Welcome. There’s even more going on out there this week than usual. Let’s have a look. Today is Saturday, July 1st, 2023.
Hooboy, they’ve really done it now; they’ve gone and put Vladimir Putin into a death spiral. Or have they? We’ll talk about it, and about the value of experts. We’ll also talk Lukashenka, Thai politics, the Hajj in the heat, Canadian wildfires, the US sails into Da Nang again, and elephants in Africa.
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RUSSIA: Red Square was closed last weekend, chained shut. You can feel bad for day trippers from the provinces, come to the big city to gawk at the sights, but it has been hard not to enjoy Vladimir Putin’s evident discomfort this week, as, having fended off his immediate demise, he tries to further forestall it.
One might feel a twinge of human compassion at his discomfiture – on clear display as he returned to the hustings to press the flesh this week – had he conducted his assault on Ukraine as anything less than unprovoked international terrorism. But one does not.
One of the most fun things about the coup-adjacent events of last weekend was the way your own predictions of what would come next were every bit as likely as all of the learned pundits who populate the television and the internet. There was Mikhail Khodorkovsky urging us all to climb on the Pregozhin train. Would Putin gun down Prigozhin’s troops as they approached Moscow? Some said he would, some said he would not. They were digging up highways south of Moscow! Where was Putin!? Where was the Russian army!?
It didn’t take long for the wisdom of the pundits to coalesce around the primary common wisdom prevailing at week’s end: Putin’s days are numbered. His demise has begun. On the most cursory examination, this proposition is notable for how little it says. It makes no prediction either how long that demise will take nor by what means it will be brought about. Buy boy, does it sound wise.
The most succinct summary of the emergent smart-sounding wisdom is here, from the Hudson Institute:
“If nothing else is clear yet from last week, this much is: if a private army can take over “two major Russian cities and (its) warriors’ march on Moscow against virtually no resistance have shown that anything is possible, including Putin’s downfall and civil war.”
THE WAGNER GROUP:
Here is part of Putin’s speech last Saturday:
“What we’re facing is specifically treason. Excessive ambitions have led to treason. Treason towards one’s country, one’s people, and the cause Wagner’s fighters and commanders fought and died side by side with our other units. Everyone who consciously chose the path of treason will face inevitable punishment — both in front of the law and in front of our people”
Specifically treason, he says. Yet because many Russians relate to the tough talking Pregozhin, apparently not enough treason to ease Mr. Pregozhin out of a tall window. At least yet. As far as we know.
On the other hand, what do we know? At the end of the week reports emerged of mysterious – and extensive – movements by planes associated with Pregozhin, and Christo Grosev, a Bulgarian journalist who is Bellingcat’s man on the Russia brief, says Pregozhin’s personal phone has been disconnected since Monday.
Here’s a graphic from a timely look at the beast that Mr. Pregozhin created, called WAGNER GROUP: The Evolution of a Private Army.
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PUTIN AS A RATIONAL ACTOR: Last Saturday Putin dispatched both the presidential plane and the decoy plane to Saint Petersburg and other than his taped speech, he disappeared. Whether he was on either plane is immaterial to the oft-made argument this week that he is first and foremost concerned about his own life (No shortage of people made the same point about the twenty foot long Covid-era meeting table).
A desire for self-preservation doesn’t make Putin unique, but recognizing it does allow us to make some predictions about the rest of his war on Ukraine. The Ukrainians have been trumpeting for weeks now their fears that Putin has an action plan to attack the Zaporizhia nuclear plant, yet so far he hasn’t done it.
Analysts have worried for years about a Russian provocation in the Baltics, say in the Suwalki Gap (see What Just Happened #4, here), or Narva, Estonia, on the Russian border, but Putin has held back from challenging NATO. In response to Ukrainian fears about an attack on Zaporizhia there has been talk (that some might call idle, but others might call carefully placed) about NATO invoking Article 5 of its treaty, which says any attack on a NATO member in Europe or North America “shall be considered an attack against them all,” because such an attack on Zaporizhia could release fallout that drifts over NATO countries.
Hypothesis: Putin is (so far) maintaining his inclination not to provoke NATO. Conclusion/Prediction: NATO can continue for now to press ahead with its support for Ukraine.
