thanks for reading CS&W. While you’re here, why not sign up for a subscription?Subscriptions start at the entirely reasonable rate of free and even the free ones come with 50% off pre-shipping price on every order from Earthphotos.com.
Good weekend, see you Tuesday.
* Since 20 May 2022, the Minister of the Armed Forces of France has been Sébastien Lecornu.