If you're a farmer, you're going to buy fertilizer from wherever and whomever unless prevented legally from doing so--and I, as a citizen of the US dependent on others growing this food on behalf of me, appreciate it.
On the one hand the US is asking the EU and allies to stop buying oil and whatever from Russia. A few large retailers pulled out of the Russian market due to perceived pressure to do so. We tell India (traditional non-aligned country) not to buy from Russia, we chastised Brazil for buying fertilizer from Russia (despite our objections), we tighten our own embargoes and then we're like, ahhhhh, nevermind..... WE'RE going to buy from Russia.
Is it lack of coordination, foresight, credibility, it's something.
I am now going to imagine the hysterics Pelosi and Schumer would have if Biden suddenly and for no reason declared himself an "R". At this point maybe he should to save the Dem party.
This is an odd one to include given it's almost administration policy at this point to look the other way while New Delhi goes out of its way to buy Russian oil.
Because Indians are able to remove all evil totalitarian molecules from it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60783874.amp
Even if it is true the oil shipments origins are being hidden so the US and Europe don't know it's from Russia. You implied they were aware it was from Russia but were ok because it went through.
Article about the hidden sale
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-oil-producers-stay-one-...
Oh these famous Indian URALS oil fields!
Which makes zero sense. I'll also note that there is no citation. India is one of the largest exporters of refined petroleum products in the world. If the refineries ramp up purchase of Urals crude, guess what ends up in exports?
The cleansing waters of the Ganges wash all sins away.
The US is coming up on an election. The party in power is extremely unpopular right now, and about to get walloped according to polls.
Polling shows that inflation is a big driver for their unpopularity. So they're trying to square two semi-incompatible positions: support Ukraine via sanctions and fight inflation too.
The wrong thing to do would be to drop all sanctions to try to lessen inflation in hopes of getting elected.
I think this is the most overblown talking point right now. In the most favorable wet dream scenario for Republicans where every tossup goes their way[0], they're still only going to hold a 56-44 Senate lead over the Democrats. That's not filibuster-proof and certainly isn't the doomsday scenario that everyone keeps predicting. Keep in mind that Republican primaries have already screwed a lot of those races too. Herschel Walker, a man with a documented history of DV and a noted evolution-denier, will not be winning over Raphael Warnock no matter what the polls say.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_Senate_elec...
In 2014, the Republicans held 54 Senate seats after the election. In the very worst case for 2022, we're back to 2014. However, if you actually go look at the upcoming races for this year, it seems much more likely that we'll end up closer to a 50/50 split given how weak many of the Republican candidates are.
The apocalypse scenario would be either party acquiring 67 seats in the Senate (to overrule presidential vetoes), which would obviate any need to win the presidency. However, anyone claiming that the Republicans are going to win 67 seats in 2022 is simply wrong.
There's no other way to govern. You govern like you can lead and Congress either does or doesn't follow, or you are an irrelevance. Biden got more of his agenda accomplished than he would have with any less aggressive approach.
> he got shot down time after time, and wound up looking quite ineffective.
Doing nothing risky let's you look ineffective without getting shot down, but it doesn't actually make you look effective. And if you get shot down—especially on something publicly popular—that’s a campaign issue. If you don't try, it's...nothing.
> WE'RE going to buy from Russia.
Having spent three years consulting for federal agencies, this behavior seems to align with my experiences. You learn not to say anything because it's a waste of time and energy. There are other ways to constructively spend your time, like focusing on the mission and the task at hand.
At this point I am not sure if they are stupid, evil, corrupt or they just despise and hate their citizens. Or maybe all of that.
You Americans are least have a pragmatic government that at least occasionally does something for your benefit. They at least say "America first", while the EU also says "America first" instead of saying "EU first".
But economies and people can only suffer to a limited extent. EU will return to Realpolitik soon.
Let's face it, the whole bashing of Russia as a "regional power" was idiotic and wrong on the same level as starting the Ukraine war and believing they would win it within a week.
Edit: stop downvoting. How silly are you?
