Eliot Cohen is a commentator on military affairs who’s been a fixture of Washington’s conversations for decades. He’s generally been in line with the policy hands identified as “neocons” but his writing has never been entirely in line with theirs. It’s at least a bit more independent, a bit less infected with their antic zeal. Earlier this month Cohen wrote a short article for The Atlantic titled “The Strategy That Can Defeat Putin.” It’s essentially a neo-Cold War manifesto which calls for a military crusade against the kind of revanchist authoritarianism which Vladimir Putin’s Russia both embodies and leads. Cohen writes that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “is a threat, too, to the integrity and self-confidence of the world’s liberal democracies, battered as they have been by internal disputes and backsliding abroad.” He argues that the goal of U.S./EU/NATO policy must be not only to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine but “to leave Russia profoundly weakened and militarily crippled, incapable of renewing such an onslaught, isolated and internally divided until the point that an aging autocrat falls from power. Targeting Putin alone is not enough.”
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TPM’s Kate Riga will be reporting LIVE from Capitol Hill on the 3rd day of hearings for Biden’s Supreme Court pick, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. For written updates you can follow along our Live Blog. For video updates follow us on Instagram: here is the link.
I want to say thank you to everyone who joined as members today and throughout this drive. During this drive we’re mainly trying to sign up TPM Readers who’ve been readers often for some time but for various reasons hadn’t become members. So for those who have just joined, I’m very interested to hear from you. What made you decide to join now?
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This is a quick follow-up on a COVID post I did last week, noting evidence of a new mini- or moderate- surge after the trough of the last month or two. I had said that my impression was that the driver was mainly the relaxation of mitigation measures — both as policy from governments and people individually changing their behavior. That seems less clear than I thought. There seems to be more evidence that the Omicron subvariant BA.2 is a key driver, perhaps the key driver. The evidence still seems muddy because BA.2 appears to have only a moderate advantage in infectiousness. And its share of cases has grown fairly slowly against the original Omicron strain. So there’s a lot about the dynamics of this latest trend that are not clear to me. But just let this stand as a partial correction or update on the earlier post which focused on declining mitigation. Be safe out there.
A few of you asked for book recommendations to read more on the subject of my post this morning about Ukraine and the homeland of the speakers of proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language to the languages spoken by just under half the world’s population. There’s a long answer and a short answer. But the short answer is the better one. The book is The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony.
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As Kate Riga noted repeatedly during her coverage of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) made a point of injecting some QAnon-adjacent claims about Jackson into the public record Monday.
Read MoreThis is hard to make sense of. But let me give you a brief update. A short time ago the Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article which cited official Russian military numbers of killed in action in Ukraine as 9,861. That is a mind-blowing number. In one month Russia would have lost 2/3rds of the soldiers it lost in a decade in Afghanistan. But then a very short time later the article was pulled and replaced by a 404 error. Then it was reposted without any numbers.
What lends some credibility to these numbers is that that is in the ballpark of many Western estimates for Russian fatalities. I’ve been watching expert Russia watchers debate this in real time on Twitter and they seem to disagree on whether this was a real number that was rapidly pulled or whether it was just a complete goof, a typo.