The Advantage of Uncertainty

 Putin should have called me first.

I could have saved him a lot of trouble.  Ukraine was never going to be a walk in the park.  I knew Ukrainians growing up.  These people are crazy.  There was a story floating around the internet that an old Ukrainian woman flung a glass jar of cucumbers out of her balcony and knocked a Russian drone out of the sky.  I don’t know if it’s true or not.  But it sure could be true.

The father of one of my oldest and best friends was a partisan and fought the Russians two generations ago.  He hid in ditches and sewers and when he died, he asked to be buried with his war companions in a special cemetery on the East Coast.  These people will not be subdued easily.

We stand at the crossroads of the most dangerous time since the Cuban Missile Crisis- and we stand with a foreign policy team that looks like it came out of a Monty Python skit and that is what scares me more than anything.  We have a dementia riddled president who already demonstrated his risk aversion by opposing the raid that killed Bin Laden.  We have a VP that doesn’t know who’s in and who’s out of NATO and is a national embarrassment.   We have a Secretary of Defense that is more consumed with pronouns than warfighting capability, and a Secretary of State that is aptly named.  He is mostly Blinkin’.

I have very little confidence in the steadfastness and judgment of any of them.

Bari Weiss’s  podcast on the wisdom of establishing a No Fly Zone is worth listening to.

Honestly with Bari Weiss: The Stakes of a No Fly Zone on Apple Podcasts

There are good arguments to be made in both directions, and I highly recommend this well-reasoned podcast.

But the worst part of all this is that Biden gave away a huge strategic advantage- simply gave it away.  That is the advantage of uncertainty in foreign affairs.   And Putin smartly grabbed it.

We wielded the powerful weapon of uncertainty under Donald Trump.  The press actually helped a great deal.  The press ran op-eds trumpeting the warnings that Trump was “unfit to be president,” that he was “impulsive” and would “start WWIII.”  When North Korea acted up, he shot back that North Korea “would be met by fire and fury” and said “I have a button, too and mine’s bigger.”  The press went wild.

But our adversaries took note.  While under Trump’s watch, our adversaries were mostly quiet.  Trump took measured, but firm steps in foreign affairs—responding to Syria’s use of chemical weapons and the droning of Soliemani.  These smaller actions demonstrated that Trump meant business.  The MSM largely did his work for him, creating the image of someone that was just crazy enough to pull the trigger.  It registered with North Korea, Iran, Russia and China.  Trump was like that surly little guy that sat drinking by himself at the end of the bar.  You just never knew.

Now with Biden, everything changed.   Early on, Biden announced that there were 16 sites that would provoke a response if Russia hacked them (the implication being that nothing else was off limits, really).  The cut and run in Afghanistan last summer told the world that Biden had no stomach for a confrontation, and would even be willing to abandon his own citizens to avoid one.  Iran just fired missiles at the US counsulate in Iraq and provoked no response from the Biden administration.  Biden announced that there would be no boots on the ground or send jets to Ukraine, and continues to explicitly say what he will and will not do, all of which has entered into Putin’s mental calculations.

Advantage Putin.  

 Putin, on the other hand, has created a great deal of uncertainty over what he will and will not do.  He has rattled the saber on the use of nuclear weapons.  He has indicated that weapons supply routes are “legitimate targets.”  He has made other veiled threats at European countries.

Is Putin’s nuclear threat a bluff?  As with Trump, the MSM is helping Putin.  Much has been speculated regarding Putin’s mental health.   He just might be crazy enough to do it.

Early in his presidency, Trump said that he will not tell adversaries what he plans to do.  We can see how much value there is in doing that.

Putin has figured that out and is using uncertainty to great advantage.