🧵As I watch US podcasts on the internet about #Russia’s war against #Ukraine what I see increasingly defies reason. Academics like Mearsheimer or Sachs de facto repeat Russian talking points. For years now retired US colonels continue to declare #Ukraine’s imminent end, etc. 1/6 Most of the people who pontificate on Russia have never been outside of Moscow/Petersburg, if that. They don’t speak a word of Russian, nor Ukrainian. Instead, IR theory and, frankly, chutzpah substitute for country expertise as they boldly predict Ukraine’s imminent demise. 2/6

🧵I’m sick and tired of those shilling for Putin who constantly repeat that Zelensky hasn’t held a presidential election or that corruption hampers #Ukraine’s defense effort and thereby Kyiv is “not worthy” of America’s support. Get it through your heads: Ukraine is at war. 1/5 #Ukraine is fighting for its very survival not just as a country, but as a nation. Period. I’d like to remind those sanctimonious “Putin explainers” that during World War II FDR introduced several significant abridgments of civil liberties and constitutional rights in the US. 2/5

🧵POTUS's post that the US will deploy 5K troops to #Poland could be transformative for @NATO. For too long since the end of the Cold War the US force posture in Europe has relied on legacy installations, predominantly in #Germany, and most of all, on legacy assumptions. 1/6 During the Cold War, the US permanently based its military in #Germany because that was the point of contact. In those days, the Bonn Republic was the critical hub of @NATO's eastern flank. US troops served in Germany with families, with an extensive support infrastructure.2/6

I recently complained about US airlines, comparing them to a superior experience offered by foreign airlines. I was wrong. Today I boarded @LOTPLAirlines from Warsaw to Seoul, flight no LO97. First surprise: No ramp to reach the plane. Instead I was directed to a bus outside. 1/6 A sourly looking @LOTPLAirlines gate agent snapped a few orders at me and sent me on my merry way. People piled on the bus, and kept piling on even though the bus was full. There was no-one from LOT staff to assist and manage the process. Finally we left for the aircraft. 2/6

🧵A message to all armchair experts who have become captivated by #UAVs (also known as #drones) as the latest shiny object of modern warfare. I hope this message sparks some much-needed debate on the ongoing technological change, while providing a necessary reality check. 1/6 #Drones don't eliminate the enduring requirements of warfare: seizing terrain, generating trained manpower, sustaining logistical capacity, etc., and most of all imposing political outcomes on an adversary. They are enablers within a broader system, not independent solutions.2/6

🧵The recent post by @USWPColby, which discusses a strategy for @NATO 3.0, mostly revisits familiar ideas. Most importantly, it retreads legacy assumptions about Germany's leading role in the US-European alliance without considering the new geopolitical realities in #Europe. 1/7 West Germany was America's key ally in @NATO because it was the key point of contact with the Warsaw Pact, had a strong economy, population resources, and critically, the irreducible national interest to resist Soviet expansionism at all costs. Today's Germany is different. 2/7

🧵I've been watching the national security policy discussion in various European media outlets, and I'm concerned by the growing disconnect between the so-called public expert opinion and the reality Europe finds itself in as a result of three decades of neglecting defense. 1/6 In European mainstream media and podcasts on the internet there has been a constant drumbeat of anti-NATO rhetoric, as though those countries now wanted to lead Europe's decoupling from America. Europe's YouTube and tv experts on strategy and defense seem to lead the charge. 2/6

🧵I’m increasingly convinced as I listen to political discourse in the US that we are paying the price for the deconstruction of the American educational system. We “educate,” or rather merely credential, people who lack the knowledge, rigor, language and discipline to reason.1/5 Ask yourself why the most ubiquitous colloquialism in American English today is the word “like”? “It’s like, you know, like, and like…..”—ad infinitum. This is an untrained mind deprived of logical linearity, grappling for order and meaning, struggling with imprecision. 2/5

🧵I’m back from California. Being on the @Stanford campus was like walking down the memory lane. I did my postdoc at @HooverInst. I wrote my first book there. It was my research home for 12 years afterwards. It was like homecoming. But different, because America is different. 1/7 I don’t remember this country as polarized and as unable to seek a middle ground as it is today. It’s as though Bolsheviks got our soul: “Kto kogo” (who gets whom). Our politics used to be “I win, you lose, we shake hands and continue to compete. Now: I win, you disappear. 2/7

🧵The announcement by Canadian PM @MarkJCarney of a reset in Canada-China ties accompanied by a trade deal of dramatic proportions will likely go down in history as a major political blunder. But don't listen to me: Premier Doug Ford of Ontario already denounced the deal. 1/9 Anger, however justified, should never be the principal driver of policy. This is true both about our Canadian brethren, and true about our European allies. We are living through a rocky transformation of the international system, but the geopolitical realities remain. 2/9

