This is dated June 30, but was on the front page of today’s paper:
…the worst drought in four decades and a confluence of crises that again have put Somalia on the brink of famine. There are the familiar culprits: a dearth of rainfall made worse by climate change; conflict; disease; the coronavirus pandemic; and even locust infestations.
But unlike previous hunger calamities, this one is exacerbated by a conflict 3,000 miles away. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is fueling starvation in Somalia and other nations, abetting death, sickness, the disintegration of families and the loss of livelihoods far from the war’s front lines.
…
“Many people would have survived if the Ukrainian crisis was not there and food was coming in,” said Hassan, the country director of Save the Children. “At least food prices would have been stable, and food would have been available.”
(Archived)
(Edited for typo)
Short thread:
No fries until autumn.
All the potatoes are being made into vodka.
I can’t speak to the “tasty” aspect, but they’re living up to the “that’s it!” part.
Center Right Opinion:
(Author Dr. Michael Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI))
There still won’t be enough.
I think that was pretty poorly argued. Türkiye is a bad actor in a number of ways. But the leap to “and Putin had infiltrated the small NATO nations to paralyze NATOs ability to react” is a long and unsupported one.
Agreed. More right wing thinking that NATO is weak I believe. A short blurb that sweeps grandiose without much critical thinking tends towards propaganda IMO.
The New York Times on Saturday published an in-depth news analysis predicting the conflict in Ukraine could devolve into a long-lasting war of attrition, with Russian president Vladimir Putin “gambling that he can outlast a fickle, impatient West”.
The outcome, the newspaper says, is “likely to be shaped by whether the US and its allies can maintain their military, political and financial commitments to holding off Russia”.
It notes the US has committed $54bn (£45bn) in military and other aid to Ukraine, which is expected to last into next year, but states there is unlikely to be much appetite for pledging anywhere near as much again when stocks of weapons from the US and European allies begin to run low.
Democratic senator for Delaware Chris Coons, a close ally of President Joe Biden, told the newspaper that the allies needed to be “determined” in continuing to support Ukraine:
I worry about the fatigue factor of the public in a wide range of countries because of the economic costs and because there are other pressing concerns.
Exactly how long this will go, exactly what the trajectory will be, we don’t know right now.
But we know if we don’t continue to support Ukraine, the outcome for the US will be much worse.
I apologize if this was in the article(I wasn’t able to get in); but I’d be very curious to know how much of the concern is on the supply side, people just getting tired of providing weapons and ammo; vs. the sanctions side.
Over here in the US, where the ‘defense’ budget is effectively sacred and there are still plenty of cold warriors around, it seems hard to imagine a situation where we’d get tired of providing missiles and such (especially when so much American military activity over the last few decades has been frustrating and ineffectual slogs against an ever broader and more diffuse collection of assorted militants that we’ve decided are our problem; which has to be really frustrating for the hawks who want either the pure war-porn of advanced missile strikes against Warsaw Pact back catalog gear; or the information value of seeing newer American weapons systems vs. a near-peer threat); so long as there’s a highly sympathetic and competent state ready, willing, and eager, to turn every javelin and HIMARS we can ship into a black eye for Russia.
What I have a weaker sense of, though, is how widely and intensely that attitude is shared among others who have been providing weapons(I’d imagine that some of Ukraine’s closer neighbors who have provided Soviet-era compatible gear may not have the same ‘we’ve got a functionally unlimited toy budget but fewer options to play with it than we would like’ incentive; but a much greater ‘we’ve probably been pencilled in as future additions to the glorious motherland’ incentive); and Western Europe likely has incentives closer to American ones; but less intense and not as well funded.
It seems like the sanctions side is where the real, much more immediate, threat of fatigue comes in. It’s both much more dependent on getting collective action out of a sufficiently large number of people(eg. missiles India isn’t sending are a non-issue if sufficient missiles get supplied by somebody else; but oil India is buying and things that they are selling or brokers are using them to launder from sanction-compliant nations provide direct logistical support to Russia); and because the world position in terms of popular response to higher energy and food prices is much more tenuous vs. popular response to military procurement budgets.
I feel sanctions are often a tool that once implemented are easy to maintain, as seen with sanctions against Iran, for example. Or Cuba. People get used to not doing business rather fast, after the initial shock wears off. Rarely do businesses in the country imposing the sanction clamor for relaxing them.
The down side is that it goes the other way as well, where the sanctioned country learns how to do without, or to make the needed spare parts itself. But as we are seeing, sometimes the hardest hitting sanctions are those which hit at the commercial level: losing McDonalds was reportedly the most tangible effect, as it’s lost convenience. People will remember and romanticize what fast food was like before the Z.
In the end, sanctions work best when the sanctioning side can master the logistics, and the other cannot. And from what I have seen of Russia, logistics was never their strong point.
