- “It is wartime,” Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia, told her colleague Jason Bordoff, a former adviser to Barack Obama, on an eye-opening recent episode of the podcast “Columbia Energy Exchange.”
“This is something that European politicians and consumers didn’t want to admit for quite a long time. It sounds terrible, but that’s the reality. In wartime the economy is mobilized. The decisions are made by the governments, not by the free market. This is the case for Europe this winter,” she said, adding that we may see forced rationing, price controls, the suspension of energy markets and shutdowns of whole industrial sectors. “We are not actually talking about extremely high prices, but we are talking about physical absence of energy resources in certain parts of Europe.”
Personally I'm really really happy I managed to find what is probably the last three year fixed price energy contract in the country. Yesterday my old electricity contract got another 51% price hike, so I feel like I'm dodging a bullet. I'm was on the fence on whether I also want to drop 2K on a doom prep electrical heating split unit system just for the living room. But consumers will be hit last and if I can't get gas anymore I probably have bigger issues than a chilly couch.
I was listening to an interview yesterday with a former CIA officer who explained in very plain terms that the major European powers NEED the conflict in Ukraine over before fall. He posited that europe isn't capable of powering/heating itself without Russian petroleum and that the recent negotiations that re-allowed maritime export of Ukranian grain were Russian controlled. While they aren't winning any war of opinion or on the surface, his argument was fundamentally that war is about economic consequences and on those grounds, Russia is winning.
Bustamante is a shameless self-promoter. Podcasts are what he does. He's got as much foreign policy and diplomacy experience as I do. More than that, the arrangement of the CIA is that "people without any chance of career advancement" are covert ops, "people with advanced degrees" start as case officers and work their way up. One of the slowest fish in our school at UW ended up going into clandestine ops. On the other hand, I have a buddy who quit being a high school English teacher on September 12 2001 and by April he was writing the Presidential Daily Briefing on Estonia. Not bad for a black man in his early 20s with zero slavic language experience eh? "Major European powers" may "NEED" the Ukraine invasion to be over by fall but that was never, ever ever going to happen and everyone with any sense knows it. Had Russia managed to take Kyiv in the first 48 hours they would have inherited a partisan hell similar to Syria and Iraq. Europe is the contentious catastrophe it is now because of the Syrian refugee crisis; if Ukraine had fallen it would be 100x worse right now. As it is, the real problem Europe faces is the amount of trade Germany and France did with Russia and the fact that eliminating that trade is bad for major businesses in Germany and France. Yeah Russia could cut Europe off and Europe would lose like 11-20% of their energy but Russia would lose like 80% of their exports. If you wanna know why Biden fist-bumped Mohammed bin Bonesaw? It's all about January 2023. Europe is suffering from trade realignment and people are going to die - a lot more in Africa than Europe, but let's not talk about that at the moment. It's going to suck. But somehow pretending that trade realignment was somehow reversible after Spetznaz jumped on Kyiv is fellow-traveler nonsense.
Slowly, then all at once. I actually read up on sanctions. Cliff's Notes: they're the only lasting legacy of the League of Nations as prior to that the idea of economic warfare against noncombatants was considered beastly and inhuman, and 60% of the time, they work 100% of the time, but if you don't try 100% of the time they'll work 0% of the time. The global question with sanctions against Russia is "how much will the oligarchs put up with." We thought the global question was "how much will the Russian people put up with" but that's outmoded neoliberal thinking that presumes Russia had some semblance of free-market, democratic DNA. I maintain that the State Department has pretty much decided it's time to push Russia over, the only remaining question is how long it will take. The minute we authorized the Defense Production Act for Ukraine it was all over but the waiting. That's pretty much a capitalist declaration of extinction against the Russian regime. Russia's got a million troops, two million with reserves. Yet they're scraping up "volunteer" battalions of 15,000 retirees and convicts to go steal toilets with Mosin-Nagants. It says something about (1) the flexibility (2) the applicability of the modern Russian military that the Ukrainian invasion has been so loss-averse yet so loss-stricken. Grandpa Joe says the quiet part out loud sometimes. I guess it comes down to your definition of "crush."