Noah Smith/Substack:
A moment of clarity
The Russian invasion of Ukraine should wake us up.
Few events create as much moral clarity as the unprovoked, brutal invasion of a peaceful nation by a militaristic empire. It’s the backdrop or the driving conflict of so many of our stories — Star Wars, Casablanca, Lord of the Rings, The Sound of Music — precisely because it creates heroes and villains so easily and automatically. On one side, the haughty, iron-fisted dictator with his legions of destruction — on the other side, children hiding underground while their parents make a desperate stand to protect their homeland.
The story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fits that archetype perfectly. Ukraine wasn’t threatening Russia in any way; Ukraine never fired a shot into their neighbor, even though that neighbor had already carved off pieces of their country in 2014 and subjected them to a grinding eight-year war. Putin simply declared that Ukraine is historically part of Russia and sent in his troops. Soon, Russian missiles were blasting practically every city in Ukraine, Russian tanks were rolling into Ukrainian cities, and Ukrainian children were huddling in bomb shelters...
David Leonhardt/NY Times:
Why aren’t the U.S. and its allies imposing tougher sanctions?
But it’s also worth taking a look at the potential sanctions that the U.S., Britain and the European Union have chosen not to impose. They are almost certainly more severe than the sanctions going into effect. A full-scale diplomatic response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could include:
-
Suspending Russia from international organizations, like the SWIFT network of banks (as Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, suggested yesterday) and the Interpol network of law enforcement (as Garry Kasparov, the Russian opposition figure, has called for).
-
Seizing apartments, yachts and other assets owned by many members of the Russian elite in London, Miami and elsewhere, as Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic has suggested.
-
Cracking down on Vladimir Putin’s propaganda tools in the West, including the RT television network, and on people like Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who now works for a Russian oil company.
-
Perhaps most significant, sharply reduce purchases of Russian oil and natural gas, by far the country’s largest source of revenue.
Bloomberg:
EU Set to Freeze Assets of Russia’s Putin, Lavrov Over Ukraine
European Union diplomats approved a plan to sanction Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over the invasion of Ukraine, a move that would freeze their overseas assets, according to two senior officials.
The asset freeze, which comes in addition to a broader package of sanctions that the EU approved early Friday, does not affect the ability of Putin or Lavrov to travel, the officials said, as the EU seeks to keep diplomatic avenues open.
When you lose Cronkite…
By the way, many Republican officials and figures are scrambling to retrofit their opinion to the invasion. Some just flat out lie (Mike Pompeo, whoi simply blames Biden for everything) or do a 180 like J.D. Vance (I don’t care last week/I care more than anyone this week). Some like Tucker carlson are doubling down on loathsome. But most are simply trying not to get steam rollered by Trump’s love of Putin. See:
NBC:
SWIFT banking system could be used as sanction against Russia. What is it?
Some financial analysts have likened ousting Russia from SWIFT, which would be an unprecedented move against one of the world's largest economies, as a “nuclear option.”
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, is a cooperative of financial institutions formed in 1973 with headquarters in Belgium. It is overseen by the National Bank of Belgium in partnership with other major central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank.
But SWIFT isn’t a traditional bank and doesn’t transfer funds. Rather, it acts as a secure messaging system that links more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories, alerting banks when transactions are going to occur. (For instance, U.S. banks have unique SWIFT codes that customers use for incoming wire transfers in U.S. dollars.)
SWIFT said it recorded an average of 42 million messages per day last year, an 11 percent increase from 2020, when Russia accounted for 1.5 percent of transactions.
David A Graham/Atlantic:
Too many Republicans who know better are serving as mouthpieces for the Kremlin.
There’s nothing wrong (despite what some commentators might have you believe) with criticizing the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine and Russia. Although an old tradition held that “politics stops at the water’s edge”—in other words, everyone should back the president in foreign policy—the Trump administration showed the folly and futility of that view: Many people criticized his handling of world affairs, and often rightly so. (Some of the present criticism of Biden is inane, but other parts are substantive.)
What is galling about these comments from Pompeo and Trump is not their break with the White House but their insistence on heaping praise on Putin, a habit that springs from Trump’s personal affection for Putin as well as his admiration for authoritarian politics. Not so long ago, Pompeo was the house hawk in the isolationist-leaning Trump administration, which was led by a man who preferred pulling back from the world. A West Point grad and Army veteran, Pompeo knows better. He also knows that his presidential ambitions probably cannot withstand a sharp break with Trump.
NY Times:
After Trump Surge, a Liberal Democrat in South Texas Shifts Tactics
In her second run for Congress, Jessica Cisneros has moved from pitching progressive policies to attacking the incumbent Democrat, Representative Henry Cuellar.
In South Texas, another test is developing over the power of identity politics and whether liberals can answer the fears that conservatives are stoking about “open borders,” “critical race theory” and rising crime. In the primary campaign for Texas’ 28th district, it is Mr. Cuellar’s experience versus Ms. Cisneros’s storytelling: the powerful and connected versus the underdogs, the community, the “pueblo.”
There have been many changes here since Ms. Cisneros first challenged Mr. Cuellar, but the most significant may have been the shock for both parties of seeing Hispanic voters lurch toward Mr. Trump in 2020. Zapata County, just south of here, is heavily Latino; Hillary Clinton won it by more than 30 points in 2016, then it went to Mr. Trump by about five points. Ms. Clinton’s 60-point margin in Starr County, which is 96 percent Latino, shriveled to a five-point advantage for Mr. Biden.
In response, Ms. Cisneros is running a campaign against the 17-year incumbent that could easily have been engineered by a Republican. She still favors Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, more liberal immigration policies and abortion rights, but those have not been her focus.
You have to read this:
together with this:
Jamelle Bouie/NY Times:
Let’s Bring the Supreme Court Back Down to Earth
If significant experience as a judge is what it means to be qualified for the Supreme Court, however, then most iterations of the court have been patently unqualified. Of the 108 men (and two women) to have served on the court before 2007, according to the legal historian Henry J. Abraham in his history of Supreme Court appointments, 26 had 10 or more years of experience on any court, state or federal. Thirty-eight justices had no judicial experience, and the remaining 46 had only token experience adjudicating disputes from the bench.
Abraham notes that “many of the most illustrious members of the court were judicially inexperienced,” among them eight of the 16 chief justices (leaving the interim chief John Rutledge out of it): John Marshall, Salmon P. Chase, Morrison R. Waite, Melville W. Fuller, Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan F. Stone, Earl Warren and William H. Rehnquist.