Some Real Foreign Policy Realism

If there's a theme to the second Trump administration, it's when after a question and answer session with Ukrainian President Zelensky and the press which went spectacularly off the rails Trump turned to the cameras and said, "This is going to make great television." If the attention economy were real dollars, Trump might stand some real chance of balancing the budget with all his extra clicks and eyeballs.

Having watched the entire 50 minutes of the Zelensky Q&A in the Oval Office, and then Zelensky's subsequent 20 minutes Fox News interview, I think it's worth taking a step back here and examining what really happened and why. There's a great deal of spin coming out of various sides, but with a bit of time and context it's not hard to see the different things going on.

First, it's important to set the stage, because there have been a lot of claims flying around.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the expectation was that Ukraine would be quickly overwhelmed by Russia's larger army.  However, rather than collapsing into chaos, the Ukrainian government and military pulled itself together and put up an organized resistance while Russian attacks bogged down amid poor logistics, including tank columns that ran out of gas and provided sitting-duck targets for Ukrainian drones and anti-tank missiles.

Ukraine completely pushed out Russian incursions from the north, both the decapitation stab towards Kyiv and the Russian advance towards Kharkiv.  However, Russia was successful in occupying the southeastern portions of the country, establishing a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula which Russia had occupied back in 2014.

Current state of war in Ukraine from Institute of War map:
Blue areas are those re-captured by Ukraine while red areas are those occupied by Russia

There was a period of optimism among some Ukraine supporters during this period of pushing the Russians back in the north that it would be possible for Ukraine, with the support of military hardware from the West, to full reclaim their territory from Russia.  This remains Ukraine's stated war aim, but for two years now things have remained bogged down in mostly static positional warfare which is reminiscent of World War One, with entrenched positions and heavy use of artillery.

Throughout this time, Ukraine has received financial and military aid from the US, Europe, and other countries. The US is the largest single supporter, though the total aid from the EU is greater than that from the US.  Other countries aside from the US and EU have also contributed, including $29B from the UK (which is no longer a member of the EU), $18M from Japan, and $13B from Canada. (source)

President Trump has stated repeatedly that he believes the war would never have happened if he had been president in 2022, and he has expressed ambitions to end the war through negotiations quickly. Vice President Vance has famously said that he "doesn't care" about Ukraine and has been at pains to reinforce that impression whenever he's given the chance.

With all that said, let's look at where things stand in the wake of the disastrous White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky, which ended with Trump and Vance berating Zelensky in response to what they described as disrespect from him.

About that meeting

The press Q&A with Zelensky and Trump was 50 minutes long, and during the first 40 minutes it was relatively cordial though it was clear that there were repeatedly stated areas of difference.

During that first period, Trump indicated repeatedly (with his usual self-congratulation) that he saw himself as a neutral intermediary, making peace between Putin and Zelensky.  This created a clear difference of opinion, as Zelensky stated repeatedly that he hoped to see the US stand with Ukraine against Russia and its aggression.

The purpose of the day was to sign a mineral deal which would grant the United States rights to develop "rare earth" mineral deposits in Ukraine. There did not seem to be much disagreement about that.  Indeed, Zelensky did not seem particularly concerned about the rate earths deal one way or the other.  However, Zelensky kept coming back to the point that if Ukraine was to agree to a peace, it would have to involve security guarantees from the US as well as Europe, because Putin has repeatedly broken past agreements he signed with Ukraine.

In other words, Zelensky was using the opportunity of this public event to establish his negotiating position for the upcoming peace talks in which Trump wants to broker a deal between Ukraine and Russia.

Trump and particularly Vance clearly tired of this, and so around 40 minutes into the meeting, first Vance and then Trump aggressively turned on Zelensky and delivered a rhetorical beat-down which filled the remainder of the meeting. It's this beat-down which has generated the clips and quotes which have been so much discussed.

I think civilized people will generally agree that Trump's and Vance's behavior was poor, and their fans will think it was bracing. To an extent, those preferences as so much determined by taste as not to be particularly interesting.

