Special Operation and Peace

The latest addition to our household has been named Zelensky. 

There have been some reportedly wobbly murmurings amongst US officials to the effect that the President of Ukraine needs to find himself an 'endgame'. 

Yet the only person in clear need of fashioning one of these right now is Vladimir Putin. 

For Zelensky the way this ends has to be crystal clear — with every Russian occupier departing Ukraine or contributing to its sunflower crop. 

For this is perhaps one of the most fundamental prescriptions for this stage of any conflict, modern or otherwise. A lasting peace follows when one side admits moral responsibility for what has occurred and agrees to the strict terms of the new security arrangements. This is what Germany and Japan did after WWII. 

However, back in 1918 Germany had had moral responsibility (accompanied by onerous terms) somewhat pinned on it and never really accepted the situation. This was less peace than uneasy truce. 

The underlying conditions for further conflict remained. This is what now has to be avoided in Central Europe. 

An absence of complete clarity is always dangerous. The failure of the GOP to accept moral responsibility for the Trump debacle and the attack on Congress on January 6th last year is disgraceful and has left a festering wound within American democracy. 

These observations come with a particular dose of pique for me as on March 12, 2018 I signed a peace accord with a neighbour who had accused me of an assault when I was not even in the country. 

I somehow forgot the directive to extract at the very least a formal acknowledgement of culpability, if only via a sincere apology. Under the circumstances any decent human being would have offered one, yet there aren't many decent human beings who would sit in front of a police officer dictating a statement full of lies and then sign it.

My only excuse is an (at the time) unfamiliarity with the workings of the local legal system, an assumption that the peace accord and its associated unambiguous court orders would put an end to any conflict and that the neighbour had probably made what might be characterised as a one-off, gross miscalculation. 

I did not learn until October 2020 about the nature of her apparent motive for filing false testimony: we had, her lawyer announced magisterially at the MP, been playing a popular reggaeton track over and over for an entire day and the lyrics were injurious to her client, who thus felt compelled to seek immediate revenge. 

This explanation is as moronic as it is untrue, and surely still not much of an excuse for breaking the law. But she knew that her husband had earlier deployed a similar psy-ops tactic of broadcasting (and singing) a tune by Don Williams that he must have imagined would cause distress on our side of the wall — and not just for a single day — and that there could be an advantage of lodging the allegation first. 

As far as I can tell the more likely rationale for her unprovoked legal strike was our refusal of a sum of money that had been dangled under our noses by a public official in Antigua. If we had taken the bung we would have dirtied our own hands in a situation where our neighbours' hands were already decidedly mucky. 

In the peace accord signed that day in court she not only committed to maintaining relations grounded in 'mutual respect', she formally committed to ensuring that her husband, her family and her household staff were informed of the agreement and would abide by it. 

Yet it became abundantly clear within a matter of days after the audiencia that she had no intention of doing any of that and in fact the aggressions significantly escalated thereafter and from additional quarters. 

The behaviour of her husband alone between March 2018 and October 2020 would surely place her in a clear state of disobedience of the original court order. 

So, I went looking for an endgame based on forgiveness and forgot the fundamentals. There can be no durable peace without accountability — plus a set of procedures which significantly disincentivise the breaking of any truce. 

Putin thinks his possession of nukes frees him from the need to ever abase himself in front of a set of foes, actual and potential, that he clearly has little respect for. 

They certainly make the quest for a lasting peace more convoluted, yet the West cannot lose sight of the endgame now or the 'special operation' will spin out into multiple threats (as our own defence against 'invasion' did) and will never cool down to the point of bearability. 

"Strong Man"

To be a "Strong Man" is to be a weak man striking a pose. Gaddafi seemed to understand this, much good it did him, along with many other notable occupants of the Hall of Infamy. 

Putin is said to be much afraid of a tumultuous third act like the erstwhile Libyan leader's, but has nevertheless fallen into another trap that always seems to sucker the weak-strong man, and which makes the undesired outcome that much more likely — anticipating a conspicuous weakness in his self-selected foes that bolsters his own delusion of relative strength beyond the point at which the instinct of self-preservation can be of much use. 

Piskaryovskoye

2 years, 4 months, 2 weeks and 5 days — the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-44 — claimed the lives of around 800,000 of the city's encircled inhabitants. 

When it was finally lifted on January 27, 1944 the Axis forces were driven back having themselves suffered losses in excess of 500,000. 

My visit to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in 1984 and shortly afterwards to the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery with its vast array of mass graves just outside the city opened my young eyes to the scale of the suffering and devastation in this corner of WWII. It was a part of fairly recent history that I was then only vaguely up to speed with. 

That anything even remotely resembling this horror could be repeating itself now in Ukraine (a land which lost 3m to the Stalin-induced famine of the 30s and a further 8m to the subsequent war) is almost unfathomable, all the more so perhaps as Putin is a little beast from St Petersburg. 

People in Mariupol are said to be collecting snow for drinking water today. 

