Earthling: Will he go nuclear? And other Putin puzzles
Plus: AI armageddon, Biden vs. Biden on Taiwan, Pentagon’s propaganda push, and more!
This week Vladimir Putin mounted a serious challenge to the aphorism that every cloud has a silver lining.
In a single speech Putin (1) announced that Russia will mobilize 300,000 soldiers; (2) said Russia would “certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us” to defend its “territorial integrity”—and added to this obvious reference to nuclear weapons that “this is not a bluff”; and (3) made that threat even more ominous by hinting that Russia will soon annex some Ukrainian provinces, thus turning them into (by Putin’s lights) Russian territory and thus turning Ukrainian soldiers already fighting in them into (by Putin’s lights) threats to Russia’s territorial integrity.
Can you find a silver lining anywhere in there? Actually, there is one—and political scientist Caitlin Talmadge spelled it out in a Washington Post piece.
Talmadge says that, whatever scenarios may be hypothetically raised by Putin’s nuclear saber rattling, the only thing likely to make him actually use a nuclear weapon anytime soon is the collapse of the Russian war effort. And the military mobilization Putin just ordered will likely keep that from happening and so keep Putin from resorting to desperate measures. In short: the first unsettling part of Putin’s speech makes the second unsettling part less unsettling.
Feel better? If so, enjoy it while it lasts, because Talmadge also writes this:
Even as it seems to ratchet down the short-term likelihood of nuclear use, Putin’s mobilization signals an unflinching commitment to his larger goals in Ukraine — and it may portend a willingness to embrace other nasty means of achieving them.
Those nasty means, she says, include ratcheting up attacks on civilian infrastructure, attacking NATO weapons supply lines in western Ukraine or even inside NATO countries, ramping up cyberattacks, and more. (Today, unusually, kamikaze drones struck targets in the city of Odessa.)
All this is troubling—but it shouldn’t really surprise us. After all, Putin, after seven months of war, still hasn’t achieved the minimal war aims he set out before invading Ukraine: securing all the territory of the two Donbass provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. And, as this newsletter noted back in June:
A number of western analysts have speculated that, if this war is deemed a failure in Russia, Putin could be dethroned via a palace coup. If that is indeed a plausible, even semi-plausible, scenario, then I doubt it has escaped Putin’s attention. So he may consider the failure to secure these two provinces a kind of existential threat—not an existential threat to Russia, but to his regime.
Yet, as straightforward as this logic seems, the discourse on Ukraine within the foreign policy “Blob” has proceeded with almost no reference to the predicament it implies: We want Ukraine to recover as much territory as possible, both on grounds of simple justice and because positive reinforcement for invading sovereign countries is a bad thing; but the more territory Ukraine recovers, the more dire Putin’s political situation and hence the higher the chances of various kinds of catastrophe.
It’s not easy to imagine these chances dropping anytime soon, and it’s easy to imagine them rising. After all, presidents Biden and Zelensky, like Putin, have domestic political incentives, and in neither case is “leave Russia in control of the territory it’s taken since February 24” something that currently looks enticing to them—to say nothing of “let Putin have the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk he doesn’t yet have.”
What’s more, by this spring, after Russia gets its creaky mobilization machinery into working order, Russian-held territory could start to expand very significantly. Assuming Putin continues to see mobilization as politically feasible (a question that may be the biggest single wild card) he can muster an overwhelming manpower advantage in Ukraine.
In the event of such dramatic Russian battlefield success, you can imagine Biden giving Ukraine new kinds of weapons—the long-range smart missiles Ukrainians have been asking for, the most advanced battle tanks, even, eventually, advanced fighter jets. And any success these bring will have the same effect as Ukraine’s recent success on the battlefield: giving Putin a strong political incentive to double down. (Not to mention the fact that the western provision of ever-more-sophisticated weapons to Ukraine is one of the things Putin has been nuclear-saber-rattling about.)
The events of this week would seem to make peace talks a distant possibility at best. On the other hand, the events of this week would seem to make peace talks more desirable than ever—precisely because these events highlighted how inexorably the political dynamics of this war seem to imply a growing chance of various kinds of catastrophe, possibly for years to come.
Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute, in the wake of Putin’s call for mobilization, issued a plea to pursue peace talks even though their success would be, by his own account, a long shot. Noting that even this slender chance of success will disappear if talks don’t start before Russia has annexed Ukrainian provinces, he wrote:
A good starting point for talks could be the proposals made by the Ukrainian government itself back in March, which met Russian demands on certain key issues including neutrality. The fact that Putin explicitly and favorably cited Ukraine’s peace proposal in his speech announcing Russia’s partial mobilization may offer a glimmer of hope for diplomacy.
If the Biden administration does not explore this potential chance of peace, the consequences of a continued escalatory spiral could be disastrous for all concerned.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking at the UN yesterday, seemed ill-inclined to follow such cues. He said, “Diplomacy cannot and must not be used as a cudgel to impose on Ukraine a settlement that cuts against the UN Charter, or rewards Russia for violating it.”
That sacrifice of principle is indeed the bitter pill that any peace talks with a chance of success would involve. Then again, Blinken—by the State Department’s own account—declined to engage in serious diplomacy before the war, back when a peaceful resolution would have prevented this violation of the UN Charter rather than reward it; and back when, if you really thought about it, you could see that war would stand a very good chance of leading either to the rapid conquest of Ukraine or to the kind of place we’re in now, which is a very bad place to be.
Thirty six percent of Artificial Intelligence researchers recently surveyed believe that AI could cause, sometime this century, a global catastrophe “at least as bad as an all-out nuclear war.” Fifty seven percent said recent developments in the field are significant steps toward artificial general intelligence (meaning an AI that is as broadly comprehending as a human being—the kind of AI that is often assumed in AI doomsday scenarios). Seventy three percent said AI could soon lead to revolutionary social change. Whether that change will be for better or for worse was left unspecified.
New Delhi News:
Wild cheetahs returned last week to India, where they’ve been absent for 70 years as a result of hunting and habitat loss. The eight big cats were airlifted from Namibia—which means they’re not the same subspecies as the cheetahs that disappeared from India (now found only in Iran). But sponsors of the initiative are optimistic that the three males and five females will prove adaptable enough to be the start of something big.
Why did the Prime Minister of India, a country that’s long been a partner of Russia, implicitly criticize Putin’s invasion of Ukraine at a summit last week? A new paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sheds light on that question. During the Cold War, economic ties and shared hostility to the US and China sustained Indo-Russian bonds. But today, India enjoys diverse trade relations and attracts tens of billions in foreign investment from the US. Meanwhile Russia, ostracized by the West after the Ukraine invasion, is increasingly reliant on China for diplomatic support and trade and hungry for supplementary support. All of which leaves New Delhi with unaccustomed clout vis-a-vis Moscow.
India’s historic “jaali” lattice windows (think Taj Mahal) may be poised to make a comeback as an alternative to modern temperature control technology. The lattice structure makes use of the “Venturi effect”: Air passing through the small holes gets squeezed, so its velocity increases (like water when you put your thumb on a garden hose) and its pressure drops. This reduces the temperature of the air, which thus cools the building as it enters. No rattly AC units required.
