The Secretary of State Is Neither a Secretary Nor a State

 

Friends, you may be wondering: where is the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken as Ukraine burns and as NATO and the West flirt with WWIII?  The answer: he's on CNN, of course, castigating Putin and praising the pluck and perseverance of Ukraine...neither of which is his job, strictly speaking.  His job is to use the tools of diplomacy to avoid conflict, first and foremost, and then to resolve it, if and when it breaks out.  And that's especially true of conflicts that threaten the national security interests of the United States.  Funny, then, that Blinken seemed to be goading Ukraine and Russia into war, and funnier still that the U.S. seemingly has no interest in helping to secure a diplomatic resolution to a catastrophic war that we helped to create.  The Israelis and the Turks are taking the lead in bringing the Russians and the Ukrainians to the negotiating table.  The Biden Administration, by contrast, seems to feel that economic pressure alone will cause the Russians to buckle -- but, just in case, we'll send the Ukrainians more missiles and drones and what not so that they can win an outright victory on the battlefield.  The problem, though, is that the Russians have already shown that sanctions won't, in themselves, force them to abandon their invasion, and the odds of a Ukrainian military victory remain as long as ever.  Ukraine can bog Russia down, for a certain amount of time, but if the Russians are determined they have vast reserves of brute force handy and can crush the armed forces of Ukraine, by and by.  The missing ingredient here, therefore, is constructive engagement by the West.  The West could be contributing to a cessation of hostilities by offering to acknowledge Russia's security interests in Ukraine, or to guarantee Russia and Ukraine's (eventual) borders and territorial integrity.  The West could be looking for exit ramps, in other words, for the warring parties, but instead we're cheering and jeering as though more rhetoric, and more bombs, shells, and bullets, will solve anything.  Are Blinken and Co. assuming that time is on the side of our friends the Ukrainians...or are we making the cynical calculation that, whatever happens to Ukraine, Russia will be demoralized and exhausted by the end of it, so feeding a few more Slavs into the meat-grinder is all to the good...  Whatever the strategic calculus of our Bidenist overlords may be, I humbly suggest that it's been wrong from the start.  Now is the time to breathe new life into American diplomacy and to start looking for SOLUTIONS rather than slogans and sound bites.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/ric-grenell-antony-blinken-sanctions-war/2022/03/19/id/1061999/

 

In other news, and in news much more relevant to the outcome of the November elections, the U.S. economy is losing steam.  That's predictable, given all the headwinds it faces, and one has to wonder whether we'll be firmly in recession territory by the Fall.  It wouldn't surprise me, although neither would continued modest growth.

 

https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2022/03/21/u-s-economy-slowed-in-february-chicago-fed-says/