Bret Stephens | The Curious Conservative Case Against Defending Ukraine – The New York Times

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

“One of the stranger features of the politics of the war in Ukraine is that the most vocal opposition to it tends to come from the hard right. In some ways, that right sounds like the hard left it used to oppose so fiercely.

On April 20, 19 Republican lawmakers, including Senators Rand Paul, Mike Lee and J.D. Vance, sent a letter to President Biden decrying “unlimited arms supplies in support of an endless war.” Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have expressed their opposition to Western support for Ukraine (though the Florida governor seemed to walk his opposition back); both are keenly attuned to what they think will play well in G.O.P. primaries.

Opposition also comes from what passes for an antiwar conservative intelligentsia. Peter Hitchens, the brother of Christopher Hitchens, is a fierce critic, as is the Orbanist American writer Rod Dreher, whose manner of critique is “Russia is wrong, but .…” Tucker Carlson routinely used his prime-time pedestal to disparage Volodymyr Zelensky, calling the Ukrainian president a “dictator” and comparing his dress style to that of the manager of a strip club. The Buchananite American Conservative is against the war on principle; the Trumpian Federalist is against it as a matter of political opportunism.

“While forcing his own people — and those whose migration keeps the cartels supplied with the billions to buy military-grade weaponry — to suffer murder, rape and other heinous crimes, Biden is abroad encouraging ongoing violence in Ukraine,” writes The Federalist’s executive editor, Joy Pullmann, giving readers a taste of the quality of both her thinking and her prose.”

Bret Stephens | Tucker Carlson and the Tragedy of Fox News – The New York Times

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

“In the summer of 2011, Rupert Murdoch stopped by my small office at The Wall Street Journal, where I was a columnist and editor. He was just back from London, where he had given testimony to a parliamentary committee investigating the phone-hacking scandal by his British tabloids (and where he was attacked with a shaving-foam pie). The scandal ultimately resulted in the closure of News of the World, at one point one of the world’s biggest-selling English-language newspapers.

I don’t remember many specifics about the conversation — Murdoch loved to talk politics and policy with his journalists, sometimes by taking us to lunch at the Lamb’s Club in Midtown Manhattan — but I do remember the gist of what he said about the fiasco: Never put anything in an email. His private takeaway, it seemed, wasn’t to require his companies to adhere to high ethical standards. It was to leave no trace that investigators might use for evidence against him, his family or his favorite lieutenants.

Fast-forward a dozen years. Not much has changed. What is being euphemistically described as a parting of ways on Monday between Fox News and its Chief Disinformation Officer, Tucker Carlson, is happening after the now-former prime-time host put things in emails and text messages that proved he knew he was peddling lies — and then went ahead and amplified them.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT  NYT Comment:

This is arguably one of the best pieces Bret Stephens has ever written at the NYT. His critics excoriate him for praising Reagan and GHW Bush, while ignoring what an extraordinary human and leader George HW Bush was. He probably lost his chance at re-election, when he wisely decided not to bomb the Iraqui Army retreating in defeat from Kuwait, and choosing not to invade Iraq at that time. Critics who dispose of GHW Bush with the same breath they dismiss Reagan, don’t know their history, or their presidents. Bret writes near the end of this assay, “Such a channel would still have been plenty conservative, in a way that most liberals would find infuriating. But it would also have defended the classically liberal core of intelligent conservatism: the idea that immigrants are an asset, not a liability; that the freedoms of speech and conscience must extend to those whose ideas we loathe; that American power ought to be harnessed to protect the world’s democracies from aggressive dictators; that we are richer at home by freely trading goods abroad; that nothing is more sacred than democracy and the rule of law; that patriotism is about preserving the capacity to criticize a country we love while loving the country we criticize.” I always mark Bret down for flaming anthropocentricism, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t say a lot of important things extremely well. I rest my case.

David Lindsay Jr. is a historian who blogs at InconvenientNews.net

Bret Stephens | Undeterred Criminals Plus Demoralized Cops Equals More Crime – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/opinion/crime-policing-chicago.html

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

“Two years ago, a white Chicago police officer named Eric Stillman fatally shot Adam Toledo, an unarmed 13-year-old Mexican American with no criminal record, while the boy was complying with the officer’s orders following a late-night foot chase. The killing brought greater awareness to police brutality in Latino communities, yet no charges were filed against Stillman. Since then, Chicago has been able to turn a corner on violent crime, thanks partly to investments in after-school youth programs. Murders are down by 20 percent from two years ago.

