PS. Sunday 21st April
This weekend - or the early part of next week - should see the U.S. Senate approve the $100 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and Gaza. Progress of the deal has been so tortuous that, for the most part, non-beneficiaries of the deal became bored and attention shifted elsewhere. The sudden passage of the deal comes as a pleasant surprise - ‘let’s take the win’ is a popular response and nobody is too interested in how this sausage was made. But the reasons for the deal suddenly becoming popular with enough Congress men and women are worth speculating about.
The Damascene conversion of speaker Mike Johnson to the Ukrainian cause has been truly astonishing and is utterly unexplained. Some think that Donald Trump may have changed his mind. Nobody knows if that is true or, if it is, why it has happened.
Something that is true is that Trump only ever does anything if he sees a personal advantage. What does he gain by encouraging aid for Ukraine? Perhaps it is impossible to know the Trumpian mind, but I’m willing to bet that there is both correlation and correlation with this: (h/t
)These are Presidential candidates’ predicted voting shares in next November’s election. The bottom lines are the hopeless candidates and the wingnuts. The top two lines are Biden and Trump.
In a surprisingly unremarked development, betting odds have shifted against Trump in recent weeks. He will know about this and hate it. It’s possibly random but more likely connected to the improving economy boosting, finally, Biden’s odds, the striking down of Roe vs Wade damaging Trump with women voters, and, well, who knows? All we need to imagine is Trump ruminating in Mar-a-Lago, noticing his falling odds of becoming President, and deciding that something has to be done about it. ‘Don’t just sit there Donald, do something’. But what?
Trump is in danger of becoming boringly predictable. He is losing his novelty value. That won’t deter his cult followers, just as some people never stopped listening to the Bay City Rollers. But Trump is is in danger of losing the votes of those who liked the insurgent, outside, edgy, outrageous candidate. Sadly for Trump, familiarity has bred not so much contempt as loss of interest.
Maybe, just maybe he has worked all this out and realises he needs to start mixing things up. Certainly nobody predicted a big change of the Trumpian mind about Ukraine. It’s been a way of getting him back into the headlines without the words ‘the defendant’ coming immediately before or after his name.
All this after quite a week for geopolitics. A week of events that distracted from Trump. He doesn’t like that.
Monday 15th April
The Iranian missile attacks on Israel have thrown a number of things into sharp relief. If there ever was any doubt about the ability of defensive systems to cope with combined cruise, ballistic and drone based assaults, there is now none. At the very least, if you have enough intelligence capability, planes and anti-missile missiles, nearly all ordinance that your enemy sends your way can be dealt with. Iran has promised ‘a thousand missiles’ next time, compared with 300 sent over the weekend, should the Israeli’s retaliate. If that happens, we may find out where the limits of defensive systems lie.
Ukraine has politely pointed out that it faces similar attacks every day. It has been asking for F-16 fighters for years, planes similar to the ones that shot down all those Shahed drones over the weekend. There are mutterings that the $60 billion Ukraine aid bill might be put to a vote in Washington this week. It’s worth noting that it is estimated that the cost of defending Israel against one night of Iranian attacks was well north of $1 billion. The costs to Iran is reckoned to be in the low millions.
Simple logic suggests that unless at least one side chooses not to retaliate, outright war risks will grow. As trading in financial markets began this morning, it seems that investors judge those risks to be little different to what they were at the end of last week. Oil prices remain high - partly already reflecting increased geopolitical risk - but have not, yet, increased further.
The successful defence of Israel has thrown into sharp relief that which we already knew: Ukraine could defend itself against Russia if it had the necessary kit. It doesn’t have that kit. Russia is advancing on the battlefield. Warnings are coming thick and fast that much larger bits of Ukraine are now under threat, if not the whole of Ukraine itself.
The US (Trumpist) argument that Europe should do more is wholly correct. However, while we argue about who should do the most, Ukraine is losing. If Ukraine is lost that will be the start of what happens next. China will take note of the West’s flabbiness, perhaps best described as decadence. North Korea is said to be considering restarting the Korean War. Putin will go for Moldova and other bits of Europe, including NATO countries.
Learned articles are appearing suggesting that this is beginning to look a lot like the 1930s. The new war, it is suggested, will start with hybrid attacks on Western infrastructure: our undersea telecommunications will be cut, our utilities, energy installations and other key industries will be cyber-attacked, and we will be subject to escalating disinformation campaigns. All of these things, to varying degrees, have started already.
Tuesday 16th April
One of the many differences between Russian and American military capabilities is the way each makes claims about their own prowess. Russia loudly advertises each advance it thinks it has made, particularly with respect to its domestic missile program. Many times, boasts have been heard about how the latest missile can breach all known defensive systems. In particular, the Kinzhal ‘hypersonic’ air-launched ballistic missile first entered service in 2017 and was reckoned by everybody to be capable of evading any anti-missile defensive system. Even Joe Biden agreed with Putin about the strengths of Russia’s ballistic missiles.
Indeed, over many decades, critics within the United States have continuously described spending on anti-missile defensive programs as a complete waste of money. The prominent blogger Noah Smith today writes about the history of people like respected MIT professors and other experts who have patiently explained, repeatedly, how it is impossible ‘to hit a bullet with a bullet’. It became conventional wisdom that the Pentagon was wasting vast amounts of of taxpayers money on ‘Star Wars’ style flights of fancy. The U.S. military did nothing to disabuse the critics of their beliefs.
It’s been apparent, for those willing to look, that it is, in fact, possible to hit a bullet with a bullet. In particular, US Patriot missiles are shooting down ‘unstoppable’ Kinzhals and Iskanders in Ukraine.
