Monthly Archives: September 2022

By Michael F. Duggan

“If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people—this is not a bluff… This is not a bluff. And those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the weathervane can turn and point towards them.”
-Vladimir Putin, September 21, 2022

“Let me say it plainly: If Russia crosses this line, there will be catastrophic consequences for Russia. The United States will act decisively.”
-Jake Sullivan on Meet the Press, September 26, 2022

So it’s official: the United States is now playing a game of nuclear chicken over a crisis with no vital national interest at stake with a man who does not appear to blink much less bluff. Does Mr. Sullivan really believe that a war with Russia involving nuclear weapons would not have catastrophic consequences for the U.S. and the rest of the world as well?

I will say it again: backing a nuclear-armed foe into a position of either accepting defeat and humiliation over what he perceives to be an existential threat, or escalating toward the use of nuclear weapons is not diplomacy. It is not a strategy. It is insanity.

The real enemy is not a temporal regime or a national leader—they and the events they initiate and respond to come and go. The real enemy is the nuclear weapons that threaten us all, and the dangerous events that threaten their use and distract from the crises of the environment.

By Michael F. Duggan

In response to the rolling up of the Russian right flank by Ukrainian forces, Vladimir Putin is calling up 300,000 reservists—a partial mobilization—to fight in Ukraine. More than an escalation, it may be a proportional analog to the Chinese entry into the Korean War in November 1950. In the words of Douglas MacArthur, we may be “facing an entirely new war” in the coming months. Russia is also in the process of conducting a five-day referendum on the assimilation of Ukraine’s eastern most provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson.

From the start, the term “special military operation” has sounded like the typical kind propagandistic newspeak used by militaries worldwide to spin nasty realities (e.g. the “police action” in Korea, “peacemaker” missiles, and mercenaries called “private contractors”). But relative to what could be coming, it might be an apt name for the mission of Russia’s anemic forces in Ukraine to date (Russia probably has around 200,000 military personnel in Ukraine facing a force that can draw from a pool of millions). The mobilization currently underway suggests that, in the language of Texas Hold ‘Em poker, Russia is now “all in,” in case there were any remaining doubts. For historical context, the previous two times Russia mobilized were in 1914 and 1941. This should be keeping all of the rational people in the world up at night.

If this escalation was not significant enough, Russian recognition of the eastern Ukrainian regions as its own territory will mean that any attack there will be regarded as an attack on Russia itself. Worse yet, if the West should escalate and actually launch rockets or missiles from a third country on Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, it might be seen as an attack by NATO on Russia itself. This could mean the beginning of the “hot” war that the United States and Soviet Union successfully avoided fighting during the first Cold War.

Michael F. Duggan

Woody Allen has announced his retirement from filmmaking.

I will not attempt to justify his private life, and I have not followed his legal troubles closely, but one of the tenets of popular wisdom to which I subscribe is: “to be great is to be abnormal.” And Woody Allen is a great director. With the possible exception of Francis Ford Coppola, he is the greatest living American director.

From his standup comedy in the 1960s, to his madcap early films like Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death, to his great period with Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, and Crimes and Misdemeanors, to his later films like Husbands and Wives, The Mighty Aphrodite, Sweet and Lowdown, Match Point, Midnight in Paris, and Blue Jasmine, Allen has proved himself to be a world-class artist and commentator of the times.

He is a cross between a borscht-belt comedian, an East Village comic of the New Left, and an existentialist philosopher (“Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on a Sunday”). There is also something strikingly original about his work. He is unique and his films have a feel that cannot be duplicated. More than any other director, he captured the Zeitgeist (and angst) of the times in which he lived (or at least a New York version of them). Over 55 years, he directed, wrote, and/or acted in 65 films, about half of which are good and half of those are classics. Without him there would have been no Seinfeld or any number of lesser artists.

I admit that his private life has been a mess (although I’d wager that few people reading this have read all of the court transcripts and investigation interviews in the cases against him, which are apparently available).¹ But the art must be taken on its own merits, just like that of other morally-problematic artists, like Mozart, Beethoven, Byron, van Gogh, Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Jackson Pollock.

If you doubt his greatness as a director and storyteller, watch Annie Hall this week.

Notes
1. John Kendall Hawkins, “Woody’s Wicked and Wicked-er Gravity,” CounterPunch, April 15, 2020.

By Michael F. Duggan

It is one of the oldest maxims of war: hit ’em where they don’t expect it. First, hit ’em hard at a weak point, or a strong point for that matter. Then, when they are distracted and have committed resources elsewhere, attack the real objective in earnest.

