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By Michael F. Duggan

This past spring, for the first time in 303 or 304 years, the Linden Oak—Maryland’s Bicentennial Tree—did not leaf out.  It is dead. I suppose that the tree, estimated to have sprouted in 1718, the year that Blackbeard was killed (14 years before George Washington was born, more than 30 years before the port of Georgetown was founded and more than 70 years before Washington, D.C., itself), finally had enough of the traffic on Rockville Pike. Either that or the Bethesda it once knew had become terminally unrecognizable to it.  I know how it must have felt.

It had witnessed at least one military action during the Civil War (a running skirmish down the Pike toward Bethesda in 1864),¹ and was a stone’s throw from Pooks Hill, where Crown Princess Martha of Norway (an intimate of Franklin Roosevelt) lived during the Second World War. On December 27, 1940, the hearse bearing the body of F. Scott Fitzgerald passed it on its way from the Pumphrey Funeral home in Bethesda to a cemetery in Rockville.² It had also witnessed the incredible postwar growth of suburban Maryland. For almost 60 years it put up with the Capital Beltway a few hundred yards to the south, and for more than 4 decades it stood in the shadow and noise pollution of an elevated section of the Washington, D.C. Metro System’s Red Line.

Old trees die all the time. But for me, the death of the Linden Oak is emblematic of the loss in recent decades of so much of what was so good about Bethesda.

PostScript, July 18, 2023
The big oak came down today, at least most of it did. A section of the trunk about 15 to 20 feet tall is all that remains. The county took it down.

Two large sections from where the trunk branched out now lie on their side. I climbed up onto one. I walked-off an approximation of the diameter of the standing portion of the trunk (atop of which was a dried snakeskin). It came to about five yards wide or a bit longer than a Miata roadster. It occurred to me that you did not get a realistic impression of the mass of the tree when you drove by on Beech Drive or its nearby ramp onto Rockville Pike.

A portion of the tree will be made into a sculpture.

Notes

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-battle-of-bethesda-a-daylong-firefight-in-jubal-earlys-march-into-washington/2014/04/24/af6bf6f0-c84a-11e3-bf7a-be01a9b69cf1_story.html
2. Tiffany Arnold, “Why ‘Gatsby’ Author F. Scot Fitzgerald Made Rockville His Final Resting Place,” Patch, May, 9, 2013.
   

By Michael F. Duggan

As of yesterday, the world’s population is estimated to be eight billion. It took around 200,000 years for humans to hit the one billion mark. We went from seven billion to eight billion in about a decade.

Although estimates of an ideal sustainable world population vary, the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich puts the number at 1.5 billion – 2 billion. The philosopher, John Gray, puts it at between .5 and 1 billion.¹

Note
1. John Gray, Straw Dogs, 11.

By Michael F. Duggan

Did anybody not anticipate something like this happening in a large, open-ended war?

Yesterday a weapon initially identified as a Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile, hit the town of Przewodow, about four miles inside of Poland, killing two people. Given that a deliberate attack on a NATO member could trigger the collective defense provisions of Article Five of the NATO Charter—and therefore World War III may be in the offing—this is obviously a serious matter.

In the fog of war, unintended situations long characterized by American servicemen with the colorful acronyms FUBAR and SNAFU (look them up) are ubiquitous in military operations, and geopolitical situations contingent on them not occurring are inherently precarious.

On October 27, 1962, the darkest day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Soviet S-75 (NATO designation SA-2) surface-to-air missile over Banes, Cuba, killing its pilot, Major Rudolph Anderson. Around the same time, a U-2 on a polar air-sampling flight, veered dangerously off course and strayed into Soviet airspace over its easternmost territory, Chukotka. MiGs were scrambled, but the spy plane returned safely. Although the downing of the U-2 over Cuba was intentional, cooler heads prevailed and the larger crisis was resolved two days later.¹

Screw ups and friendly fire incidents are common in war, more common than most of us realize. In Sicily on July 11, 1943, U.S. antiaircraft batteries accidentally shot down 23 American transport planes carrying paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division, killing 141 U.S. servicemen. A little more than a year later, American bombers attempting to soften up the German lines in Normandy during the initial phase of General Omar Bradley’s much-vaunted Operation Cobra, accidentally bombed U.S. positions, killing 25 U.S. soldiers, and wounding 130 more. As horrifying as these incidents are—events made worse by their self-inflicted nature—they are an intrinsic part of armed conflict and reflective of our fallible nature. C est la guerre.

When the dust settles—and it should settle quickly—the current SNAFU will be seen for what it likely is, an accident. Consider the two scenarios: 1). Russia may have had some reverses in recent months and thus, with its hands already full, does not want the additional burden of fighting NATO forces. 2). Russia is winning the war, and thus does not want to ruin its chances by giving NATO an excuse to enter into the fight. Although it would make more sense for Ukraine to want to bring NATO into the war, if the missile was indeed launched from Ukraine, it will be difficult to tell whether it was an accident or a false flag incident.