Much more visible, even to the casual observer, is the success that Israel and its allies has in stopping almost all of the 300 missiles fired by Iran. The propeller driven drones were relatively easily shot down because they move so slowly. The much faster ballistic missiles were dealt with mostly by Arrow anti-missile missiles, a weapon developed jointly between the U.S. and Israel. The Arrow system has proved, quietly, to be so good that even Germany has joined the queue to buy it.
It seems the U.S. was more than happy for its enemies to believe it had little or no missile defences. It turns out that all sorts of ballistic missiles are vulnerable to being shot down, mostly thanks to improved sensors (ground and satellite based) and sophisticated - and fast - software that interpret the signals sent by those sensors. Successful predictions about the trajectory of fast moving missiles mean they can be intercepted.
Missile defences aren’t perfect - sheer numbers can still overwhelm them. And the ICBMs that carry nuclear warheads are still thought to be ‘bullet proof’. But who knows?
Wednesday 17th April
The path to war is occasionally described in terms of Hemingway’s analysis of bankruptcy: ‘gradually then suddenly’. A few crusty academics have been mostly ignored - or occasionally derided - for comparing the current state of geopolitics to those that obtained in the 1930s. Today, out of nowhere, a BBC radio presenter calmly asks his guests about the war - the world war - that currently exists between the West and the axis of countries comprising China, Russia, Iran and North Korea’ (just don’t call them the CRINKs). For the record, those guests rejected the notion that WW3 has started. But it was the way the presenter calmly - blithely - presented the idea in pretty much the same way as he would have done the weather forecast that was remarkable.
This week sees the anniversary of Sudan’s civil war - the first anniversary of a conflict that in fact goes back decades. There have been at least 15 military coups since independence in the 1950s. Millions have died, more millions have been displaced (often leaving altogether) and the country has formally split with the creation of South Sudan in 2011.
Estimates inevitably vary but it is reckoned that 25 million people currently need humanitarian assistance. 5 million people are on the verge of famine. The number of Sudanese headed for Europe has grown by a factor of 6 in a very short space of time. There is an aid conference in Paris that has raised billions in pledges for aid from various countries. Sadly, commitments and deliveries are often very different things.
Russia now manufactures its own version of the Shahed drone, working off Iranian blueprints and with the help of engineers from Tehran. Last week, Ukraine struck one of the Russian Shahed factories, a facility which opened in July last year. That factory attacked by Ukraine was 800 miles from the border between Ukraine and Russia,
Thursday 18th April
The history of foreign policy - of any country - is littered with mistakes, contradictions and red lines (crossed and uncrossed). A lot of the world’s current problems are sometimes traced back to the West’s inaction over Russia’s annexation of Crimea and other bits of Ukraine a decade ago.
Barack Obama’s ‘red line’ was the use of chemical weapons in Syria. When he did nothing after Bashar Al-Assad fired sarin-filled rockets at Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, Russia essentially took over in Syria. Obama’s basic foreign policy error was to ignore Theodore Roosevelt’s advice to ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. Obama loudly and repeatedly talked about ‘game-changing’ use of nerve agents, ‘unacceptable’ chemical weapons and, ultimately, that ‘red line’. And then he did nothing.
That at least, is how many people think about Obama’s ‘biggest mistake’. Some analysts say the mistake was actually not to make promises that couldn’t be kept. Syria’s chemical weapons facilities couldn’t be taken out from the air, no matter how hard the U.S. may have tried. That’s one counterfactual history at least, one as unverifiable as all the others.
Another problem created by Obama was a fundamental contradiction at the heart of his strategy: prior to his red lines, he had signalled on multiple occasions that he wanted the U.S. to disengage from the Middle East and focus on Asia (the threats represented by China). Hence, Assad was right not to attach too much credibility to Obama’s red lines.
There is now another fundamental contradiction at the heart of American foreign policy. US support for Israel is, according to Joe Biden, ‘ironclad’. Biden is also committed to stopping ‘escalation’ in Israel’s war with Iran. The obvious question arises: what happens if and when Israel escalates? That’s the problem with credibility: if your policies are incredible, they will be in all likelihood not be taken seriously.
Friday 19th April
Oil prices are the key measure of how financial markets view the risks coming out of the Middle East. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Iranian air defences have shot down a number of Israeli drones (quadcopters) When the news broke about Israeli retaliation aimed at (or near) Iranian nuclear facilities, oil prices spiked by more than $3 a barrel. That’s actually quite a serious jump - in minutes - even for a notoriously volatile market. Since then, prices have steadily fallen back almost to where they started. We may just be trying to analyse noise rather than signal here, but that easing back of oil prices signals that some investors think that the risk of full scale war between Iran and Israel has, for now, not seriously increased. Fingers crossed.
Iranian state media is trying hard to play down the significance of the attacks. Jokes have been made about the drones with TV presenters describing them as ‘toys’.
US politics has been many things in recent times but surprising is not one of them. Until, that is, the accidental House speaker made a statement about aid for Ukraine that could have been made by the White House. Mike Johnson argued that if Putin isn’t stopped then Ukraine will lose and the Baltics and Poland could be next.
‘I’d rather sent bullets than American boys’ is quite a quote from a man who has quite deliberately stalled a vote on Ukrainian aid for months. A man who seems to need to visit Mar-a-Lago before making any kind of decision. Hard line Republicans will now try to remove Johnson from his post. One of those opposing Johnson appended an amendment to the aid bill, demanding that any Congressman or woman who votes for it be required to enlist in the Ukrainian army.
A tiny bit of hope creeping in?