🧵I've spent my entire professional career dedicated to strengthening transatlantic relations for America has always been "Albion's seed," with its institutions and culture steeped in the British settler culture of the 18th century. That why we used to understand each other. 1/10 Today Europe and America understand each other less and less. I visit Europe multiple times each year, and I can almost feel our "common language" disappear. My European friends tell me it's all because of Trump, but it wasn't that much different during the Biden years. 2/10

🧵This won't be my typical post; rather, a reflection after the Christmas season that allowed me to slow down a bit. BLUF: We need a return to analog culture. We need to reclaim reading physical journals and books. We need to return to in-person contact and conversations. 1/6 The internet generates alienation and ultimately loneliness. As human beings we were never meant to live our lives online. The world can't be reduced to a phone screen, and even if so, it shouldn't be. We need to reclaim tangible living where real human complexity resides. 2/5

🧵Over Christmas I had an opportunity to catch up with friends across Europe, and those conversations convinced me even more that unless there is a fundamental rethinking inside the European Union, the continent will slide into geopolitical irrelevance-and we'll all lose. 1/13 It is time EU elites stop talking about "Europe" and the EU as interchangeable concepts. There can be no such thing as a "federalized Europe," as there is no European nation. Indeed, you can construct a centralized mega-state, but it would be a democratic polity in name only.2/13

🧵I don't get rattled often, but today I've had enough when I watched online two credentialled American apologists for #Russia's imperialism repeating yet again that we caused the war in Ukraine because we declared in 2008 that we would consider bringing Ukraine into @NATO. 1/10 I ask this: What planet do these people live on to argue with a straight face that a nation brutally attacked by its neighbor, and fighting for its very survival must explain itself to them and convince them that it has the right to live free? Are they simply this callous? 2/10

🧵About to get on the plane to fly back home. A few thoughts after visiting @KUL_Lublin and my series of meetings in Warsaw. First, #Poland has undergone a remarkable transformation over the post-Cold War decades. What was once a smoldering ruin, is now w thriving economy. 1/5 #Poland’s remarkable transformation is a tribute to its people, with a new generation-untainted by communism-coming into its own and now ready (I hope) to take the helm. In my conversations I sensed patriotism, aspirations and tenacity young Poles display in spades. But…2/5

🧵I recently visited Europe, and I'm planning to go again to Poland, UK, Lithuania and Finland. I returned from my recent visit to Poland with mixed feelings, encouraged by the commitment to collective defense, but concerned by the apparent chaos in various policy debates. 1/11 Since the end of the Cold War, Poland has achieved a remarkable economic success, with a new generation- untainted by communism-coming into its own. The country is a model. But what is missing in various publicized policy debates are the fundamentals geopolitics and power. 2/11

🧵My initial impressions from this trip to Europe: The continent is not ready to face up to the new reality of the increasingly fractured regional balance of power. The eastern flank countries understand the existential threat Russia poses to Europe. Other allies don’t. 1/8 This regionalized security optics across Europe means that @NATO doesn’t have a genuine shared consensus on the nature the threat #Russia poses, and how to address it. I called this once a “crisis of disbelief” on the part of the West’s policy elites and political leadership. 2/8

🧵One would assume that rooting for the home team is to be expected. So it is disconcerting to say the least to watch how many among Western policy experts seem ready to declare that the competition is over and China has already displaced the US as the world’s leading power. 1/7 Reading some of those articles, op-ed’s and posts made me wonder what drives this fascination with China-a country that (no matter how one spins it) is a communist state and shares none of Western values we proclaim to hold dear. Why in effect so much disdain for ourselves? 2/7

🧵History never repeats itself, but it rhymes on occasion, and when it comes to the decomposing European security architecture, historical analogues are compelling. A determined revisionist state – Russia – is arming at speed and scale to reverse the outcome of the Cold War. 1/8 References to past traumas can be overdone; still, we're living through an era of Western appeasement of Russia that invites comparisons to the interwar period in Europe. Putin repeatedly used military power to seize territory but paid only a relatively small price for it. 2/8

🧵The maxim ”know your adversary” should be one of the core principles of US foreign policy. It should be the founding principle of US-Russia relations. Stop mirror-imaging and stop assuming that Russia is behaving as we would. Russia is not a part of the West—it never was. 1/10 Russia is not a nation-state; it is an empire that expanded from a tiny Duchy of Muscovy into a tsarist domain spanning eleven time zones. After 1917 Stalin continued in the same vein, pushing deep into Europe. And now Putin and his cronies are having yet another go at it. 2/10

🧵As I watched the wrangling over Germany’s demand that PL extradite the Ukrainian man accused of blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, I asked myself whether and when the EU will live up to its professed principles. The debate should not be about what that man did/did not do. 1/5 The discussion focus on why Germany pursued the Nord Stream project in the first place. Why isn’t there real soul searching and naming names Berlin? It was Moscow’s brutal geopolitical project to isolate @NATO’s eastern flank allies while continuing to supply Germany with gas.2/5