Now Putin knows how Marshal Tallard felt at Blenheim, or how the Germans felt when the D-Day invasion forces showed up at Normandy instead of Calais (Operation Fortitude), or how the commander of any quiet sector felt when it suddenly became the focus of the entire war on the Western Front (feints were also used during the Great War to take pressure off of beleaguered portions of the line). Until February 1916, Verdun had been a quiet sector.

A few months ago, I conjectured that the Russian drive towards Kiyv was either an error or a feint to distract from their real objectives to the south and east. Now it seems that the much-reported Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south and east was itself a feint from the real objective in the Karkiv Oblast immediately to the east of Donesk and Luhansk. It has been a great success; The Ukrainian right-feint-and-left-hook strategy reintroduced shock and decisiveness to a war that had appeared to have settled into deadlock. The Ukrainians have shown themselves to be remarkable fighters, and, with roughly $1 billion per week in the latest Western weaponry and real-time intelligence, it seems that there is little they cannot do.

Of course a possible alternative is that the southeastern feint and the northern punch were both real attacks—a coordinate right-left, Mike Tyson-like combination, from which only the left hook drew blood. But let us assume that for a moment that the real Ukrainian focus was primarily on the north.

Does this mark a turning point in the war? It is hard to say. The West hopes that this victory will cause a general collapse in Russian morale and that the momentum of revitalized Ukrainian forces will allow them to roll up the line to the south and east. The success of the current offensive will no doubt encourage those supporting Ukraine to continue their support. But the degree to which Russia begins to lose the war will be proportional to the increased risk of an expanded and far more dangerous conflict. Forcing a nuclear-armed foe into a choice between losing face or lashing out with tactical nuclear weapons is no way to resolve a conflict. It is something like insanity.

Of course even if the counteroffensive is a turning point, it may not be decisive or final in a broader strategic sense. It may be just another round of escalation or a change in a shifting tide. As James McPherson observes in Crossroads of Freedom, the American Civil War was like a pendulum and had multiple “turning points.” This is certainly the case of many protracted conflicts, like the Second World War, and anything can happen. Momentum can swing back and forth numerous times in a long war. Along the rest of the line in Ukraine, both sides are dug in and it has hard to imagine Kiyv or Moscow suing for peace at this point. It seems that both sides are likely to redouble their efforts in the face of setbacks.

We know what the Kharkiv Oblast means to the Ukrainians. The question then is how much does it mean to the Russians? If they permanently lose this area, it will (from Russia’s point of view) remain a permanently hostile frontier and perhaps a Western bastion on the Russian border. This may be intolerable to them. If Russian strategy and pride dictate that this area must be retaken and included with Donetsk and Luhansk as a territorial war aim, then there will be a redoubled effort there, a counter punch, a counteroffensive to the present counteroffensive but with no chance of surprise. This would likely signal an even greater intensity of fighting, a magnitude of violence perhaps well beyond what we have seen to date. It will mark yet another escalation, an escalation in the viciousness in the prosecution of the war by both sides.

If the Russian leadership comes to regard Kharkiv as “a bridge too far” relative to their apparent territorial ambitions to the east and south, they might swallow their pride and abandon any ambitions of retaking it. The Kharkiv region is well beyond the prewar separatist areas, but has significant ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking populations.

Fasten your seat belts.

Postscript: December 13, 2022
The Ukrainian victory in Kharkiv three months ago was widely interpreted at the time to be the rolling up of the Russian right flank in the northeast. It now appears to be something like the American victory at St. Mihiel in September 1918. This attack, the first large-scale campaign by the American forces under Pershing, was intended to reduce the long-standing St. Mihiel salient. It was launched on September 12, just as the Germans were withdrawing from the sector. Although it would be an overstatement to say that the Americans only punched air at St. Mihiel (U.S. losses were 4,500 killed with another 2,500 wounded), the reduction of the salient was not the battle that was expected.

Like the Germans in September 1918, it now appears that the Russians were consolidating their positions both in Kharkiv and in Kherson during the late summer and fall of 2022, ceding territory not easily defended—a fighting withdrawal. Unlike the Germans during the final months of the Great War, the Russian forces now seem poised to launch a cold weather offensive that could be decisive.

By Michael F. Duggan

Yesterday is the anniversary of one of the most devastating attacks ever delivered by a foreign enemy on American soil. I refer of course to the defeat of the Continental Army at the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777.

The American forces under Washington were aligned along the east bank of Brandywine Creek at Chads Ford, Pennsylvania, attempting to block the British advance on Philadelphia. With him were Nathaniel Greene, Anthony Wayne, and the Marquis de Lafayette (it was his first battle and he would be wounded in the leg).