Of course, this could be proven perfectly wrong tomorrow. Have to see. The NATO summit is coming up on July 11th and 12th and they have a lot to talk about. We’ll talk more about NATO and Russia here next week.
BELARUS: Alexandr Lukashenka went out for a verbal strut in a lengthy press conference on Tuesday, claiming credit for peace in our time, or at least total mastery over Putin.
This from the Institute for the Study of War:
“Lukashenko stressed that the Wagner Group will not open recruitment centers in Belarus as it did in Russia but that Belarusians - and presumably other nationals- will be allowed to join the Wagner Group in Belarus. Lukashenko’s description suggests that the Wagner Group will primarily act as a training and advisory partner for the Belarusian military. Lukashenko stated that Wagner forces have more training than the Belarusian military and that the Belarusian military could benefit from the Wagner Group’s extensive combat experience.”
It has occurred to many that the last thing Mr. Lukashenka needs is a well-armed militia knocking around shoulder to shoulder with his sullen citizenry. Maybe the ISW is right, though; maybe he can use Wagner troops to hone his Belarusian fighting machine. That seems far-fetched, but it just could be, I suppose, that the threat of defenestration may focus Mr. Pregozhin’s mind in new ways. Surely this is as yet unresolved.
PUNDITRY:
In the ‘maybe reaching a little far for an analogy’ department, during a valedictory appearance, Richard Haass, who retires this week after a successful, scandal-free twenty year run at the Council on Foreign Relations, tried an everyman’s take on the end-of-Putin theme on TV on Thursday, trying to broaden it to apply to the entire war on Ukraine”
He said this week “pulls a thread on the sweater of Russian troop moral and solidarity.”
What a sweater.
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In yesterday’s Weekend Reading I highlighted an article Vladimir Kara-Murza wrote in the Washington Post in which he called out Western leadership for propping up and sometimes praising post-Soviet Russian leaders. His thesis was that The West deserves much of the blame for Putin’s rise to unchecked power.
Historian Stephen Wertheim wrote in an op-ed in the NYT a couple of weeks back in which he repackaged a prominent Realist argument that Russian aggression in Ukraine is partly the West’s fault. I take Mr. Kara-Murza’s point, but not really Mr. Wertheim’s.
Wertheim writes that “After the Cold War ended, Moscow wanted NATO, previously an anti-Soviet military alliance, to freeze in place and diminish in significance,” and that “Russia, for its part, never stopped claiming a ‘zone of influence’ over the former Soviet space, as President Boris Yeltsin baldly stated in 1995,” as if the West’s acceding to Russia’s desires might have headed off any future post-Soviet conflict.
His big ’sweep of history’ idea is that NATO “must recognize that the war has more complex causes than this popular narrative suggests. Without question, Russia is committing horrific, inexcusable aggression against Ukraine, and imperialist attitudes in Moscow run deep. But partly because of those attitudes, Russia’s leaders are also reacting to NATO’s expansion.”
It’s like saying ‘I never knew the guy next door was a virulent dog hater but he’s acting weird now, so maybe I should never have got my puppy.’
Wertheim is surely right that Vladimir Putin has grievances, but it’s not as if he’s unique in that respect. Compare his blamecasting with this prediction that has held up well for 25 years now, from Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who warned us in 1997 in The Grand Chessboard that:
“Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”
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THAILAND: The eight party coalition that dominated vote-getting in the May 14th Thai election vows to remain united in its goal of overthrowing what it calls the “dictatorial” conservative bloc headed by General Prayut Chan-o-cha, but as the Diplomat reported this week, Cracks Are Appearing in Thailand’s Pro-Democracy Coalition.
The current machinations, it says, center around the two top vote-getting parties’ attempts to win the post of speaker of the upcoming parliament. Parliament is set to convene Monday, with selection of the House speaker to take place within its first 10 days.
The top vote-getters are the upstart Move Forward Party, with 151 out of 500 seats, and the runner-up and longtime populist player in Thai politics the Pheu Thai Party, with 141.
Meanwhile, Frontier Myanmar says General Prayut Chan-o-cha’s caretaker army-dominated Thai government invited the international pariah and Thailand’s neighbor Myanmar’s Foreign Minister Than Swe to an informal two-day meeting.
