The President has put in place a “Plan of Territorial Control” that has brought the murder rate down and locked up some 70,000 gang members in new, huge, and brutal prisons.
Moscow needs to keep throwing large numbers of relatively under-equipped men under artillery cover at Ukrainian defences. A new source of terrorism will drain a proportion of those resources, making things more difficult.
When they were mass-membership institutions, parties used to be able to integrate their populist extremes. Now, through a more diverse mass media, as well as the social media revolution, they are much less effective gatekeepers.
Transnistria may be small and obscure, but the antics of its Russia-backed government are another warning of how comprehensive Putin’s ambitions to restore the old USSR have become.
Despite European NATO’s technological superiority over Russia, we will struggle to defend against a Russian attack: only Finland and Poland have land equipment on the necessary scale.
Estonia’s government has, in a White Paper that rightly calls for Russia’s defeat, estimated it could be done at a cost merely of 0.25 per cent of Western GDP over four years.
Its case is an attempt to divide the West in the guise of post-colonial ideology, but in the interests of actual imperialists in Moscow and Beijing.
Now, through Orbán and Trump, the Kremlin is cashing in its chips. Unable to defeat Western-supported Ukraine on the battlefield, it’s playing Western politics to cut off its supply of money and weapons.
This European “nationalism” could well produce a considerably more populist EU. Whether that would be good for the UK is another matter.
Through their overreaction, they may have handed the UK something quite wondrous: a genuine economic benefit of Brexit.
It can’t create the conditions for stability in Gaza and work towards a two-state solution with the present Prime Minister in place.
This way of thinking also contrasts with the naive counting of the civilian dead. In this tradition, war can be a necessary evil, but that judgement requires attention to its practical consequences.
A victorious Russia would not only be free to continue its extermination of Ukrainian society, but its forces would be on the Polish border, and its leadership convinced that the West lacked the will or ability to defend itself.
Biden’s policy would have the perverse effect of strengthening the regime just when it is under most pressure, leaving it free to fund Hezbollah, supply drones to Russia and otherwise destabilise the region.