Digest 22: Biden speaking sense; running out of ammo; receiving ‘top secret’ clearance

Most interesting highlights from the past two weeks…

Note: for those who prefer to watch, rather than read, I will do a video version of this post in the next ~48 hours and post on Twitter here. (By Wednesday evening, UK time.)

Biden speaking some sense

Here agreeing that Ukraine is not ready for Nato membership.

Short clip: https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1678046770243198978

Biden came off surprisingly well to me in the full interview. (Granted it was only about 15 minutes.)

• Part 1: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2023/07/09/exp-gps-0709-president-biden-on-nato-membership-and-ukraine.cnn 

• Part 2: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2023/07/09/gps-0709-biden-on-china.cnn

• Part 3: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2023/07/09/exp-gps-0709-president-biden-on-middle-east-relations-and-seeking-reelection.cnn 

Good questions from Fareed.

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McFaul

I’m struck by the popularity of these tweets from Michael McFaul, who was U.S. Ambassador to Russia 2012–2014.

Thoughts:

- Could there be any strategic reason for Putin not wanting to start a civil war?

- If Putin has shown that he’s willing to negotiate, then surely the West should negotiate. (Especially when the West is running out of ammo and resorting to cluster munitions – more on below.) How does logic follow from this to escalate?

- Graham Allison recently said: ‘If Putin has to choose between losing everything and nukes, I’m betting he chooses the latter. I’m betting that he strikes Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon.’ Does McFaul think he has better judgement than Graham Allison?

- What probability would McFaul assign to the potential likelihood he’s wrong? (Which we should all be open-minded to.) If he were to entertain the chance he might be wrong… what are the consequences?

Further, this tweet:

I contrast this with Edwin Reischauer, who was JFK’s Ambassador to Japan (1961–1966). Reischauer made important cultural documentaries to help Americans better understand Japan and the Japanese way of perceiving the world. Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone in turn said: ‘I know of no other man who has so thoroughly understood Japan.’

What has happened to the quality of U.S. diplomacy?

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My only hope is that, reading pieces like this: ‘During a secret visit to Ukraine by CIA Director William J. Burns earlier this month…’ there’s more going on behind the scenes that we don’t hear about. Not all diplomacy is public.

William Burns published a book in 2019, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal. I’m going to read it next month, as soon as I’m through Jared Kushner’s Breaking History.

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Cluster munitions

The U.S. agreeing on Friday to send cluster munitions to Ukraine…

‘He [Biden] will supply Ukraine with cluster munitions, disregarding international consensus not to use them because they cause severe injuries to civilians and US allies ban them. The decision carries implications for humanitarian concerns and global unity… more than a hundred nations have signed an international treaty banning them.’

The tragedy to me here is that Nato has advocated for a counteroffensive – to some degree I think because the U.S. government has self-awareness enough to know its support domestically for Ukraine is on a political time clock – when it must have known it was going to run out of ammo.

The West has wishfully thought Ukraine would make such rapid progress in its counteroffensive this would not be necessary.

The New York Times: ‘For months, Mr. Biden and his aides have tried to put off the decision, hoping that the tide of the war would turn in Ukraine’s favor… Now, Mr. Biden’s aides think they have little choice.’

McFaul and co. endorse it:

This is breaking a taboo that could make all future warfare more lethal.

And further, what does it say about U.S. defence manufacturing capability?

The idea that this is just a ‘transition period’, as Biden has said, seems potentially (naïvely) plausible from a manufacturing perspective (further ramp up production of conventional ammo…), but morally unlikely. I think once you do it, you normalise it.

I can appreciate the ‘fog of war’, and that organising logistics of anything on this scale must be insanely difficult. But I consider this decision should not be being made weeks into a counteroffensive.

Commencing an ambitious counteroffensive when you know you don’t have the manufacturing capability to back up what you’re doing seems misguided – to put it mildly.

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Indian ex-Foreign Secretary opens up about Russia-Ukraine conflict

I found this interview with Dr Kanwal Sibal extremely good.

I’m not going to time-stamp it. For anyone sufficiently interested, I encourage listening to the whole thing.

Dr Sibal is a former Indian Foreign Minister, as well as former Indian Ambassador to Russia.

He knows what he’s talking about.

He speaks very candidly. And he doesn’t pull punches speaking about any country: the U.S., UK, China, France, Russia…

I liked his take on ‘de-risking’ rather than de-coupling.

This conversation ought to have a wider global audience.

And I think a reasonably good principle to have in trying to discern what’s actually going on: listen to neutral people. They are the least subject to propaganda/distortion/tribe thinking.

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Interesting counter point on Nvidia

For all those who’ve bought Nvidia stock the past few months – from Steve Hsu, who’s co-founded a startup, SuperFocus, working with LLMs… (Clip for ~2 mins)

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Notable pledge from Trump…

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Briefing Henry Kissinger on security clearances

Upon Daniel Ellsberg’s passing last month, I listened to this 2009 WNYC interview, ‘The Most Dangerous Man in America’.

This bit on briefing Kissinger on the psychological effect of ultra-high security clearances was fascinating… (1 min)

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A few final thoughts…

- The number of commentators screaming that Putin took so long to respond publicly to the Prigozhin affair (‘13 hours!’) seemed peculiar. Is that really a long time? Do we really want knee-jerk reactions from leaders in situations like this?

- And the number of U.S. commentators who cheerfully slighted Prigozhin for being a former ‘hot-dog vendor’. Isn’t America supposed to be the champion of social mobility? Slighting somebody for what they did early in their career (rather than focusing on the event, and the actual situation at hand) seemed to me antithetical to American values.

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