A more important question is perhaps whether Zelensky was wise to attempt both to emphasize Ukraine's position in regards to upcoming peace talks (that they are only willing to stop fighting if there are some guarantees this isn't just a way to have the Ukrainians stand down so the Russians can stage a surprise attack at their leisure) and also to repeat the basic truth that Russia is the aggressor in this war and has repeatedly violated agreements for more than ten years.

I think it's reasonable to think that, given the relative positions of Ukraine and the US, it was not actually wise to use an occasion such as this as a chance to state his negotiating position and the accurate history of recent events in that part of the world.

I'm not adamant that it was unwise, but I can see why one might argue that this wasn't the time to make clear what the sticking points in the next round of negotiations would be.

On the other hand, there's reasonable question as to whether getting through this mineral deal without drama would actually be any benefit if Trump continued in his belief that he could steamroll Ukraine into signing a ceasefire without guarantees.

A situation in which the US wants to stop providing aid to Ukraine is necessarily a pretty poor situation for Ukraine, which despite the justice of their cause is low on resources compared to Russia (and far more so compared to the US and even Western European countries.) So all of this ends up being a question of how Ukraine should best navigate a situation which is genuinely bad for them.

How can things end?

All of that said, I think it's important to take a realistic look at how the war in Ukraine could proceed from here regardless.

Predictions about the future are, of course, difficult. That said, some things seem fairly clear.

While both Russia and Ukraine have lost a lot of men (Russia, to all appearances, a lot more than Ukraine, but they also have 3.5x the population) neither one seems likely to experience a collapse which allows the other to roll forward. It's possible, but three years in there are few signs that such a collapse is coming soon on either side.

Russia has more military hardware to apply, in particular more artillery shells, but they are also using it at 10x the rate and still producing fairly little to show for that extra expenditure. This is very much a WW1 style war, with all the complaints about gains best measured in yards applying at least as well here as they did in the Great War.

This means that Russia is very unlikely to achieve their original goal of either completely absorbing Ukraine or turning it into a demilitarized satellite state ruled by a puppet regime. It seems pretty clear at this point that Russia simply does not have the military power to make that happen without a complete breakdown in Ukrainian will to fight.

At the same time, the Ukrainian war aim of regaining all of the territory which Russia has captured since Feb 2022 is similarly unrealistic. Given Ukrainian manpower and abilities that we've seen over the last three years, it seems clear that this would only be able to happen if there was a major deployment of European and probably also US airpower and perhaps also ground troops.

There are very good reasons why the US and Europe are hesitant to do this.  Not just cowardice (though in some cases, I think this honestly is a factor) but also the fact that despite the fact Russia is clearly no longer a conventional great power, it still has a great power nuclear arsenal. No one really wants to corner the great bear to the point where it might start doing desperate things.

As someone who despises Putinism and admires the underdog courage which Ukraine has shown in a very bad spot, I wish this were not the case, but I think that in all realism we have to admit that it is. The conquered territory is not coming back to Ukraine any time soon. This is bad for the people who are suffering under Russian occupation.  Not only have they kidnapped thousands of children to Russian-ize them and assassinated or imprisoned many innocent people, but Russia has also used the men from the territories they have declared to be Russian as cannon fodder in the war.  And the Russian way of war requires a lot of cannon fodder.

But this is the simple truth which Ukraine supporters are often too hesitant to admit: Ukraine is not one additional weapons system away from being able to push Russia out.  They are either 40-80 million population or 10 more years of military development along Western lines away from being able to push Russia out.  

Poland is of similar population to Ukraine and probably could deal with a Russian invasion pretty well, but they were not nearly as close to the black hole of post-USSR collapse as Ukraine was, and they have 20 years of close collaboration with the US in Iraq and Afghanistan behind them to hone their military.

So the truth is, the kind of peace which Ukraine could get is probably not much better than what Trump is offering. However, because that would leave Ukraine vulnerable to Russia simply invading again (as they did in 2022 after the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Donbas, and the peace agreements after that) Ukraine naturally would rather not put down their weapons without either foreign military commitments of support or very, very significant commitments of weapons which would allow them to be significantly more ready should Russia re-start the war.

