WTH: Putin Advances His Russian Empire Plans

Our podcast last week was about Georgia. No, not the Georgia on my mind 🎵 Georgia. But the former Soviet captive nation Georgia. Now, you may — probably will — ask yourself why you should care about a Georgia far away that is never on your mind. Fair enough; let me tell you.

We in the United States of America have a good idea of who our enemies are. Primarily they are China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. At the substate level, there is al Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis et al. And there are a couple of South American nasties. Ranging the full power of the USA against almost all of them, barring China, we can afford to boast of our superior capabilities. Then again, why would we want to go to war with any one of them? War costs lives and money and, ultimately, is a sign of the failure of diplomacy.

So let’s talk a little about the power of diplomacy. In the case of serious challenges to our national interests and the world order, diplomacy works when it is backed by the threat of sanction or the use of force. We’re not talking about the trade-in beef lips (yes, that’s a real thing), nor even about more thorny questions of diplomacy like what to do with Julian Assange (he should have rotted in prison forever, but that’s another substack). We’re talking about diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program (a failure). We’re talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, when Putin occupied and then annexed Crimea. Or the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, when Putin falsely claimed attacks against ethnic Russians to take over South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Read more in the WTH Substack here.