Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on out there this week. Today is Saturday, June 10th, 2023.
I’m in Europe this week, just now on a train to Helsinki, so let’s take a look around the continent. A fateful NATO summit approaches, we’ll talk Ukraine, Spain and Slovakia, and have a look at Poland’s big, big problem.
Here we go:
I’ve been in Finland this week. It may just be the people I talk with, but this trip I feel a kind of repudiation of the interminable reign of Urho Kekkonen, Finland’s ruler from 1956 to 1982. Finland has joined NATO and appears pleased with itself.
Kekkonen is remembered as a statesman for resisting Russian domination and trying to find a modus vivendi with Russia during the difficult Cold War period, but he leaned toward accommodation in the process. Ever the pugilist, he passed a law in 1971 that gave him the power to censor news, appointed loyalists to state broadcaster YLE and thundered about cutting YLE’s budget whenever its reporting didn’t suit him.
There is precious little accommodation of Russia now. This NATO thing is an occasion for discreet, modest backslapping in a land where emotional displays are rare.
[The standard joke is that the introverted Finn will look at his shoes when talking to you while the extrovert will look at your shoes.]
Millions of “I Was There” T-shirts have been sold over the years to commemorate the Beatles’s first Ed Sullivan show appearance on February 9, 1964, when in fact the Ed Sullivan Theater had a capacity of 728 seats.
It’s a little like that here right now. Pretty much all Finns suddenly claim a variation on, “I said twenty years ago we should have joined NATO,” while in fact, polls say only a minority of Finns favored NATO accession until February 2022.
Whatever, there’s enthusiasm in the civic step in Finland just now, and it’s good to see.
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A NATO summit packed with business looms a month from now, July 11th and 12th in Vilnius, Lithuania. Will Sweden’s keenly sought accession to NATO be ready to announce? Last Sunday Jens Stoltenberg was working Sweden’s case in Türkiye. Posing as optimistic, he told Reuters an agreement could be reached in time for a summit. Trying to knock heads together, he said officials from Finland, Sweden and Türkiye would meet next week, probably Thursday and/or Friday when NATO defense ministers meet in Brussels.
The Swedish Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, said he and Stoltenberg agree that Sweden has done “all it could.” “We have fulfilled our obligations, including changing our laws. The decision now rests with Ankara,” he was quoted as saying by Turkey’s Anadolu agency, AL-Monitor reported.
Conventional wisdom has been that President Erdoğan has been holding up Sweden’s accession so he could present domestically as the tough nationalist through his coronation. Now that’s complete, let’s see if the conventional wisdom is correct.
In other pre-NATO summit jockeying, at week’s end it still appears the alliance has yet to settle on a common line on Ukraine. Brief background: Over the heads of Germans and French delegates at Bucharest, Dubya Bush declared in 2008 at Bucharest that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join NATO.
Five months later Russia invaded Georgia and still holds Georgian territory in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And in 2014 Russia invaded the Donbass and Crimea.
In a meaty Reuters article, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Ukraine wants into NATO, and now: ”It is time for the alliance to stop making excuses and start the process that leads to Ukraine's eventual accession.” Stoltenberg ruled that out for the present, saying "To become a member in the midst of a war is not on the agenda.”
The Prime Minister of front line NATO member Latvia, Krisjanis Karins, maintained that Russia would start a conflict all over again unless Ukraine was allowed to join NATO after the end of the war. “To have ... lasting peace, we will need Ukraine, [an] independent, free and liberated Ukraine, as a part of the NATO alliance,” he said. As of a month before the NATO summit, that appears to be the most Ukraine can hope for.
The Center for European Reform sums things up with the headline, Going from Bucharest to Vilnius without Moving? It says”
“allies seem to be coalescing around offering Ukraine an as-yet undefined closer relationship with NATO, while putting off membership, again, for a future that may never come.”
There’s still more business for NATO: the 31 country alliance charged with the collective defense of a billion people needs a new leader. Stoltenberg’s already extended term ends at the end of September. No announcement is expected, apparently, in Vilnius.
The Great Mentioners are mentioning Mette Frederiksen, the 45 year old prime minister of Denmark, and Ben Wallace, 53, the British defense secretary, as candidates. Mark Rutte, 56, the Dutch Prime Minister and Kaja Kallas, 45, the Estonian Prime Minister also make the first round, and the London Times throws Pedro Sanchez’s hat in the ring, especially as the Spanish PM, 51, may need a new job after Spain’s July 23 election.
