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Robert E Kelly Profile picture
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Feb 26 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Douthat once again broadcasts his rightie domestic politics onto an unrelated foreign policy issue, just like in Afghanistan last year. None of this is true:

"Putin sees a window of opportunity in the pandemic’s chaos, America’s imperial overstretch,

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nytimes.com/2022/02/26/opi…
& an internally divided West."

1. Covid nothing to do with this.

I challenge anyone to provide serious casual evidence of this. This is about as silly as saying Ukraine was driven by the cancellation of XL, another ridiculous right-wing talking point

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2. The US is not overstretched.

We're out of Afghanistan; we're not rushing into Ukraine; we not over-committing around China; we're pushing the allies to help with CN (the Quad); interest rates are low; GDP growth is good. CN is 2-3 decades behind us militarily.

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3. 'Internal divisions' means democracy, not weakness

And the West's unity on the war has been widely hailed. If there's division over the war, it's on the hard right, people who share Douthat's deep Christian cultural pessimism and so want a 'trad'l values' alliance w/ Putin

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I figured Fox & friends would start throwing out specious explanations for the war - even though Putin told us point blank in that creepy imperialist press conference this week, where didn't even bother with the agitprop that it's bc of NATO expansion.



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More from @Robert_E_Kelly

Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Feb 26
S Korean left's presidential candidate just blamed Zelensky for getting Ukraine invaded, the same Zelensky showing extraordinary courage by staying in Kiev as the Russians come for him and his family:

"A novice politician who only has 6 months of political experience became

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the country's leader and caused a major clash by inciting Russia with a hasty promise of Ukraine's NATO admission."

This is shameful.

koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/202…
This comment is also empirically inaccurate, obviously.

An operation of this scale does not get worked up in just 6 months, & Putin's been banging on against Ukrainian independence for 20 years now.

So I don't know what Lee Jae-Myung had in mind saying something so callous.

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Read 7 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Feb 26
Who’s excited for Fox’ upcoming fishing trip on why the #UkraineWar is actually bc of American liberals?

1. Biden is weak/senile

- An oldie but goodie

2. Critical Race Theory

- Yes! I’ve no idea what the causal logic is, but I’m sure Carlson will figure it out

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3. Liberal academics

- Sapping American patriotism for decades encouraged Putin to think we’re decadent (Douthat, for sure, even though it has nothing to do with Ukraine)

4. Capital gains taxation

- If we know anything, it’s that the GOP will demand a tax cut for its donor

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class in response to, well, everything

5. The Southern Border

- American borders are ‘weak’ encouraging Putin to think the same of Ukraine’s (I didn’t say these ideas made any sense)

6. XL pipeline cancellation

- Putin’s spent all last year checking in on US petroleum

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Read 7 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Feb 25
This gets to an argument I tried to make for a long time, but never seemed to get any traction:

TRUMP WAS A DOVE. In fact, he was a craven appeaser whom GOP hawks obsessed with 'strength' should reject.

He routinely toadied to dictators, offering concessions to get deals for

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for the most insipid reasons - validation from dictators that he too was a tough guy; bc Obama got a Nobel, Trump had to have one too, bc O mocked him at press dinner 10 years ago; validation from world leaders and the media that he was qualified to be POTUS and not the

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incompetent, no-nothing, arriviste serious commentary long since tagged him as.

While toadying to dictators, he proved his 'hawkishness' by punching down at small US allies.

This isn't what US hawks, in any recognizable usage of that word, do. Trump talked like a macho bully

3
Read 5 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Feb 24
If we’re going to sanction Russia as harshly as we keep hearing, we’ll need Chinese cooperation.

Chinese foot-dragging is one of the biggest problems in N Korea sanctions enforcement.

The incentives - strategic, ideological, economic for CN to do same on Russia will be huge

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We also won’t get multilateral (UN) sanctions. Russia itself will veto that.

But for democratic countries’ Russia sanctions to bite, a Chinese back door will be a real problem.

CN probably won’t do much, so we need to be honest about how far sanctions, however harsh, can go

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We also need to grasp the limits of #sanctions. They won't push #Russia out of Ukraine, just as they aren't forcing N Korea stop building nukes.

Instead, their goal is to prevent the problem from becoming even worse by imposing costs. That is, NK won't stop building nukes,

3
Read 12 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Feb 24
So this is the kind of neocon logic that fills anglophone op-ed pages - esp @washingtonpost & @FT - in every crisis, and which we desperately need to replace with other models of aggression & response. Western opponents are rarely unlimited revisionists like Hitler, Napoleon,

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or Alexander.

Reading them that way encourages overreaction and provocative escalation as in Vietnam, Central America in the 80s,or the war on terror.

Putin is indeed a gangster and a predator. And his command of a great power army and predilection for anchluss-es is

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reminiscent of the 30s. Which is why Biden is taking this so seriously.

But the odds against Russia are much worse than against Nazi Germany. The West is pretty united, and Russia is badly isolated. Even the Chinese don’t want an unabashed Russian invasion, and an open war

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Read 7 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Feb 23
Everything here is wrong for reasons typical of lazy, knee-jerk MAGA analysis:

1. Deterrence is deeply structured by local & historical factors. Defeats in one place don’t necessarily drive expansionism elsewhere. The Soviets also withdrew from Afghanistan, in the 80s. That

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didn’t encourage the US to attack Mexico or West Germany to attack E Germany. When the US withdrew from Vietnam, the only dominoes to fall were Laos and Cambodia. All the credibility fears of the 60s were overblown. The US right’s fetishization of US presidential ‘weakness’ as

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a driver of foreign dictators’ bad behavior is really just a tell of their American parochialism - everything must be about us! - and their ignorance of other countries & the particulars of their conflicts. In this case, Putin’s been banging on against Ukrainian independence

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Read 10 tweets

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