There are East/North European member states that are genuinely concerned that Russia could attack them next. They advocate for stronger sanctions. And while it's not said aloud, they believe the sanctions should be in place until there is (at least) a regime change in Russia. For them, the real issue is not the war in Ukraine but Putin. And if the economy crashes as a result of the sanctions, it's a small price to pay for safety. That's Realpolitik for them.
Then there are West/South European member states that are safe from Russia and mostly just see the economic consequences of the sanctions. They are economically stronger and have more political influence. But if they try to force the issue and lift the sanctions too soon, it could well be the end of the EU.
People will not carry this ideological politics as soon as they will feel the pressure over a longer period.
Sanctions will go, mark my words.
If the current Russian regime can start a war based on gross misjudgment, they can do it again. That's a real threat, even if Russian military is not as strong as we used to believe.
History: brzezinski sums it up well. Russia has some weird imperialist interest in Ukraine. They have ZERO historical interests in the Nordics.
Future: Finishing this war will take how long? Active conflict 1 year give or take + licking wounds 3 year + restoring economy and finding your way in the new world order 5 years + getting ready for your theoretical war against the Nordics 10 years (this is the time Russia took to get ready for this one). In total: 19 years. How old is Putin again?
Russia has a weird imperialist interest in Finland. Our history can largely be summarized as "trying to cope with living next to Russia, with varying degrees of success". From the dawn of history, until Napoleonic wars, there was an invasion from the east every generation or two. The invasions only stopped after Sweden lost Finland to Russia. After Finland gained independence, it took only 22 years before there was another invasion.
The Cold War and the decades after the collapse of the USSR were the exception. We had a lifetime of peace and prosperity by leaning to the West while maintaining good relations with Russia. But that is over for now, as Putin no longer cares about having good relations with anyone. Russia is big, it's next to us, and it has become unpredictable again. Dealing with that takes priority.
With you until this point. Higher energy prices have in no way made up for the loss of Russia's reserves.
The EU is getting played by both Russia and America.
This is less than inflation. (Curious to see a source spinning it as a result of tax revenues. Even for the Kremlin, that's an idiotic argument.) It's also about the amount Russia's economy is expected to shrink this year.
- https://fortune.com/2022/06/14/putin-russia-oil-gas-profit-r...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-10/russia-cu...
Keep mind that the Russian government budget operates on a $40 gallon barrel of oil budget.
Russia is weaker and poorer than it was at the end of last year. The Russian state is doing far better than was expected, domestically. Credit due where owed. But it's a growing share of a shrinking pie situation.
If anything, I'm incredibly upset that EU is not doing more to tighten the screw on Russia. If we are unwilling to send our militaries to fight Russia in Ukraine, then we should completely and entirely stop doing any business with that murderous, warmongering country, no matter the cost to ourselves. I mean it.
Yes you hear Ukrainian/Russian in the street, but I am not sure you hear much gratitude. I certainly do not and I also live and travel in the country. I actually know of families hosting for 2 months and the people they hosted left in one day and never said anything back. Others had everything set here, like employment housing etc but went back to Ukraine or to Germany. The ones who went to Germany regret it as they are not pampered like in Poland. Hell even in euro vision song contest the polish got the taste of Ukrainian gratitude for the polish unconditional solidarity.
There are grateful Ukrainians but those already were in Poland got their life's easier now thankfully. The refugees could not care less about Poland. Actually historically the Ukrainians and Poles haves as bad blood as with the Russians or Germans.
As a foreigner what i see Poland needs, is to continue to get stronger economically so it can support a very advanced armed forces that could wipe the floor with the Russians. Poland needs to be needed and that is achieved by being an economic powerhouse on which the great powers depend. In the past Poland was left alone because it was not worth the trouble. Look at Taiwan, they sure know how to make themselves worth the trouble. The "honor" thing in polish culture is so self destructive: Throw everything away for honor. Let's keep growing and stronger, it will not be long before Russia is a nuisance.
The goal is to survive and to win, not to go down in history with honor.
Oh and, the US didn’t mandate Germany to do this, its voters did.