All of these are young people and some represent generational change. That’s good.
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Let’s talk about Poland: Media outlets are calling the huge opposition rally last weekend, which stretched for more than a mile across Warsaw, the biggest Polish gathering since the fall of Communism (though well short of Pope John Paul II’s homecoming, which was maybe Poland’s biggest gathering ever).
In advance of Poland’s parliamentary elections the main opposition party Civic Platform is rowing against the world tide of illiberalism. It’s youngish candidate (now 51), popular Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, ran a respectable race in 2020 against victorious President Andrzej Duda, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) candidate, racking up 48.97 percent of the vote.
Next time, in 2025, Civic Platform’s candidate is likely to be party head and former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who seems, best I can tell, to be playing the happy warrior as he largely did during his stint in Brussels as President of the European Council.
But Poland has a deep, deep problem.
Most everyone agrees Poland’s work in support of Ukraine has been exemplary. Because of that, PiS has largely gotten a pass. It shouldn’t. The PiS is a deeply conservative bunch of illiberal, populist cronies. Unfortunately, its politics plays well outside Warsaw and big cities like Krakow and Wroclaw, especially in generally conservative, largely Catholic rural Poland.
Rural areas account for roughly 40 percent of the Polish electorate. Poles are religious and traditional, by and large opposing abortion and same-sex marriage as not being congruent with “Polish values.” In contrast, Civic Platform’s last presidential candidate, Mayor Trzaskowski, prominently signed a declaration of support for the LGBT community during his mayoral campaign.
PiS is adaptable and willing to learn. It has taken a page from Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn aka Rama X, (who, by the way, since this is the Mostly European Edition, lives not in Thailand but in the town of Tutzing in Bavaria, about 30 kilometers south of Munich).
Thailand has a much invoked lèse majesté law that makes it a crime to insult the king. PiS has passed its own version, Article 135, which states that anyone who publicly insults the President is punishable by up to three years in jail.
PiS has also borrowed from Turkish President Erdoğan’s banning of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu from running against him, a particularly inspired bit of illiberal thuggery.
[A short digression is useful here. Very briefly, here is how Erdoğan dispensed with his strongest opponent: Ekrem İmamoğlu of Türkiye’s opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), ran for Istanbul mayor against Erdoğan’s AK Party candidate in 2019 and won a very close election. Erdoğan demanded the election be run again, whereupon İmamoğlu won by 770,000 votes, ending 25 years of AK rule in Istanbul.
İmamoğlu called the people who annulled the first election “idiots,” was accused of “insulting public officials,” and sentenced by an Erdoğan-friendly court to more than two-and-a-half years in prison. With his appeal pending, İmamoğlu was unable to compete in Türkiye’s recent election. İmamoğlu was clearly the most charismatic candidate and Erdoğan knew it. In the presidential election just finished, Erdoğan dispensed of the CHP’s second choice, the determinedly milquetoast Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.]
In Poland, PiS now seeks to use a similar law to sideline a potential Donald Tusk candidacy. On May 29th, President Duda signed a law locally called Lex Tusk, or Tusk’s Law. It seeks to disqualify Tusk from holding elective office for ten years, on grounds he is a Russian collaborator.
The London Times speculates that PiS would use the fact that Tusk negotiated cheap oil prices with the Russians when he was Prime Minister (2007-2014) to accuse him of being Russia friendly.
In a Washington Post column last weekend former Polish Foreign Minister and MEP Radek Sikorsky warned that:
“The ruling Law and Justice party, with an eye to the parliamentary election set for this autumn, recently passed a law establishing a so-called Committee on Russian Influence, which would target any opponents it deems fit.”
The Center for European Policy Analysis says:
“as things stand now, the commission will start sanctioning people in mid-September, a month or so ahead of elections to be most likely scheduled for mid-October.”
Tusk has said that he will challenge the ruling if it is unfavorable.
That’s only a thin slice of the no good PiS has been up to:
• PiS has effectively packed the Constitutional Tribunal with loyalists by appointing 7 of 15 judges as part of its wider project of overhauling the judiciary.
• PiS has passed a law that gives the government the power to appoint the heads of public broadcasters, so that public broadcasters speak for the government.
• PiS has also passed legislation giving the central government the power to dissolve local governments that it deems to be “dysfunctional."
• PiS has passed a law that gives the government the power to block websites that it deems to be "harmful." It has blocked Krytyka Polityczna, a left-wing magazine, Wolne Media, which investigates corruption, and the news site OKO.press, among others.