However, it's understandable that absent those kinds of guarantees, Ukraine is hesitant to stand down. While loss aversion is not a strategy, it is very hard to stop fighting a war in which you have lost so much both without gaining your aims and also without some kind of guarantee that it won't simply start up again soon under even less favorable circumstances. It's arguably that faced with a neutral ceasefire with no arms and no security backing, Ukraine is honestly better off continuing to fight.  Yes, they're continuing to lose men, but then, so did Afghanistan when faced with Russia, or later faced with the US, and who is in control there now?

Where is Europe?

One of the obvious questions in all this is: why does all this come down to the US?

Trump's actions in all this do not strike me as reasonable or honorable, but it does not have to be the case that the US is the only country capable of backing Ukraine to resist as long as they choose to do so, or the only country capable of forcing Russia to the negotiating table.

After all, the UK and France are both full nuclear armed powers with second strike capabilities. And while the total GDP of Europe is not as large as that of the US, they certainly have the economic and manufacturing resources to be enough of a military power to overwhelmingly outclass Russia if they chose to do so.

Moreover, this is not a problem which has come up overnight. Europe has had a whole three years of knowing that the US was one election away from disengaging from Ukraine, and they could have done a lot to ramp up military production and readiness during that time.

It is, quite frankly, disgraceful that Europe has not stepped up in the last three years.  They should have been scrambling as fast as they could to make themselves energy independent from the fossil fuels that Russia exports.  And they should have been ramping up their recruiting and their armaments manufacturing industries. Instead, despite some admirable spending, they have mostly ramped up their rhetoric.

It would, as of this moment, take Europe a while to step up to the plate and support Ukraine militarily independent of the US.  But they should not have waited till now to have made themselves ready to do that.

Perhaps they will now pull themselves together. The natural result of the Trumpian desire to pull back from being the world's superpower is that regional powers will have more space to rise.  I do not think that will, on the balance, be a good thing.  But Europe is the sort of power one might not mind having more strength, and they keep refusing to do it.  It's not an excuse for what Trump has done, but they too are actors and they should have acted better.

Troll-y Problem

 The early days of the second Trump administration are as muddled as they are fast moving, and much of the reporting is being done by people who have strong feelings about the matter and thus a tendency to run with what's "too good to check" even if they're not consciously shading the truth.

That said, there are a few things which are clear and are in keeping with what we've known about the inner Trump set for quite some time. And one of those is that a number of notable characters on the Trump train are attached to a very online sort of argumentation.

The approach is: If they accuse us of being horrible in some particular way, we'll troll them by making jokes about whatever it is they accuse us of.

The problem is, this means that when the left invariably calls everyone on the right a racist, this type of discourse results in folks on the right tossing around racist terms or symbols to be "ironic" and make fun of the left

Or as we saw this week, after the left beclowned itself by insisting that they'd caught Elon Musk making a Nazi salute when giving a speech, Steve Bannon decided to intentionally throw a half hearted Nazi salute while giving a speech at CPAC just to show...  what exactly?

The thing is, throwing Nazi salutes or posting racist memes is just plain wrong. It doesn't matter if the point is to be "ironic" or mock the other side. It's something you shouldn't be doing regardless of the reason.

I understand how we got here.

For one thing, when the GOP nominated centrist Republicans like George W Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, the left called all of them Nazis and racists.

For another, the left used its cultural power to play stupid games where it declared things offensive simply in order to go after conservatives. For instance, when Justice Amy Coney Barrett used the term "sexual preference" to refer to...  groups that define themselves by what sort of person they are sexually attracted to, not only did the media (which had happily used the term in the past) suddenly announce it was offensive, but several dictionary websites re-wrote their definitions of the phrase in real time to define it as pejorative.

And finally, there is the problem that for decades the elite class of the GOP has been significantly to the left of the base, particularly on cultural issues.  So when it came to things ranging from abortion and gay marriage to trans issues, in a lot of cases the professional Republicans who would actually work in congressional offices and the White House actually agreed with the left rather than the right.  And so when the GOP got in power, they never really did much to roll back social liberalism.