That’s one version of events, the version favored by the progressive left.

Another version goes like this. On March 29, 2021, at 2:36 a.m., Stillman and his partner responded to a call that shots were being fired. Stillman pushed Ruben Roman, a 21-year-old with a criminal record, to the ground and chased Toledo, who was holding a 9-millimeter handgun, down a dark alley. Stillman yelled “drop it.” Toledo tossed the gun behind a fence and turned toward him. The officer fired the fatal shot less than a second after Toledo got rid of the gun. Stillman then immediately jumped to Toledo’s aid and called for an ambulance.

Roman was acquitted of firing the weapon at a passing car; his lawyers argued that it might have been Toledo who had fired the weapon.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT NYT comment:

A friend of mine, who is also about 70, caught two black men taking the catalytic converter off his prius in his own church parking lot in Hamden, CT. He ordered the men to stop. One of the men turned on him and said, I have gun, and we are taking what we want. They finished removing the piece, and drove off in an old jalopy with no license plates. It might be time to bring back the gulag. CT has a stiff law against trading in such auto parts, but apparently our neighbor states do not, or so I heard.

InconvenientNews.net

Bret Stephens | On Ukraine, Biden Outshines Macron, Scholz — and DeSantis – The New York Times

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

“To President Emmanuel Macron of France, a suggestion:

If, as a report in The Wall Street Journal suggests, you are convinced the war in Ukraine is destined for a bloody stalemate, and would like to encourage Kyiv to enter “peace talks” with Moscow that would leave Russia in possession of large tracts of conquered territory, why not lead by example? Publicly suggest the return of Alsace to Germany as evidence that you, too, believe that territorial sovereignty should be negotiable.

To Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, another suggestion:

If you’re going to dangle the prospect of closer ties between Ukraine and NATO (but not full membership) as a way of pushing Kyiv into a diplomatic settlement with Moscow, why not invite several battalions of Russian armor to the vicinity of Berlin? That would demonstrate that you, too, are willing to adjust the verdict of 1991 to mollify the Kremlin’s resentment, greed and paranoia.

These are preposterous suggestions. That’s the point. Those who now argue that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine needs to be “realistic” or “pragmatic” — that is, that he should stop short of pursuing a complete Russian withdrawal from all occupied Ukrainian territories — are proposing a solution they would never countenance for their own countries under ordinary circumstances, let alone during a struggle for national survival.

That’s why, as the war in Ukraine enters its second year, I feel grateful for Joe Biden. Fault him all you want on many issues, particularly his gradualist approach to arming Ukraine, but on the most consequential question of our time he has the big thing right. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased,” he said last week in Warsaw. “They must be opposed.” “

Bret Stephens | Putin Is Starting to Do What Won Him a War 7 Years Ago – The New York Times

“. . . The strategy is clear. Putin’s armies might be falling back in the field. But if he can freeze, starve and terrorize Ukraine’s people by going after their water supplies and energy infrastructure — while waiting for winter to blunt Ukraine’s advance — he might still be able to force Kyiv to accept some sort of armistice, leaving him in possession of most of his conquests.

That would count as a victory in Putin’s books, however wounded he might otherwise be. It would also be encouragement to China’s Xi Jinping as he eyes Taiwan and Iran’s Ali Khamenei as he tries to suppress weeks of protest that are starting to have the color of a revolution. Much more is at stake in the outcome in Ukraine than the fate of Ukraine itself.

What can the Biden administration do? More. And more quickly.

So far, we’ve had a policy of nick-of-time delivery of critical weaponry, such as the Javelin and Stinger missiles that saved Kyiv at the beginning of the war and HIMARS, the rocket systems that turned the tide of war over the summer. We need to switch to an approach that stays consistently ahead of the pace of war and weather.

On Tuesday the administration announced that it would soon be delivering to Ukraine two National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, or NASAMS, with ranges of up to 30 miles. But there’s a hitch: Only “in the next few years,” according to a report in The Times, will Ukraine get to take delivery of the next six systems.