• PiS has changed the electoral system through gerrymandering, the introduction of a five percent threshold to win a seat in the Sejm and other means that make it more difficult for opposition candidates to win elections.
• PiS is staunchly anti-immigrant, unless you’re white and Ukrainian. It has refused to take any migrants from the Middle East.
For all these sins, PiS has huge support. It has increased the minimum wage by more than a third in its eight years in office, from 2000 to 3240 zlotys and added subsidies for child care. It has cut the income tax from 19 to 17 percent, VAT on food from 23 to five percent and abolished property tax for most people. It has not said how it will replace that lost revenue. With all the traditional tools of incumbency and all its new ones as well, PiS is going to be hard to beat. Parliamentary elections are due on or before November 11th.
One more thing on Poland: the US Ambassador to Poland was quoted this week as saying
"The U.S. government shares concerns about laws that may ostensibly reduce voters' ability to vote for those they want to vote for, outside of a clearly defined process in an independent court."
What, Mr. Ambassador, are you doing here with the word “ostensibly?”
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Ukraine and NATO: I wrote week before last about how President Zelenskyy’s fate rests with President Biden.
The president declared that the U.S. would “not tire” in its support. Along with a hundred Ukrainian commentators, pundits and analysts, his administration has been careful to say, “Ukraine is fighting, Ukrainians are dying—they get to decide” their own war aims.
The fact that it’s such a morally defensible position makes it easy to say, and the administration might mean it sincerely and completely. But Ukraine’s utter dependence on Washington makes it vital that Kyiv continues to court the U.S., and that, in its way, undermines Zelenskyy’s ability to completely “get to decide” what happens in this war.
The United States has reasons of its own security and geostrategy beyond those of Ukraine for backing Ukraine in this war – it doesn’t want to reward Russian aggression, it doesn’t want NATO to be institutionally undermined, it wants to be seen as bestriding the narrow world like a colossus. But however unlikely it might be, should Biden change his mind, Ukraine will have to either come along on U.S. terms, or potentially lose the war.
In what may or may not be signaling something about the administration’s future intent, it’s worth noting that National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told Fareed Zakaria last weekend, “But what I will say is this: President Zelensky himself has said that this war will end ultimately through diplomacy.”
Call it a portent. Dismiss it. But let’s watch. Along these lines, a second article suggesting that Washington Needs an Endgame in Ukraine has appeared in Foreign Affairs, which many call the house organ of the foreign policy establishment (the “blob” in Ben Rhodes’s estimation), and which in any case usually comes pretty close to what ultimately happens.
Richard Haas, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs, wrote The West Needs a New Strategy in Ukraine, A Plan for Getting From the Battlefield to the Negotiating Table in April. The Eurasia Daily Monitor says this is the establishment trying to find an off ramp for Biden ahead of his reelection effort.
One other word on Biden: he has been criticized for holding back various types of aid from Ukraine, like F-16s, until a groundswell builds that drags him along. You may have to squint a little, but not too much, to see Biden’s reluctance as a way of trying to nudge the Europeans forward toward advocacy for their own continent. In this view, when, finally, the Europeans don’t lead enough, Biden is willing to be the bad guy.
South Korea is breaking its long-standing policy of not providing weapons to active conflict zones in order to send artillery shells to Ukraine. It marks the first time since the policy’s inception (following the Vietnam war in the 1970s) that South Korea has provided weapons to a country that is actively engaged in a conflict (although In 2022, South Korea agreed to sell artillery shells to the United States, which were then sent to Ukraine).
The worthwhile Foreign Exchanges elsewhere on Substack says:
“According to The Wall Street Journal, Ukraine is about to receive an influx of hundreds of thousands of South Korean-made 155 millimeter artillery rounds, breaching Seoul’s policy heretofore of only providing non-lethal support to Kyiv. The South Korean Defense Ministry insists that the report contains “inaccuracies” and that the lethal assistance policy has not changed, but this may be a question of semantics. Technically, per the WSJ, the South Koreans are giving the shells to the US and it’s the US—whose own stockpile of 155mm shells has been severely depleted in service of the Ukrainian war effort—that would technically be sending them to Ukraine. The US has been thinking about sending Ukraine cluster bombs (which could fill the same basic military niche as the 155mm shells but are far more dangerous to civilians primarily because of a high “dud” rate), but this South Korean shipment will apparently delay a decision on that front.”