Hopefully neither side will attempt to make escalatory hay out of another of the war’s uncounted tragic events.

Note

1. See generally, Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

By Michael F. Duggan

The Russian withdrawal from southern Ukrainian city of Kherson is being widely reported as a battlefield victory for the Ukrainians and an inglorious reverse for the Russian forces. According to Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, it marks nothing less than “the beginning of the end of the war,” the conflict’s equivalent to the D-Day landings. Although it is hard to know what is really going on in Ukraine, the pullback of Russian troops from the city appears to be a consolidation of their positions behind the Dnieper River, in essence strengthening their lines. In this sense, the initial Ukrainian suspicion of the Russian withdrawal appears to have been well-founded.

In some respects, the Russian redeployment may be like the German strategy of February and March 1917 of withdrawing from inferior positions on the Western Front to prepared positions with greater defensive advantages. Although Germany would eventually lose the First World War, the redeployment to the Hindenburg Line was a sound strategy (and the bigger picture of Germany in 1917 and Russia in 2022 are quite different in terms of resources). The Dnieper—a mile wide at Kherson and considerably wider upstream—is a natural barrier that will be difficult for the Ukrainians to overcome as tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Russian reservists and other non-regular army troops begin to arrive at the front. The Russians may then just wait for Ukrainian attacks to impale themselves on the new positions. When the hitherto anemic Russian forces are sufficient, it is entirely possible that they will launch an offensive sometime in the winter or spring of 2023. At that point, the purpose of last week’s withdrawal will come into sharper focus.

But there is an even darker side to these recent developments. Encouraged by its apparent victory, Ukraine now has no reason to sue for peace short of reoccupying its lost territory, including Crimea. With replacements arriving on the front—and with the possibility of holding the good cards in terms of fresh manpower and resources—Russia has no reason to negotiate either.

Russia can now replace its losses more effectively and in greater numbers than before. Ukraine will likely have a harder time replacing losses, and the question is what are the real numbers—the actual losses on both sides (i.e. the ratio of loses) relative to the overall resources of both nations to sustain their war efforts? This is the real calculus in determining how the war might end. Especially important is the losses sustained by Ukraine in its recent offensive in the south relative to Russian losses falling back on the defensive.

By Michael F. Duggan

Well, wishful thinking, or a hitherto undetected surge of Millennials and Gen-Zers, or legions of closet pro-abortion rights women, or something else flying under the radar, or all of the above appears to have blunted the Great Red Wave. Turned it into a scarlet ripple in spite of Gerrymandering, intimidation, and other forms of suppression. But the indications are still of a slightly rising crimson tide as regards the House of Representatives.

A narrow margin of Republican control of the House will likely put a damper on the more extreme of GOP ambitions for the next two years (e.g. impeaching President Biden), assuming that the Senate remains under Democratic control. For the Democrats, this may be the legislative equivalent of almost surviving a car crash (or being killed but with an unmangled corpse; you get the idea). Unless a bipartisan coalition emerges in the establishment middle, gridlock will likely result from the red tide. Weak control of the House could also undermine Kevin McCarthy’s efforts to defund the war in Ukraine, if he is the new Speaker. We should also remember that it is dashed expectations that spark revolts, and it the the far right may radicalize to an even greater extent than to date. Stay tuned.

But for now, in terms of domestic politics, things could have been worse. And although it is still early and much remains in flux—and a dismal bigger picture remains firmly in place, and Ron DeSantis won in a landslide—I am delighted to have been more wrong than right in my predictions of this one.

By Michael F. Duggan

During the tense run-up to the midterms, I occasionally asked myself what novel would best describe the United States in our time. Moby Dick is perhaps the most obvious choice, and the points of comparison are legion. There is also The Lord of the Flies, but as of now, the comparison is not yet on all fours. The work that comes closest to describing the psychological backdrop of our domestic political situation may be the greatest realistic American novel to come out of the Second World War, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, from 1948.

The dominant current of the book is a power struggle for control of a reconnaissance platoon on a doomed mission by two alpha males. One is Lieutenant Robert Hearn, a high-minded outsider foisted on the unit from above. The other is Staff Sergeant Sam Croft, a cruel but familiar noncom who has led the unit for some time. The former is an educated rational liberal; the latter is a brutal but functional psychopath. Guess which one is still alive at the end of the story.

By Michael F. Duggan

Over the past day or so, Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Federation’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Andrei Kelin, have both stated that Russia will not use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine. On its face, this would appear to be extremely good news.