And then along came Donald Trump, who has all the rhetorical courtesy of a Sherman Tank, and unlike previous GOP nominees, he won.

Nothing empowers like victory, and so the people who had been pursuing the "let's be loud jerks to rub the left's nose in how wrong they are" approach looked like they were right.

I am not expert on what is politically expedient or popular, but I do know this: being a loud jerk is not a virtue, whether on the right or the left.  Doing things that are wrong isn't somehow better because you're making a point in the process, or owning the other side, or showing them how it feels to be on the receiving end.

I am very grateful that this administration has done basic sane things like acknowledged that there are only two genders and that boys should not be competing on girls sports teams.  But I would feel even more enthusiastic if this work was being done without all the bozo behavior that's come with it. After all, we want people to understand that our views are right, not that they're some form of madness imposed by bozos.

Parenting as the Crossroads of Lives

The early impression of parenthood is that it is comprised of always being on duty to keep small humans alive, fed, and moderately clean. As the kids get a bit older, transportation duties are added to this.

And to be fair, there is an awful lot of this.

But as the older kids move into adulthood, I think a deeper sense of what parenthood it comes into view.

A typical evening lately might range from taking one or two younger kids to activities, cooking and serving a dinner for 7-10, trying to get the youngest two kids engaged in something other than begging for screentime, hearing about the activities or workday of teens, getting those kids not yet old enough to put themselves to bed to head upstairs at a reasonable time, discussing some financial or personal issue with one of the adult kids, and Mom and Dad trying to somehow get a little time together as a couple.

When the kids were younger, everything moved more as one family machine: get everyone up, make sure everyone eats breakfast, have everyone do schoolwork, take everyone to activities.

The younger end of our distribution is more spread out: 7, 11, 14, 16 -- all different stages of life and development -- and among the adults, despite the closer spacing there is working-before-college, college, and post-college.  

The result is that it is more than ever apparent that our duties as parents do not consist of moving around an amorphous blob of children.  Rather, we sit at the intersection of many lives.

Some need guidance and help in their fledgling adult lives.

Some are working through those last years of semi-dependence before becoming adults.

And some still have many years of growth ahead before they will be stepping off to lead their own lives.

But all of them are separate human lives, bound inextricably to ours through our shared family, yet by tethers which become longer and more flexible with time.  Eventually -- indeed, not so very far away -- they will begin to form their own families, even as they also remain part of ours.  

I'm tempted to make some sort of astronomical analogy, but although multi-star systems can have planets, they tend not to be stable.  Perhaps that's some indication of how each new family needs the distance to be self containing, even while remaining part of the larger system. After all, gravitational pull reduces according to the square of the distance.

But this sense of living at the crossroads of many different lives has been the dominant one in parenthood for the last year or two.

Ordo Amoris is not the point

Vice President JD Vance has been out using terminology from Catholic theology to defend the specific policies and tactics which the Trump administration has been adopting around immigration, and so there was a brief burst of discussion a couple days ago about the idea of the Ordo Amoris, the order of loves.

You can hear him speak here, but if like me you'd always rather read a transcript, here's the relevant bit:

But there's this old-school, and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society. I think the profound difference that Donald Trump brings the leadership of this country is the simple concept, America first. It doesn't mean you hate anybody else. It means that you have leadership. And President Trump has been very clear about this that puts the interests of American citizens first. In the same way that the British Prime Minister should care about Brits and the French should care about the French, we have an American President who cares primarily about Americans, and that's a very welcome change.

This quickly resulted in a firestorm, with all sorts of people calling Vance out as not understanding Christianity.  He tweeted back at them:

Pretty quickly lots of people were lining up to argue about whether Christianity taught that you were supposed to love strangers more or family more.

The problem is: none of this is actually apropos of the actual things that inspired this argument.

I think just about anyone would agree that if a father failed to feed his own children, because he was sending all his money off to feed the poor somewhere else, he would be failing in his duties as a father.  