Russia/Belarus:
“in March, Putin announced that he would station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, with a storage facility set to be built as early as July. Since Russia has already deployed nuclear-capable Iskander missile systems there — as well as thousands of troops — this would put nuclear delivery systems and warheads in close proximity to one another, greatly reducing the warning time of their use.”
That’s from Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan, Harvard’s Belfer Center and a former US defense attaché to Moscow and deputy director for strategy, plans and policy on the Army Staff. He may know his stuff. Read the whole article, Why Putin will use nuclear weapons.
Independent North reported that Denmark’s government would triple its defense budget over the next 10 years.
“The government wants to significantly strengthen Danish defense and security with approximately 143 billion kroner ($20.5 billion) over the next 10 years,”
the acting Defense Minister said in a statement.
Finally in Spain, alongside the tide of populism in Poland elsewhere in today’s column, watch the far right, who are looking strong against incumbent Pedro Sanchez’s center left coalition, in Spanish elections scheduled for July 23rd.
And be aware that the opposition leader in Slovakia is openly pro-Putin. Marian Kotleba is founder of the People's Party Our Slovakia, and appears to be your run of the mill racist, antisemite xenophobe. Three days before last year’s invasion of Ukraine, Kotleba praised Putin for "decisive action" in recognizing the independence of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, calling it "a step in the right direction.” He said it would "help to protect the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine.” The Slovak election is September 19th. Two polls last month showed the incumbent Zuzana Čaputová: 42 percent, Marian Kotleba: 27 percent, and Zuzana Čaputová: 40 percent Marian Kotleba: 28 percent.
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Back in the USA, I regret having been abroad to miss the gravity of this week’s events in Congress, as Republicans have been promoting something called the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act, naturally enough, sponsored by Senator Ted Cruz.
There is also Republican primary news. Former Vice President Mike Pence declared his presidential candidacy at a community college in Des Moines on Wednesday . The former VP mystifies me. Mr. Pence lives with the very strange belief that Jesus and a groundswell of tens and tens of people want him to be president.
Meanwhile on Tuesday Chris Christie, in a career move calculated to keep him relevant until his next book, declared for the presidency in New Hampshire.
And finally, make a note that you heard it here first: Burgumentum.
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In late 1973, White House lawyers learned that 18-1/2 minutes of an incriminating - and subpoenaed - recording had been erased, supposedly by accident, by Richard Nixon’s longtime secretary Rose Mary Woods. Nixon told a grand jury he “practically blew my stack.”
Last week, as The New Republic puts it,
“A resort employee (at Mar-A-Lago) drained (a) pool last October, straight into a room full of computer services used to store surveillance footage from around the property, CNN reported Monday, citing anonymous sources. It is unclear whether the room was intentionally flooded, but smart people generally try to drain water away from buildings.”
Here is the pool, obviously adjacent to wherever the servers are.
LAST MINUTE: Then came Thursday’s federal indictment of the convicted sex abuser former president, immediately followed by the resignation of two of his Washington lawyers, and at 12:30pm BST yesterday, Boris Johnson sent a letter submitting his resignation as a Member of Parliament. He blamed supernatural beings and animals for his demise, claiming there was a “witch-hunt under way” by a “kangaroo court.” More next weekend.
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THOUGHT: Brad DeLong writes:
“Some of us are more optimistic than others about the future. We optimists recognize that it is still possible to escape from the traps that America’s Second Gilded Age has laid.
During a gilded age, productive capabilities are directed away from providing most people with necessities and conveniences, and toward exorbitant spending on status-seeking and other worthless activities. Inherited wealth typically plays a major role, and it is often deployed to block and delay any transformation that could upend the status quo.
Consider global warming, which now threatens to neutralize much of the technological dividend that we otherwise would have had over the next two generations. We are in this mess precisely because coal and oil interests had enough social and political power to delay the transition to zero-emissions energy.”
Read the rest.
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That’s it for today. Every Tuesday CS&W publishes a travel column. Last Tuesday’s column was from Abidjan, and it felt good to be back in Africa, so Tuesday we’ll start a two column series about an adventure in Tanzania.
Thanks for reading Common Sense and Whiskey. While you’re here, why not sign up for a subscription? You get three posts a week, subscriptions start at the entirely reasonable rate of free and even the free ones come with 50% off the pre-shipping price on every order from Earthphotos.com.
Good weekend, see you Tuesday.