Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The Russian offensive has begun, with no guarantee of success

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Shay Katiri / The Bulwark:

It Looks Like Genocide

Rich Lowry thinks President Biden shouldn’t have used that term. But the evidence of genocide is mounting.

Let’s look at the record. As recently as April 4, President Biden rejected an opportunity apply the “genocide” label to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Putin “is brutal,” Biden said to reporters upon exiting his helicopter, “and what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone’s seen it.”

“Do you agree that it’s genocide?” a reporter asked him.

“No,” Biden replied. “I think it is a war crime.”

But a week later, on April 12, in a speech in Iowa, the president used the g-word, saying that economic inflation in the United States should not “hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide a half a world away.”

Lawrence Freedman/Substack:

It is 50 years since I read Hannah Arendt’s essay on ‘Lying in Politics’. The essay was prompted by the unauthorised release of the Pentagon Papers, a classified documentary history of US policy-making in the Vietnam War. What shocked many at the time was the evidence that while Lyndon Johnson’s administration continued to tell the American people that its strategy was working, despite the accumulating casualties, top officials knew it was failing. Much of the commentary surrounding the release of the papers, including Arendt’s, turned on the role of deception and self-deception.

One passage in this essay stuck with me and influenced my subsequent efforts to understand how political leaders end up making such poor choices about military power. This is the passage.

‘Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers, the “National Security Managers” as they have recently been called by Richard J. Barnet, who “exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.”  The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man of the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined.’

I recalled the passage when considering how Vladimir Putin came to decide on his calamitous war against Ukraine. The key insight was that someone so powerful could also be so badly informed. That was the case with Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. Could it also be the case for Putin in 2022?

A Reporter in China / The American Prospect:

In Shanghai, the Essence of Authority Was Silence

The lockdown crisis in China’s richest city recalls decades of past food shortages and stirred a restless citizenry to speak out about a broken social contract.

In January 2020, when the virus was still a mystery, 11 million people in the city of Wuhan experienced a similar fate. Physical movement was halted and food supplies dwindled. But courier services still operated, albeit expensively and clumsily. Over two years later, Shanghai’s world-class food delivery system had ground to a near-total halt. Whether a migrant or a billionaire, a lawyer or a shopkeeper, all Shanghai residents were forced to ration food. They bartered with their neighbors, trading oranges for milk, beer for salt, garlic cloves for toilet paper. Vegetables and meats—obtained sporadically from government care packages and wholesalers—were shared. It was like Lord of the Flies, one Canadian resident said: “We organize ourselves, choose a leader and then figure it all out.”

During these lockdowns, some Chinese lost their lives and their loved ones, not because of COVID, but from everything else. As Shanghai’s health care system pivoted to pandemic prevention, patients with other illnesses were abandoned. This is a country where 26 million people can have a PCR test by day and get their results by night, but some of those people will not eat. That titanic myopia was all too familiar to some Shanghai residents. On April 6th, one elderly man asked officials, “Are you trying to outdo the Cultural Revolution?” He compared Shanghai to the Four Pests Campaign, a 1958 nationwide public hygiene movement to eradicate sparrows. The mass extermination led to an insect infestation, which decimated crops and contributed to China’s Great Famine. “Long before the ‘zero Covid’ policy,” The New York Times wrote, “China had a ‘zero sparrow’ policy.”

Ilya Matveev / Twitter:

Mikhail Khodorenok, a retired colonel with the Russian general staff currently working as an analyst, writing *three weeks before the war*:

1. No one in Ukraine will happily greet Russian troops in case of the invasion. [An obvious one, but okay]

2. Russia has no capability to destroy the Ukrainian military and thus end the war with one missile attack. It just doesn’t work that way. 

3. The war will not end quickly because of Russia’s air supremacy. Russia lost in Afghanistan and Chechnya despite them having zero planes. And Ukraine does have an air force and air defense. 

4. The Ukrainian forces have undergone massive reforms since 2014 and are very capable. The West will supply them with weapons on the scale of a new land-lease program. 

David Rothkopf / Daily Beast:

Even if Russia Uses a Nuke, We Probably Won’t—but Putin Would Still Pay Dearly

A U.S. official who is closely tracking these matters noted that top Russian officials have been explicit in pointing out that the threat from events in Ukraine was not “existential.” This is seen as a possible signal that nuclear use was yet to be warranted under the guidelines described above. He added, “Nothing we’ve seen suggests they’re at the precipice” of taking such action.

U.S. officials also emphasized that in such circumstances, it would be expected that the first use of a nuclear weapon would be as a “warning shot,” likely the detonation of a device in the upper atmosphere. Whether Russia chooses such an approach or another, however, U.S. officials are confident NATO has multiple options via which to inflict high costs on the Russians without “transgressing” as the Russians would have done.

Should Russia use nuclear weapons of any sort on NATO forces or territory, the result would, of course, be swift and severe. A conventional attack on such forces, for example, would trigger a direct confrontation that it is believed the Russians very much want to avoid.

Amanda Carpenter / The Bulwark:

Mike Lee’s Role in Trump’s Attempted Coup

What would have happened if his plan worked?

Let’s bat the argument around, though. The texts show Lee was eager to assist Trump in challenging the election—to the point of Lee texting Meadows dozens of times, begging “please tell me what I should be saying” and offering his advice about what should be done. (Pour one out for his Article One Project.) Specifically, these texts and Lee’s other on-the-record statements show he was consistent in advocating that the only way, according to the Constitution, to change the outcome was for state legislatures to appoint alternate slates of electors for Congress to accept on Jan. 6. Lee spent much time and effort insisting on this. But, the state legislatures did not. So Lee did not raise any objections on January 6th and voted to certify Joe Biden as president. And, for this Lee is supposed to be some kind of hero.

Slow clap.

Because what if GOP-controlled state legislatures in the swing states Biden won had decided to appoint Trump electors based on whatever Cheetos-dust some drive-by gang of Cyber Ninjas sniffed and got high on while seizing Dominion Voting machines? Well, as Lee wrote Meadows on January 3: “Everything changes, of course, if the swing states submit competing slates of electors pursuant to state law.”

Got that? Everything changes. If state-level Republicans had been okay with overturning the election results, then Lee was okay with it, too.

Sarah Longwell / The Atlantic:

Trump Supporters Explain Why They Believe the Big Lie

For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose.

Some 35 percent of Americans—including 68 percent of Republicans—believe the Big Lie, pushed relentlessly by former President Donald Trump and amplified by conservative media, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They think that Trump was the true victor and that he should still be in the White House today.

I regularly host focus groups to better understand how voters are thinking about key political topics. Recently, I decided to find out why Trump 2020 voters hold so strongly to the Big Lie.

For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.

Kyle Pope / Columbia Journalism Review:

Doubling down at the Times

In picking Joe Kahn, the Times’ managing editor, to replace Baquet, the newspaper is signaling that it has no plans to rethink its approach. Baquet and A.G. Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher, have consistently dismissed the idea that journalistic norms of objectivity should be tossed out. The view of the Times leadership is that journalism is more threatened by a lack of trust, which only deepens when readers sense that the paper has its thumb on the partisan scale.

Kahn, holder of the newsroom’s second-highest job since September 2016, has always been a front-runner for the top spot. He’s been a reporter in the Washington bureau, bureau chief in Beijing, and international editor. Now fifty-seven, he was president of the Crimson, at Harvard, and his father cofounded Staples, the office supply chain. In announcing Kahn’s elevation, Sulzberger called him “a brilliant journalist and a brave and principled leader.”

And one of us. Depending on who “us” is.