You're talking about the same administration that literally admitted in the open to be executing cyber attacks on Russia[1]. The fact that they haven't made most of North America glow in the dark is an utter miracle.
And to make my point clear, the issue isn't that they're conducting cyber attacks - that's a given.
The issue is admitting it, in the open, to the news media. Everyone knows this is happening, but you don't say the quiet part out loud because it's an escalation against a nuclear power and gives them carte blanche to retaliate.
---
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/us-military-hackers-conducting-of...
I judge middle school debate and this still has to be the most wildly insane geopolitical take I've heard in a long time.
You must be hot boxing some strong stuff... might be time to roll down the windows of that information bubble and get some fresh air ;)
No, no, "some computer hacking" (because who would worry about not being able to watch funny cat videos for a while? it's not like people do anything important using computers...) won't do much. But the next Stuxnet targeted at Russian infrastructure could well spell the end of us all. Honestly, I'd be quite content in that situation - witnessing, for however short before dying to radiation, the literal end of history (instead of the pseudo-one from the '90s) could be strangely rewarding.
But okay. Suppose there were a cyber attack sufficient to trigger full scale nuclear war and which also didn't fully disable Russian's nuclear armament.
Do you really think that Russia would not launch nukes just because the US didn't publicly declare responsibility for the attack even though Russia knows the US is responsible? Because, to be clear, that was OP's assertion:
>> And to make my point clear, the issue isn't that they're conducting cyber attacks - that's a given. The issue is admitting it, in the open, to the news media. Everyone knows this is happening, but you don't say the quiet part out loud because it's an escalation against a nuclear power and gives them carte blanche to retaliate.
No it doesn’t. Russia has been taking increasing amounts of direct action against other nuclear states for years (including sponsoring cyber attacks and e.g. criminally intervening in US elections). They aren’t going to start a nuclear war over e.g. the USA compromising their military computer networks and distributing the information discovered there.
Putin is doing everything he can to prevent escalation to a direct shooting war with NATO because he knows that in a conventional war NATO will wipe the floor with the Russian military, and a nuclear war is mutually assured destruction.
But if we compare to the Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan administrations (let alone the Vietnam war era), it can’t really be called “disastrous”.
Trump’s foreign policy was largely symbolic and incoherent, if anything focused on corrupt self enrichment, breaking up US soft power to aid Russia (he backed out of various treaties, halted diplomacy around the world, wanted to pull the US out of NATO, ...), symbolically opposing China to appeal to anti-Asian racists, making up nonsense about Latin American immigrants to appeal to anti-Latino racists, continuing middle East aggression (and the Muslim ban etc.) to appeal to anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racists. His antics (on top of the Bush Jr. wars) further pissed away America’s global reputation. To the extent things went okay it was largely down to incompetence and uncoordination.
Nb. what I blame him for isn't the Syrian civil war itself, but for choosing to get involved in such a way that it's dragged on indefinitely, rather than concluding it one way or the other much faster. This also contributed to destabilization and suffering in Iraq.
Continuing to allow Afghanistan to bleed for his entire 8 years while everyone at the top (and probably most folks in the middle, and at the bottom) knew no progress was, had been, or would be made was a straight-up crime (see: the Afghanistan papers).
But sure, it's hard to beat Bush II for "foreign policy fuck-ups". Dude's a legend in that regard. I wouldn't be surprised if historians in 2100 will look back at that and see it as America falling on its face at the starting line, for this century, and never really recovering.
> Trump’s foreign policy was largely symbolic and detail-free, focused on breaking up US soft power to aid Russia, symbolically opposing China to appeal to anti-Asian racists, making up nonsense about Latin American immigrants to appeal to anti-Latino racists, continuing middle East aggression (and the Muslim ban etc.) to appeal to anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racists. To the extent things went okay it was largely down to incompetence and uncoordination.