For those of us who have studied the Cuban Missile Crisis and who realize the ideological fervor and determination of the U.S. foreign policy Blob, and the fact that Putin tends not to bluff, this would seem to be best possible news (other than a ceasefire) in what has otherwise been an unmitigated human tragedy. And as far as it goes, it is good news. But it also has ominous implications, if we read between the lines.

In June, John Mearsheimer pointed out an irony in the Ukrainian war, a dangerous inverse ratio that he referred to as ”a perverse paradox.” It is really quite simple and is as commonsensical as a sliding supply and demand chart in economics: if Ukraine and NATO begin to win the war, the odds of an increasingly desperate Russia using nuclear weapons go up proportionately: i.e. as you begin to win, the chances of everybody losing catastrophe also go up. Therefore, the announcement that Russia will not use nuclear weapons suggests confidence on the part of the Russian leaders that they will win the conventional war.

How is this possible? After all, the network media has reported sweeping Ukrainian victories in the northeastern part of the country, small but increasing gains in the southeast around Kherson, and the fact that Russia has not been able to occupy all of the territory of the four provinces it has annexed. Think of the news you are getting as being akin to the movie Money Ball and the idea of Sabermetrics: facts, figures, and numbers—statistics—are important, but they have to be the right numbers, the relevant facts and figures.

What the nightly news is not telling you is that the gains Ukraine is making in the southeast are likely coming at a high cost. As a historian, one of my primary areas of interest is the First World War, and if I have learned anything from that conflict, it is that in a war of position, when one side launches protracted offensives that make small gains against an enemy in strong defensive positions backed by heavy artillery, those gains usually come at a heavy, perhaps extreme cost.

My sense is that most Americans have little idea just how badly Ukraine has already been damaged in this war. An economic basket case before the Russian invasion, it would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild. At the present time, Russia is engaged in a long-term missile and drone campaign to systematically degrade—destroy—Ukraine’s energy networks and other infrastructure related to day-to-day life. What will happen in a nation of 40 million people with greatly diminished access to clean water, heating, lighting, power, transportation, etc., once winter sets in? This is to say nothing about the economic state of Western Europe and its capacity to support its proxies in a raging, open-ended conflict, and to deal with the millions of refugees that have already left Ukraine (will an already over-stretched Europe be able to afford expensive natural gas from the U.S. now that cheap Russian gas is off the table?).

When analyzing the war in Ukraine, do not just look at it in narrow Jominian terms of battles won or lost or who occupies or has retaken what territory, whether it be in areas lightly defended by the Russians like the western Kharkiv region, or in fiercely contested areas along the broad front in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. These things certainly matter, but are only a part of the larger calculus. Rather, look at the war more broadly in Clausewitzian terms of the overall resources of the respective sides. The Russians are getting artillery shells from North Korea and drones from Iran, but Ukraine remains far more dependent on outside support. It is fair to say that almost all of the Ukrainian war effort is being subsidized by the West as Russia mostly supports itself and appears to be positioned to do so indefinitely. Will the people of the Western democracies be similarly committed in economic hard times of their own?

Inflation in the Eurozone stands at 10.7%—higher than in the U.S.—and energy costs are up 42%. Other than these, I do not have the specific numbers of European economics at my fingertips, but I believe that the relevant economic statistics regarding the prosecution of the war would show a considerable Russian advantage. At this point, I infer—and this is mostly just a hunch—that Russia is holding most of the good cards in this war: its economy is more insulated and more capable of autarchy than the nations of the European Union and the United States (and certainly more so than Ukraine). The great danger now is that NATO will expand the war if it becomes apparent that the proxy war strategy (or popular support for it) is failing.

We should all be guardedly relieved that Russia has declared that it will not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine (of course there is always the possibility of an accident or miscalculation by either side). But if we look at the bigger picture, to include the domestic and international economics related to the support of Ukraine, it is difficult to see how such support can be sustained. The time to open a back channel to end this war is now (assuming that one is not already open). Perhaps it could be done through a third party with connections to both sides, like Turkey.

By Michael F. Duggan

Almost a year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog that the 2022 midterm elections might be the most consequential, or fateful, in U.S. history. With 17 day until election day, I reaffirm that statement.

At this point, it is likely that the Democrats will lose the House, the Senate, or both. If any of these happen The Hill will return to gridlock and obstruction and President Biden will become a lame duck with two years left in his administration. What happens after that is anybody’s guess, but we can assume that it will not be good. Of course, this is not even a worst case scenario and does not address issues of election denying by the losers in close races or the possibility of outright violence by extremest elements.

A friend of mine recently analogized contemporary American political and social life to a river flowing toward an uncertain end. He recently modified that metaphor to a fast-moving, rapids-strewn, wild river immediately above a great waterfall. Another metaphor might be the event horizon to the black hole that is the future of our nation.

Hope for the best, but strap in.

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.