It reports that Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha justified the meeting on the grounds that:
“We suffer more than others because we share more than 3,000 kilometres of land and sea border with Myanmar.”
But he was defensive: “We need to talk, otherwise people will be affected. Today is just a meeting, we did not agree on anything.”
Than Swe ran Myanmar from 1992 to 2011 as chairman of the “State Peace and Development Council,” which neither promoted peace nor developed anything but wealth for Than Swe’s cronies.
Frontier Myanmar reported the ‘informal discussion’ “gave the junta’s foreign minister Than Swe a platform to paint the regime as a benevolent peacemaker vilified by biased media.”
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SAUDI ARABIA Hajj in the heat: The annual Hajj began in Mecca last Sunday. It’s the first with no limit on attendees since Covid in 2020, but record crowds were not expected.
The Hajj, governed by the Islamic lunar calendar, floats through the Western Gregorian calendar. Since the lunar calendar is shorter, the Hajj gets ten or twelve days earlier each year in the Western calendar.
Just now it’s in June, with everyday temperatures beyond 40 expected. Then there’s inflation. The AP says, for example, that “Since last pilgrimage, the Egyptian pound has lost 40% of its value against the Saudi riyal.”
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CANADA: Wildfires have burned an area of over 4 million hectares so far in 2023, more than the average area burned in an entire year in Canada. It is the most area burned in a single year since 1950. The fires have been concentrated in the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec.
The main cause has been lightning, during prolonged periods of hot, dry weather. The BBC said on June 8 that “Spring in Canada has been much warmer and drier than usual, creating a tinder-dry environment for these vast fires.”
The fires have destroyed forests, wildlife habitat and agricultural land, caused air pollution and respiratory problems, forced the evacuation of thousands of people and caused untold damage, with the cost of fighting the fires estimated in the billions of dollars.
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VIETNAM: VNExpress reported that the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier arrived in Da Nang for a port call last Sunday, scheduled to stay until yesterday. It’s the third time a U.S. aircraft carrier has visited the country since 2018.
“This is a normal friendly exchange for the sake of peace, stability, cooperation, and development in both the region and the world,” said Pham Thu Hang, the spokesperson for Vietnam’s foreign ministry.
As the VOA pointed out, what it’s really doing there is “supporting a free and open Indo-Pacific region." It arrived with two escort ships, the guided-missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Robert Smalls, the American Embassy in Hanoi said.
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ONE MORE THING: Fintan O’Toole is unusually acerbic in the latest New York Review of Books. On the Mike Pence campaign:
“That a candidate with Pence’s name recognition is polling in the single digits, barely ahead of the virtually unknown Vivek Ramaswamy, shows how, like so many others who offer their necks to Trump’s fangs, he has been sucked dry.”
O’Toole has coined the most succinct phrase yet to sum up the Republican presidential field: “somewhere between deference and defiance.”
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THOUGHT: Science has always sold plants’ and animals’ cognition and abilities short. I’ve written a couple of columns at 3 Quarks Daily (1,2) on the special abilities of plants and featured them here, too (1,2). Ed Wong provided a great introduction to all kinds of unimagined abilities of animals in his An Immense World. The German forester Peter Wohlleben did the same for plants in The Hidden Life of Trees, and then we were off to the races with a deluge of books.
Most recently I’ve been reading a new book about the abilities of plants by a researcher named Paco Calvo called Planta Sapiens, the New Science of Plant Intelligence. Here’s a taste of it with a lengthy quote that begins on page 74:
“some plants track a moving light source – the sun – through the day. They are sun-worshippers, heliotropic plants. Their leaves and shoots dynamically follow the sun through the sky over the course of the day with incredible accuracy. Young sunflowers do this by turning their heads to follow the sun east to west, deviating their heads less than 15 degrees either ahead or behind. This maximizes the sunlight falling on the flowers and, as a consequence, the number of pollinators attracted to them. Now, it might seem a simple task for a plant to track the sun from the direction of the light hitting it – until we know that plants can accurately follow the sun even when it’s cloudy. If you rotate a young sunflower 180 degrees during the night, it will take a few days to reorientate its movements to the new angle of the sun relative to its bloom. The plants are not just responding to what’s happiening around them, they might have an internal model of what the sun is going to do that guides their movements.