Pushing NATO members to meet their defense spending obligations ended up being damn-near prescient, even if the rest of his action on NATO was mostly bad. I'd love to see more breaking down of trade relations with China, so that part was fine by me. Lots of his rhetoric was idiotic but at the same time it was refreshing to see anyone in power talking anti-neoliberalism, for once, even if he was either too ambivalent in-fact or too incompetent to accomplish much. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was way overdue and it disgusted me that NPR ran with "it's just too hard to withdraw in more time than it took to put the same number of soldiers and same amount of equipment in-theater" bullshit, in response. All his stuff related to the Southern border was moronic, of course.
I'm not saying I think he was great—dude belongs behind bars 10x over, I'd say, including for some of his foreign policy actions. In fact, a lot of it's just that, after his predecessors, accomplishing very little was kinda an improvement.
Agreed. Obama came in from the context of the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan and wanted to avoid another similar, and was too cautious and non-confrontational, especially once Russia got involved.
> Pushing NATO members to meet their defense spending obligations ended up being damn-near prescient
This was not “pushing” so much as “ineffective trash talking”. And it had nothing to do with making NATO or European militaries effective, but was based on Trump’s inability to understand anything except in narrowly transactional terms, not comprehending the possibility of second-order effects or complex systems and therefore unwilling to listen when people try to explain that supporting NATO and maintaining the prevailing geopolitical order is in America’s long-term interest. With maybe some bonus of trying to help Putin.
> I'd love to see more breaking down of trade relations with China
Trump’s #1 foreign policy “accomplishment” was pulling the USA out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, undermining US economic and social power in the region to China’s great benefit.
> Withdrawing from Afghanistan was way overdue and it disgusted me
The USA should have pulled out of Afghanistan years before (or never gone in at all), but the way the Trump administration handled the transition was profoundly incompetent, and made things much harder for the Biden administration (the only president of the past 4 with the guts to go through with it).
Yeah, I know. Again, I'm not saying he was good. Just that I didn't think there'd even be a single half-assed compliment I'd be able to muster for anything he did. He exceeded sub-zero expectations, and probably, for whatever reason (yeah, likely largely ineffective management of his administration) at least didn't do anywhere near as much harm as the the guys who ran things the prior 16 years. Not via his foreign policy actions, at least.
Sorry if any of this came off as "I like most of Trump's foreign policy". What I'm getting at is that I'm pretty harsh even on popular Democratic presidents, and not incapable of admitting "that was kinda OK" with Republicans even when they're an actual no-BS joke like Trump, but still think Biden's not screwed the pooch so far (he still might, certainly) on foreign policy. And I'm inclined to dislike him because I'm getting really sick of ancient dudes sitting in the Oval Office—could we get a youthful 60-year-old, even? Please?—and don't care for a lot of his legislative record.
Point is, if Biden's badly screwing up foreign policy, this particular devoted foreign policy cynic isn't seeing it. But, again, there's always tomorrow.
>This was not “pushing” so much as “ineffective trash talking”.
Trump and Stoltenberg argue on camera (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>). Who turned out to be right? Who turned out to completely, totally, 100% wrong?
If Trump was so bad for NATO and Ukraine's defense, why didn't the current war didn't begin in 2017-2020?
Let me guess: You think that the current state of the Ukrainian military (in terms of training and weaponry) that enabled it to survive the initial Russian invasion in February when few believed it could, somehow magically began in January 2021. It is a fact that the Trump administration continued and accelerated the training and arming of Ukrainian military by the US that his predecessor began.
Let me also guess: You are one of those gullible who say that Merkel was always against German dependence on Russian gas but could not do anything about it. For 16 years!
There is more "evidence" that Merkel is a long-term Russian intelligence asset, recruited from her youth in East Germany,^1 than that of Trump being the same. One guess on which claim is incessantly repeated by the bien-pensants of the chattering classes.
^1 Something else never talked about is how her parents moved from West to East Germany when she was a baby
Remember, Trump fired the US ambassador to Ukraine because she was opposed to Ukrainian (and American) corruption, and instead sent Rudy Giuliani, Rick Perry, and Gordon Sondland – an incompetent hotel developer who bought his way into a cosplay job as EU Ambassador – to further his corrupt schemes, including not only the extortion plan to invent scandals about Biden, but also replacing the leadership of a Ukrainian state-owned gas company so that it could give contracts to Trump’s corrupt American allies, ending the US attempts to extradite Firtash (a criminal Ukrainian oligarch with Russian mafia ties who hired Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies), etc.