However, the fact that one has the most urgent duty to provide for one's own family and friends and community does not mean that it doesn't matter what attitude you take towards those further away, or what political policies you endorse in regards to their treatment.

It's also worth considering what exactly a nearby need is.  If there is someone who is originally from another country who is in want in your particular parish or town, isn't that person's need arguably more proximate to you than people in some other state?  The idea of "America first", taken in certain ways, could suggest that we have a closer tie with some unknown person on the other side of the continent who is an American citizen over someone we work with or live next door to who is not.

One thing Vance has become very adept at is turning a policy question into what sounds like a moral balance of absolutely.  He famously said as a senator that he didn't care about Ukrainians, and when asked why said it was because his duty was to the people of Ohio.

But of course, it's not a question whether we should care about Ukraine OR the people of our home state. One can easily care to some extent about both. And even if one cares more about local needs than international needs, that doesn't mean that one cannot do anything to help those abroad.

Following that example, total US aid to Ukraine over the three years of war has been $113 billion.  That's a lot, until you consider the US government spends $6.8 trillion annually.  Ukraine aid has constituted roughly 0.5% of federal spending over the last three years. 

Maybe there should be no Ukraine aid at all, maybe it's not a good cause or one the US should be involved in, but if so that needs to be discussed on its own terms.  It's not sufficient to say, "Local concerns are higher priority, therefore we can't spend a cent on this particular non-local thing."

Likewise with any number of other issues.

Pointing out that we're called by Jesus to love everyone does not end arguments about enacting some particular policy, and neither does pointing out that we have the greatest duty to those nearest to us and thus most dependent on our personal help. Those are both important principals to recall when making any decisions about policy, but the policies have to be evaluated and chosen based upon themselves and the necessary trade-offs which implementing them would require.  

Trying to Lift Off

 

As I wrapped up my 2024 reading, I read a pair of books about SpaceX:  Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX and its sequel Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age

On the one hand, as someone who grew up in and around a planetarium, and who has always been fascinating by space flight, these are great for the sheer joy of seeing it all happen again. There was a PBS documentary from 1985 entitled Spaceflight, narrated by Martin Sheen, which I watched as a kid till the VHS tape wore out.  I have never grown out of that fascination.  

I've watched my share of SpaceX launches, but reading the detailed account of the scrappy, high speed fashion in which the company and their rockets were built is fascinating, inspiring, and reminds me of some of the things that I've been discovering as I work closer to fully launching my own business (not going to Mars, just helping people improve their prices and lower their costs.)

Something I heard a company founder say recently in an interview was, "The rules are made up, and no one knows what they are doing."

The higher up I get in business, the more this strikes me as true. But also, the thing that strikes me is: Just doing the basics right is very, very hard. Most of the time, most companies, are not hitting all the basics. On the one hand, it seems like companies should be able to do that and more.  And yet, I look around the office and how often people come into meetings and say, "Oh, yeah, sorry, I didn't send that email."  "I didn't have time to do that."  "We didn't check to see if that worked."

Just doing all the basics right will put you ahead of a lot of people.  So many teams get bogged down in endless cycles and approach their goals like the sprinter in Zeno's Paradox.

And on the other side, if you're truly driven, you can do a lot of things wrong and still move faster and be more successful than most.

That latter situation is what seemed often to be at play in the books about SpaceX. As we've all had reason to see, Elon Musk can be chaotic and drive so fast as to skip steps.  And yet, reading these books (and having read Walter Isaacson's lengthy biography of Musk a year ago) it's clear that he both has an ability to instill a tremendous inspiration and urgency towards a goal, and to do an almost superhuman job of hiring the right people for critical roles.

SpaceX routinely burns those right people out.  And yet it continues to make progress towards its goals in ways that few organizations do. It seems fully believable that if he doesn't get distracted with Twitter fights and dabbling in government, Musk will get humans to Mars 20 to 50 years sooner than might otherwise have been the case.

Meanwhile at my last two day jobs I can see the contrast between a company in which the CEO was able to inspire people with a vision and drive, despite himself being an utter chaos monkey who often sabotaged his own efforts, and a company with a CEO who is genuinely good at leading projects and yet who is not good at the inspire-the-room thing it takes to keep people moving at speed through significant change.