Sir William Howe, the British commander, saw the strong defensive position of the Americans. With the aid of local loyalists, he moved a portion of his forces under Charles Cornwallis north and crossed the Brandywine further upstream at Jefferis Ford. Moving south along the creek, they turned Washington’s right flank, and after a vicious fight, defeated the Americans. This opened the way for the capture of Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress. The remaining American forces withdrew intact and would fight again.

Also present on the British side was a Scottish officer, Patrick Ferguson, who had invented, and was now armed with, the technically-sophisticated Ferguson Rifle, an early breechloader based on the La Chaumette design. He wrote in his diary that at one point in the battle, he had an American officer in his sights, but did not take the shot. He considered the targeting of an individual enemy officer to be dishonorable. The American officer may have been George Washington, who was on the part of the field described by Ferguson. Ferguson was wounded—shot through the elbow—at Brandywine.

Major Ferguson was killed on October 7, 1780 at the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina. A near-contemporary source alleges that his body was stripped and urinated on by undisciplined American militiamen before burial.

By Michael F. Duggan

And so the second Elizabethan Era draws to a close.

Not to get all weepy about an accident of birth—and in spite of my ambivalence about monarchy—I liked the Queen. All life is mostly accidental and just in being born each of us has won a trillion lotteries. In terms of social rank, the Queen just won one more lottery than the rest of us. Britain could have (and has) done worse in terms of the monarchy, and although it seems like an anachronism, there are certainly worse systems than constitutional monarchy. Although not a complete surprise, hearing of her death left a feeling that a decent, vaguely benevolent omnipresence had been taken. Approximately the same age as such long-gone people as Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, she seemed like a permanent part of the international landscape.

Okay, she wasn’t a hands-on executive like Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression or WWII, or John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but she was more than a figurehead. She was the moral leader of the British People from the Korean War until yesterday, an omnipresence of constancy and consistency. Both high-minded and tough-minded, she was the dignified Keeper of the Flame of national institutions, a relayer of national continuity.

Oh, sure, critics (Charles Krauthammer?) have long noted that the only political institution more absurd than the American vice presidency is the Royal family. But I think that this is only partially true. Marxians and some progressives deride these kinds of traditions, and yet this particular one is about 1,200-years-old (how old is the oldest Marxist government and to what degree has it lived up to the principles of Marxism?). It obviously resonates with a lot of people as a mostly harmless preoccupation and is the kind of historical and social detail that Marxians and Marxists tend to leave out of their moral-rationalist calculations.

Much of what one reads about the Royal Family and “The Firm” is calculated PR and the lingering pageantry of a dead empire. But as with the outpouring of emotions after Diana’s death, the feelings of ordinary people for the Queen both in Britain and abroad, their sense of loss appears to be a mixture of both false intimacy and real affection. Could it a coincidence that all of the county liquor shops were out of Dubonnet yesterday afternoon? Of course there is also PR that you cannot buy, and a double rainbow is said to have appeared over Buckingham Palace as the sun broke through the clouds yesterday afternoon. I was not there, but I assume that it really happened and was not just a wishful fictional device, like the Angles of Mons.

We all know the trivia: from the girl who could change tires and work on the engines of military vehicles during WWII, the the 25-year-old who inherited a moribund empire after her father’s untimely death, the most-traveled, longest-serving (15 prime ministers, 14 U.S. presidents) British monarch in history. She was not, as Prime Minister Truss (who has now served under two British monarchs) observed, “the rock on which modern Britain was build” (hardly a compliment), but rather the dignified means of relinquishing what Britain had been, both beneficial (the welfare state and social democracy), and problematic (the Empire itself). Above all, she embodied the devotion to duty to the institutions and traditions of Great Britain over a long period of great change and numerous crises.

She was not perfect. As one might expect of royalty, and in spite of the continuing displays of affection by the public, she was often remote from the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and her grasp of contemporary issues and engagement in addressing them was uneven. Like Churchill and her father, she could be a guiding moral force in troubled times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Perfectly (if predictably) turned out in bright colors and a big hat, and perfectly well spoken, she embodied qualities so conspicuously missing from much of today’s world. She was regal.

But what about her successor to the Throne?

Except for his treatment of Diana—which was in part the tragic result of the absurd and brutal realities of being an heir to the throne—I have always liked Charles (I had the chance to meet him in my old job, but alas, was out sick on the day of his visit). A man of intelligence, ideas, and opinions, and grandnephew and protege of Lord Mountbatten, I think that we can expect a more hands-on monarch in important areas like the environment and perhaps geopolitics. If, like his mother, he is a force for benevolence in the world, let us recognize it and appreciate him.