When Trump’s extortion scheme was exposed and blew up as a scandal, Congress appropriated additional aid for Ukraine, and Trump was driven by the scandal and intense public and congressional scrutiny (not to mention pressure from the US military) to continue the aid. (He still wanted to be re-elected, remember, so didn’t want to look totally corrupt.)
Thankfully the USA is not (as of 2016–2022) a dictatorship, and the president does not personally decide all national policy. So when Trump had some bright ideas like nuking a hurricane or selling off Puerto Rico, those didn’t actually happen. When Trump suggested pulling the US out of NATO, there were still enough powerful and sane figures in the US defense establishment who were able to thwart that proposal.
* * *
You are right that the US and NATO did some (though in retrospect it perhaps should have been more) to help Ukraine from 2014–2021. That training, funding, and support was surely one important part of the Ukrainian army’s recent success. Score one for the US military and US federal government.
* * *
> who say that Merkel was always against German dependence on Russian gas
I don’t know about Merkel per se but German political parties clearly have significant corruption problems. The German response to the Ukraine war has been a disappointing indictment of the whole German political class.
More generally, many Europeans (and Americans, etc.) have been bought off (explicitly or implicitly) by money embezzled from the Russian people by various oligarchs and organized criminals. Russian corruption is a serious worldwide problem, and other countries should continue to make large-scale coordinated responses, ending money laundering, seizing corrupt assets, and imposing legal liability on local residents (e.g. the legal, real estate, and financial services industries) who knowingly participate.
I also wish we'd send in the big guns to put a lot more pressure in focused places.
What may be an inconvenience to you, a probably-rich person on the global scale, who can afford to outbid poor people when food gets short, is not necessarily just an inconvenience for others.
This is not to say that all meat consumption is 'inefficient'. Cattle can graze on land that is not suitable for farming, and animals generally eat more of the physical plants than we do (animals on a feedlot are often eating fibrous parts of the plant like stalks and stubble and not just the parts we humans like to eat). But there's no way around it, industrialized meat in its current form is an extraordinarily inefficient use of land and has terrible environmental consequences.
Also relevant to any discussion on fertilizer is that excessive usage basically destroys the soil. We've moved away from time-tested methods of managing crops through things like crop rotation, cover crops, promoting natural vegetation in key areas... to over-tilling, over-fertilizing, mono-cropping, and this is taking its toil on the ground we use to farm. Fertilizer is also responsible for eutrophication (nutrient pollution) which destroys local ecosystems and poisons the water. Not to mention nutrition != calories.
Fertilizer is absolutely a modern technological wonder which has allowed humanity to produce food at tremendous scale, and I would not argue that it does not have its place in farming. But the current singular focus on "more yield per hectare" is a very modern, naive approach to farming that throws out a ton of considerations, and is absolutely unecessary.
† https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets †† https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
Come back when you are willing to starve to death as this is what millions in other countries are facing
You are missing a critical piece of information here: what is your yearly income and what is your family size?
Look. We all understand that the reaction to the war activistic and ideological. The more time will pass, the more politics will move towards Realpolitik.
> Using data on ship movements, real-time tracking of gas flows through pipelines and estimates based on historical monthly trade, the researchers reckoned Germany alone paid Russia about 9.1 billion euros for fossil fuel deliveries — mostly natural gas — in the first two months of the war. [2]
Let's not pretend these are comparable numbers.
It's not like the US is about to run out of food anyway. We're a massive exporter. The goal is to boost US food production enough that the 3rd world doesn't starve to death (and if food prices go through the roof, it also helps Russia). Frankly, if we were being ruthless about it, the US might be financially BETTER off if there was a worldwide grain shortage. We're still trying to stop it.
Germany is importing Russian natural gas to avoid turning on nuclear power plants for ideological reasons.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/russia/fe...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-europe-ge...