Leading people is hard -- and hard to define. The more I think about starting an organization in which I hope myself to lead people, the less sure I feel about whether I have the indefinable skills or instincts it takes to provide that leadership. A lot of company founders can get things done but will never be able to inspire people to excel, and so they will either never grow big or if big will move ponderously along tapped within the habits of consensus.

And then other people, with some combination of imagination and drive and willingness to put the objective above the individuals, are very, very good at moving an organization forward at speed.

Don't worry, the SpaceX books are honestly all about rockets, with few meditations on these vague questions of leadership. If you like rockets, you'll like those books.

But this -- combined with the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs which I also read recently -- have very much set me thinking about how flawed some very effective leaders are, and how many nice people are not effective leaders.

Ringing in the New Year with Darwiniana!

 This weekend, our daughter Julia, the second of the Darwin offspring, got engaged to a delightful young man whom we love as a son. This is a moment of pure joy, untainted by internal reservations or fears. Lots of photos were taken -- not by me; I'm the world's worst documenter of events! -- and as we started to share the news, I wondered: what was the earliest photo of Julia here on the blog?

As it happens, it was the birth of her younger sister Isabel in 2006, and it features all three of the big girls:

Eleanor and Julia welcome an oblivious Isabel

Well, it's not 2006 anymore, and everyone has gotten much older. Let me present the Misses Darwin now:

Eleanor

Eleanor, 22, is now graduated from college. After a year of health woes, including surgery and a colonoscopy, she's finally been diagnosed with PCOS and Crohn's Disease -- which news she's given me permission to share, as she'll tell anyone that she's dying of Victorian Women's Disease. We're still in the throes of learning about how to manage everything, including the double whammy of chronic fatigue being a result of both conditions, but she keeps up her good cheer and her artwork. She played Trinculo the clown in my recent production of The Tempest, and was celebrated for, as an experienced Shakespearean colleague put it, "her extraordinary conception of Trinculo as a being who walks about as if he has no bones in his body."

Julia and William

Julia, 21, finds herself in the amusing situation of being engaged to a man with the same name as one of her brothers. Can there be too many Williams, though? She is at The Ohio State University, and recently changed her major to prepare to study midwifery. She loves hands-on work, and is often busy either with her own projects, or with keeping the rest of us on task. She's become a notable costumer, doing work with the University, and also costume design for my productions. After a recent trip to Italy for Christmas, she's come back more fashionable than ever, but reports that there's no place like home.

William, who came into our lives by playing Orsino to Julia's Olivia in my production of Twelfth Night, recently played Caliban opposite Eleanor's Trinculo. I knew that I could count on those two to be supremely ridiculous while rolling around under a gabardine, and they did not disappoint me. William has the bass voice of a radio host and a gentle good nature that is the ideal foil to Julia's energy. He and my son Jack recently adopted kitten sisters from a litter of strays, and now William's Antigone comes over for playdates with Jack's Mithril. I just live here.

Isabel, no longer oblivious

Isabel, 18, is taking a gap year while she decides if she needs a business degree to rule the world, or if she should just keep making money without going into debt. She is the spreadsheet queen, and will manage your business as well as her own. To the chagrin of her sisters, she scored a used 2025 car -- in 2024. If business does not avail her, she has the chops to be a successful TikTok dancer, and was dance captain for my production of The Music Man last summer. She does not put up with your nonsense, but appreciates a good meme.

The rest of the Darwin youths are minors, though at the rate everyone is getting older, that will change soon enough. The comings and goings in the house rarely cease, and we often have several people (and kittens) dropping by for dinner or to hang out. Like Mary, I find myself increasingly inclined to ponder all these things in my heart, and feel less and less inclination to write about them. And yet they are good things (except chronic disease, maybe), and writing them down helps me to give them all back to God, from whom all blessings flow.

We wish you all the joy of the Christmas season, and the peace that passes understanding.

Darwins, minus Julia (in Rome) plus William