Category: J K Cohen

03/22/22

“Obedience and support are the same.”

I realize that Anna Netrebko is to her country what Elizabeth Schwartzkopf was to hers, but can you imagine if the Soviets had asked Van Cliburn to denounce Eisenhower as a condition of his playing at the Tschaikovsky Competition?

[Commenters elsewhere have pointed out that in the Cliburn example, there was no American “inciting event” on the scale of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I would call these events Operation Hardtack, large-scale U.S. ground testing of nuclear weapons rising to a record high in 1958, and Operation Argus, exo-atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons to in future knock out Soviet air and space defenses. (Operation Argus worked in some respects, but it seeded the continental U.S. with radioactive fallout.)]

03/16/22

Twenty Tons of TNT

This country has learned nothing about nuclear brinksmanship in the past seventy years. 1956: the Hungarians overthrow the USSR puppet government, and Soviet tanks go right back to crush the Hungarians and re-install the puppets. The United States does nothing; Hungary is not worth setting the world on fire. 1968: Roughly the same thing happens in Czechoslovakia. The United States does nothing; Czechoslovakia is not worth setting the world on fire. And then there’s now, where the predictable decision is being made, aided by Putin’s declaration that he will launch if conventional forces arrayed against him seem like they’re going to win. We spent how many millions on RAND and the War Colleges for them not to have come up with an answer for this?

Yes, I’ve heard about the benefits of statesmanly multilateralism. All I can say is that if it doesn’t work before Ukraine is destroyed, it gets the President the “He Kept Us Out Of War” medal, which is what Woodrow Wilson got, and no better.