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The US regime during the prosecution of Russia’s war against Ukraine was committed to ensuring Ukraine could resist Russian aggression for as long as it took to exhaust Ukraine. The major evasion of those who backed those policies was in ignoring the realistic outcome of a ‘total’ war between Russia and Ukraine. In reality the pledge was to participate in the destruction of the Ukraine. I’m sure there will be apologists in the ‘after action’ reports that will try and claim the US aid, of course well and below adding significant manpower to the conflict, had the ‘good’ outcome of decimating Russian military forces. Even allowing the ole timey military terminology defining decimation by a reduction of troop levels by 10% , which it seems could be the case in personnel numbers lost, it doesn’t actually equate to reducing Russia’s military present and immediately available capabilities to ole timey ‘decimation’. How is the precise outcome not going to be one wholly foreseeable, without the evasion? Everybody thought it would be a good thing to get the Ukraine ground up, apparently.

Trump has saddled America with another charlatan in an important post. Economist Tara Jirari raises the alarm over the new Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget because he once headed the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA), which not only supports tariffs, but notably used dishonest arguments to do so. Jirari supports her charge by citing an analysis by Joseph Francois of the World Trade Institute and Robert Koopman of American University. They note among other things that the CPA's claims "rest on assumptions that that run against established empirical evidence, contradicting hundreds of papers and decades of economic analysis on the effects of tariffs," and make more detailed commentary on some of these assumptions, including:The next key assumption that tariffs will raise U.S. productivity growth finds absolutely no support in the economic literature. Tariffs tend to reduce productivity growth as firms face less competition and therefore less incentive to innovate and reduce costs, resulting in more scarce resources flowing to less competitive firms and sectors and away from more competitive and innovative firms and sectors, and reduce scale economies as firms now operate in a smaller, domestic market rather than a larger global market. Indeed, this assumption implies that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs should have brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression. In their underlying model, a full-blown trade war is good for everyone.The analysis thoroughly eviscerates the CPA analysis and concludes that "this study is not only misguided, but also intentionally misleading and would not find support in a serious economics journal." I cannot top economist Jessica Riedl's analogy, so I'll repeat it here: "This is like hiring a NASA administrator who believes the Earth is flat, an Attorney General with no legal training ... or an HHS secretary who is an anti-vaxxer (oh wait)." -- CAVLink to Original

Incoming German Chancellor: France has strategic nuclear warheads capable of reaching Russia, submarine launched and on cruise missiles. They are controlled by France independently from NATO. Britain has its own nuclear weapons as well, though they are under NATO control. US nuclear weapons are presently in storage at bases in seven European countries. NATO had deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Western Europe and had relied on their deterrence and NATO had relied on its superior pace of advances in military technology to offset the enormous Red Army (whose expense became a major weight bringing down the Soviet Union). Russia moved tactical nuclear weapons last year from Russia to Belarus. I hope Chamberlain Trump does not concede to Putin getting rid of the NATO ballistic missile defense system. That system is capable of intercepting Russian ICBM's in their ascent stage of flight.