Ukrainians, whose country is nearly the size of Texas, need the systems now. If the United States can’t deliver them quickly, we can at least provide Ukrainians with unmanned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.s) that can give them vastly improved detection and defensive capabilities over much longer ranges.

The Biden administration has been considering the sale of four of the U.S. Army’s long-endurance U.A.V.s armed with Hellfire missiles since June, but the request has been held up in the bowels of Pentagon bureaucracy for months over excessive fears that some of its technologies could fall into Russian hands. Why not approve the sale, increase the numbers and start training Ukrainians on the systems immediately?” . . . .

Bret Stephens | Climate Change Is Real. Markets, Not Governments, Offer the Cure. – The New York Times

By Bret Stephens
Photographs by Damon WinterMr. Stephens is an Opinion columnist. Mr. Winter is a staff photographer on assignment in Opinion.

“ILULISSAT, GREENLAND — On a clear day in August, a helicopter set me and a few companions down on the northern end of the Jakobshavn Glacier in Western Greenland, about 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The ground under our feet seemed almost lunar: gray silt and dust, loose rocks and boulders, and, at the edge of the glacier’s face, mud so deep it nearly ate my boots. To the south, the calving front of the glacier known in Greenlandic as Sermeq Kujalleq periodically deposited enormous slabs of ice, some more than 100 feet high, into the open water.

I asked the pilot to give me a sense of how much the glacier had retreated since he had been flying the route. He pointed to a distant rocky island in the middle of the fjord.

“That’s where the glacier was in 2007,” he said.

Over the course of the 20th century, the Jakobshavn Glacier retreated about 10 to 15 kilometers. Over just the next eight years, it retreated about the same amount, according to the oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Later the front advanced a little — a function of complex dynamics partly involving ocean currents — before resuming its retreat.

For anyone who has entertained doubts about the warming of the planet, a trip to Greenland serves as a bracing corrective. Flying low over the vast ice sheet that covers most of the island, I immediately noticed large ponds of cerulean meltwater and dozens of fast-flowing streams rushing through gullies of white ice and sometimes disappearing into vertical ice caverns thousands of feet deep. Such lakes, scientists report, have become far more common over the last two decades, occurring earlier in the year at higher elevations. Last year, it even rained at the highest point of the ice sheet, some 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle. That’s a first since record keeping began in the 1980s.”

David Lindsay:  Hallelujah. Thank you Bret, for this careful and honest essay.  One climate crisis denier starts to understand.  Here is a comment I especially liked, of many I endorsed.

Former American engineering professor

EuropeOct. 28

I have been waiting for this column. I liked it. Thank you for stating everything so carefully. Mostly I agree with what you have said, but as FunkyIrishman points out, we would not be in nearly as much of a bind if the earth had the same population it did in the 1950’s. “Grow and multiply until you fill the earth” doesn’t mean standing room only. The earth is “full” when population starts to stress the system in potentially dangerous or irreversible ways. I know conservatives hate regulation and I can relate, but consider the horrible photochemical smog that plagued Los Angeles in 1970. We had the ability to make it go away all along, but it did not start to go away until a regulation limited vehicle emissions. It is naïve to assume companies will consider the wellbeing of society. I am not saying companies are bad. Companies are certainly indispensable, but they exist to make a profit and nothing more. They are incredibly good at that. Once a clean-air level playing field was established in California, they made profits while improving air quality. Having said that, regulation needs to have the lightest touch possible to get the job done, and it needs to be straightforward. About having a lot of time to deal with it – the idea worries me because policy makers are so good at kicking the can down the road. I think you were a little unfair to climate scientists. They have tried to explain about the uncertainties, but the public have a hard time with that concept.

3 Replies 265 Recommended

David Lindsay: Most of the top comments were hyper critical, and they scored great points, without recognizing the strengths of Stephen’s piece. He overstates the case for letting markets solve the problem, and yet keeps mentioning regulations that were successful in guiding markets to sanity. It is as if, he hasn’t digested all that he has just learned. I reread the piece and marked most of the good or excellent and bad or terrible points, and the count came out, 42 good or excellent points, 17 bad or terrible points, so the score or grade was 42/59= .71 or 71%. Many of the comments discuss the 17 terrible points, without acknowledging all the many good points in the piece, which is typical of the carelessness of many commenters in this space.