Certainly no one can say that he has not paid his dues.

By Michael F. Duggan

There isn’t much in the world that give me hope these days, but I sometimes take solace in the beauty and power of ideas. Sometimes the ideas themselves give me hope as faint possibilities by which to address the world’s problems. Two people whose ideas have given me hope were Jane Jacobs and Peter Viereck. Besides being almost exact contemporaries—both were born in 1916 and died in 2006—they were brilliant thinkers of startling insight and originality with distinctive writing styles.

Jacobs is most famous for her landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but I think her most important work might be Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Here she makes the case that economies are naturalistic phenomena and that the best basis for an economy is the natural production region centered on an import-shifting city. Under such an arrangement, the world order would be based on a community of nations set up on such regions. To me, this idea makes much more sense than the prescriptions of Smith, Marx, or even Kenyes.

The initial problem is how to set up such a world order. Transforming the current world order into the model of Jacobs would be impossible. The powerful would never allow it. Even if it was possible, it would likely not last long; Jacobs might have been a natural-born genius with an intuitive understanding of how cities and their economies functioned, but she might not have understood how power functions in the world (although, to be fair, she stood up to Robert Moses and defeated him on his own ground—no small task). In reality, power aggregates, and even if her prescription could be implemented, it would likely not last as the most aggressive leaders of the world would consolidate their power and take over less aggressive neighbors.

Peter Viereck was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a political thinker of the first order. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he fought with William F. Buckley for the soul of American conservatism and lost. His model of true conservatism is nothing like the reactionary radicalism that we call “conservatism” today. For him it was was a moderate and high-minded form of realism. It was political gradualism toward progress and not the strident, rollback extremism of today’s far right who erroneously call themselves conservatives.

Like liberals of then and now, Viereck believed in progress, but held that it had to be gradual in order to keep what worked while changing that which did not. In Viereck’s analysis, quick change often resulted in instability and eventually violence (e.g. the Terror of the French Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, the Russian Revolution). People were imperfect in Viereck’s estimation—flawed by nature—and thus required strong cultural traditions, strong laws, and good, but strong, republican governance. He also believed in a liberal arts education for all citizens and that intellectually every person could be raise to the level of a cultural aristocrat. One could only study other cultures, but only after achieving a fluency in one’s own. Viereck also believed that when gradualism did not work or proved insufficient to meet a crisis, a system had to adopt more sweeping approaches. He was therefore a conservative that supported the New Deal.

As with Jacobs’ ideas, it is hard to imagine imagine the gradualism of Viereck working today outside of the judiciary (and even the U.S. judicial system at the highest level has become increasingly radicalized). Domestically the country is too deeply divided and too diverse for gradual solutions to work, and at this point, the crises of the environment now require the strongest and most sweeping non-utopian approaches. And so the wonderful model of conservatism as gradual progressivism looks like a dead letter.

The question then becomes: if the prescriptive models of two of the most insightful, most sensible thinkers of the 20th century have been rendered nonstarters, then what is the basis for any hope at all?

By Michael F. Duggan

I was never crazy about Senator Joe Biden. He seemed to embody so much of the mediocrity and cynicism of the Democratic Party of the post-New Deal paradigm. I also do not like his dangerous escalatory policies driving the Russo-Ukrainian War. That said, let’s look at what he and his administration have accomplished:

• American Rescue Plan ($1.9 trillion)
• 200 million vaccinations administered during his first 100 days, twice the number promised
• Infrastructure Bill ($2 trillion)
• The decisive withdrawal from the fruitless twenty-year U.S. War in Afghanistan
• Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (the gun safety bill; the first federal gun legislation passed in 28 years)
• CHIPS and Science Act
• PACT Act (Veterans’ Healthcare)
• The appointment of 75 federal judges to date (more than any president to this point in an administration since JFK)
• The appointment of Ketanji Jackson to the Supreme Court of the United States
• Student Loan Relief
• The killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri
• The Inflation Reduction Act (if it had not been for two obstructive members of the Democratic caucus, the far more robust Build Back Better Bill would have been enacted into law).
• Unemployment is at its lowest rate in 50 years

Work still remains to be done (the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill remains unpassed, illegal immigration remains high, and we must do much, much more to address the crises of the environment). But as far as domestic accomplishments go, this has been a significant first year-and-a-half, especially given how evenly divided the Senate is. It is reminiscent of the days of the great named domestic programs like the the Square Deal, the New Freedom, New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. It is reminiscent of the days when Americans still thought big for the public good. One can only wonder when the Democratic Party and the “liberal” media are going to start trumpeting these accomplishments.