Things get even more mysterious when we look at what plants do at night. Many of these sun-worshippers, including young sunflowers, reorientate their leaves or blooms at night to face where the sun will rise. It is not simply a retracing of the movement of the day; it happens at double the pace, even in the absence of any cues from the sun the night before. … This behavior is adaptive, maximising the sunlight that the leaves can soak up during the day. It is also predictive: the leaves don’t turn in response to the sun, they are ready in anticipation of sunrise.”
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TRAVEL: In March and April of this year my wife and I took a train ride across Tanzania and Zambia. We saw the seeming desperate state of Tanzanian finances up close when we found the Tanzanian side of its border with Zambia without power at night (I wrote about it here and here).
Tanzania is a country that doesn’t pay its police enough to feed their family; it’s one of those places where baksheesh at the traffic stop is routine. Everybody knows it and incorporates it into the way they live. In Dar es Salaam, the normal traffic fine is TZS 30,000 (about $12), and the standard payoff is TZS 10,000 (less than $5). Out in the country sometimes you can get by with a TZS 5,000 bribe. Everything’s more expensive in the city.
Yes, there are helmet laws. No, they are not enforced. Cops don’t mess with motorcycle drivers because they’re poorer and less apt to deliver that quick payoff. If you’re a cop, stopping cars is the way to go.
Which leads in a roundabout way to what I want to talk about, which is poaching. To end poaching, you’re going to have to have a government with enough money to spend on conservation, and many governments just don’t have it. Sounds obvious but the resources a country needs to prosper just don’t exist everywhere.
So poaching is probably more of a problem in a country like Tanzania than in a richer (relatively) country like neighboring Kenya. If the government can’t pay cops a livable wage, can they outfit the wilderness with anti-poaching rangers, ranger stations, uniforms, rifles, food and so on? Don’t know specifically about Tanzania, but I doubt it.
Earlier on that March trip we’d been in the Tsavo Nationa Park in Kenya where way out in the park in the utter middle of nowhere you’ll find a ranger compound through which anti-poaching rangers are rotated. Kenya feels like it’s turning the tide against poaching, that’s to its great credit, and it didn’t come without hard work.
The loss of the expertise of a poached matriarch elephant is devastating to her family. She will have lived forty, fifty or more years, and in times of drought, for example, she will remember water holes outside her normal territory to take the family to drink.
Cynthia Moss is declaring the drought over in Amboseli, the Kenyan National Park famous for its elephants, and that is welcome news for everybody. Ms. Moss has made her life and career there, knows the elephants individually and here is what she says in her June 2023 Amboseli Trust for Elephants newsletter:
“The drought is over, the elephants and other wildlife are recovering. It was a very bad time, but this is a feature of savannahs—times of plenty and times of scarcity. We’ve lived through droughts before and we hate them, but we always find that elephants are amazingly resilient IF they are able to live their lives naturally. With minimal poaching over the last 45 years the Amboseli elephant population is intact, one of the few anywhere in the world. By intact we mean there is a full age range of individuals from newborns to males and females in their 50s and a few in their 60s. This age structure means that when an old matriarch dies there is someone to take over, someone in her 30s or 40s who has been watching and learning from that matriarch. With her knowledge and experience the new matriarch can take over and lead her family with confidence.
More than 200 elephants died during the drought. We haven’t been able to do full censuses on every family, but to date we know that 15 adult females died. Any male who died was found outside the Park and we are still collecting that information. Most of the mortalities were of calves less than three years old. Nature can be very harsh. We have to keep telling ourselves that it is the natural processes that we are striving to conserve.”
(You can sign up for the Amboseli Trust’s free newsletter at the website elephant trust.org.
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That’s it for today. There’s a travel story here on Common Sense and Whiskey every Tuesday, and next Tuesday we’re going to Greenland:
First thing we have to do, we have to find Robert.
The men smoking outside the concrete block terminal are not Robert so I ask around inside. The man behind the check-in counter might as well be collecting Arctic tumbleweeds. No flights are pending; no one is checking in.
He does not know Robert.
Together we lean over his counter to look down to the harbor. One boat is speeding away and there don’t seem to be any others. He flips his palms up and shakes his head, “I think you just go down there and wait. That is your only chance.”
See what happens, Tuesday.
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Good weekend, see you Tuesday.