I’m rereading the second half of the Fritjof Capra book, “The Hidden Connections, A Science for Sustainable Living,” which I recommend to Bret Stephens, for an introduction to the new economics of sustainability, which is not based on GDP, but bringing humans into balance with nature, and a healthy environment and ecosystems, in an economy that recycle everything and doesn’t pollute.

David Lindsay Jr  is the author of the Tay Son Rebellion about 18th century Vietnam, and blogs at InconvenientNews.Net. 

 

 

 

I

Bret Stephens | This Is the Other Way That History Ends – The New York Times

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

“The End of History was supposed to have happened back in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama announced the conclusive triumph of liberal democracy. We know how that thesis worked out. But what happens when the other kind of History — academic, not Hegelian — starts to collapse?

That’s a question that James H. Sweet, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the president of the American Historical Association, tried to raise earlier this month in a column titled “Is History History?” for the organization’s newsmagazine. It didn’t go well.

Sweet’s core concern in the piece, which was subtitled “Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present,” was about the “trend toward presentism” — the habit of weighing the past against the social concerns and moral categories of the present.”

David Lindsay: One of Bret’s best pieces, and the comments are glowing with praise, on a complex and difficult subject.

Opinion | Bret Stephens: I Was Wrong About Trump Voters – The New York Times

“. . . . A final question for myself: Would I be wrong to lambaste Trump’s current supporters, the ones who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic outrage of Jan. 6?

Morally speaking, no. It’s one thing to take a gamble on a candidate who promises a break with business as usual. It’s another to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the Republic itself.

But I would also approach these voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,” noted Abraham Lincoln early in his political career. “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.”   -30-

Bret Stephens | Five Blunt Truths About the War in Ukraine – The New York Times

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

“Five sentences sum up the war in Ukraine as it stands now.

The Russians are running out of precision-guided weapons. The Ukrainians are running out of Soviet-era munitions. The world is running out of patience for the war. The Biden administration is running out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chinese are watching.

Moscow’s shortfalls with its arsenal, which have been obvious on the battlefield for weeks, are cause for long-term relief and short-term horror. Relief, because the Russian war machine, on whose modernization Vladimir Putin spent heavily, has been exposed as a paper tiger that could not seriously challenge NATO in a conventional conflict.

Horror, because an army that cannot wage a high-tech war, relatively low on collateral damage, will wage a low-tech war, appallingly high on such damage. Ukraine, by its own estimates, is suffering 20,000 casualties a month. By contrast, the U.S. suffered about 36,000 casualties in Iraq over seven years of war. For all its bravery and resolve, Kyiv can hold off — but not defeat — a neighbor more than three times its size in a war of attrition.”

Bret Stephens | The Left Is Being Mugged by Reality, Again – The New York Times

By Bret Stephens     Opinion Columnist

This column has been updated to reflect news developments.

“Is a decade of destructive progressive ideology finally coming to an end?

That San Franciscans, some of America’s most reliably liberal voters, chose on Tuesday to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, one of America’s most leftward D.A.s, is a sign of hope.

Voter patience for what Mayor London Breed of San Francisco calls “all the bullshit that has destroyed our city” — aggressive shoplifting, rampant car burglaries, open-air drug use, filthy homeless encampments, sidewalks turned into toilets — is finally running thin.

Progressive overreach has its price. Even for progressives.

What’s going on in San Francisco is happening nationwide, and not just in matters of criminal justice and urban governance. In one area after another, the left is being mugged by reality, to borrow Irving Kristol’s famous phrase. Consider a few examples:     . . . . . “

David Lindsay:

Great points Bret, thank you.

My beyond beef, is that you sound ignorant, or dumb, on the threat of climate change. Your brilliance is your hard honesty, that we climate hawks have a tough job, since, as you point out, most folks are for the environment, as long as it won’t cost them more than an extra $10 a year. The irony, is that as you sound almost gloating over our failures to mitigate climate change, you seem oblivious to the fact that the planet we are trying to keep habitable, is the same one you and your family live on.

Your punishment, or assignment, is to go study Edward O Wilson, and learn about the sixth great extinction of species going on right now all around us. Why did he conclude that at current rates of growth and pollution, we will lose 80% of the world’s species in the next 80 years, and humans will be probably one of the casualties.  Some aliens in outer space are probably gloating, since those humans won’t last very long.

David blogs at InconvenientNews.net