The suffering in this part of Europe apparently comes in cycles, each new one underpinned by, justified by, the previous. 

Meaning Bombs

I suppose us Europeans, perhaps more than anyone at this stage, understand why this war is different — one that cannot simply be ‘stopped’ or negotiated out of existence, one that we now all have to live with in a non-discretionary manner until all of its uncontainable consequences have manifested themselves. 

On our continent the conquest or attempted conquest of one state by another has tended to have geopolitical ramifications which extend for a very long time, centuries even. 

1066: The Norman Conquest of England might have appeared done and dusted in months, but the aftershocks persisted for at least 400 years until the conclusion of the Hundred Years War. And all that. 

From the outset this war in Ukraine has been in a dialogue with history, difficult history. Putin, one might say, has been trying to shout down, overrule history; mansplain at it. 

Europeans now understand that historical lines have been crossed. While the conflict as it stands is more plainly existential for Ukraine, the loom of approaching DARKNESS is being felt continent-wide (and the global economic repercussions unavoidable and, largely unpredictable). 

And so, while the West in the wider sense perceives a direct challenge to itself and the order that has prevailed, more or less, since 1945, for many Russians it is instead necessary to comprehend this as a civil war, with the near necessary fratricidal brutality that entails; its innocent victims mere traitors. 

We thus have two distinct, yet equally authentic ways for this to escalate further. 

Firstly, via the inclusion of additional national combatants and participants in the historical shouting match, yet also via an insane internecine conflict which back-contaminates large swathes of the former USSR. 

Think not that the army or the oligarchs might displace Putin, but that part of the army and some of the wealthy and powerful will try to act, and then remember all those nukes awaiting some sort of factional control. 

The missiles currently in the sky carry a payload of extra meaning. Perhaps Putin always wanted it to be this way, but after that first weekend when the immediate military and political goals were nixed, the need for this to be something more than Russia's private calamity became paramount. 

And for that reason he will surely continue to bomb hospitals, shoot his thermobarbaric weapons and unplug the nuclear reactor cooling systems, for he desperately needs a reaction from us, a retrospective meaning bomb that makes everyone understand why this is at once a global and civil catastrophe and not just his own private misadventure. Something he can duly present to history, in his shouty way, as defensive. 

And maybe he is almost certain to get it now — for as I say, this war is different, not just an ugly media spectacle where passive (albeit emotive) consumption or humanitarian angst are the only ways to interact with it, because it has an expansionary logic of its own. And we have already arrived at the days when the opportunity costs of mere observation have to be counted by the hour.

Cunning Plans

If Putin's fatal flaw is not letting all the relevant people know what he plans on doing in a timely manner, NATO's would appear to be precisely the reverse. 

This rather elaborate procedure involving Poland sending planes to Germany so that the USA can deploy them against the Russians in Ukraine is really not that much more sophisticated in terms of overall sneakiness than Trump's idea of putting the Chinese flag on American bombers. 

And both of those strategems will tend to be notably less effective as ways of containing the lunatic the more everyone talks about them in advance.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

"I need ammunition, not a ride". 

I suppose those acclaimed, defiant words of Ukrainian president Zelensky already appear on bumper stickers on sale in small rural gas stations in Texas. I stopped at a couple on my way back from viewing The Great American Eclipse in Tennessee in late August 2107. 

The whole "Don't Mess with Texas" vibe is practically a movie genre of its own and it permeates the perpetually-stalled Leatherface horror franchise, really a collection of orphaned stand-alones, rather like its iconic killer here. 

Netflix's latest edition is really a motley collection of characters and familiar off-the-shelf-parts (redneck cops, Confederate battle flag, the gas station shop etc) all wrapped around one key scene which, I suppose, gives the film its reason to exist — the gory carving up of a load of millennial influencers on a bus which begins with them all whipping out their phones to live feed their own slaughter. Mild drollery followed by full on carnage, yet still not quite remarkable enough to justify all the rest of the padding, which includes a half-hearted effort to bring back the survivor from the 1974 original. (More Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) than Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween (2018)). 

And once again we see the determination of producers to adopt a point of view carefully calibrated to fully alienate neither the city mice nor their country cousins. 

Shame not frustrated greed could end this...

If there is to be an internal threat to Putin in the months and years to come, my own suspicion is that it will come not from the (relatively) impoverished oligarchs or even the Moscow masses, but from those that have shared his feverish nationalist dream of a 'greater' Russia. 

There will be many in that camp who are already feeling an element of shame — not for the mass murder that Putin has unleashed against a territory and people they insist should be returned to the mother — but for the relative weakness in Russian might that has been exposed in the conduct of this war. 

Along with that, considerable frustration that the likes of Moldova and Georgia are already on course to join the EU along with a still unyielding Ukraine. Their dream of completeness is being ruined, in some cases before the tanks can roll — and in a manner that promises to be lasting. 

Hitler seized most of the continent and then fought to the bitter end as it was prized from his grip, piece by bloody piece. Putin's putative restoration of empire is apparently already stalling not far from the vestibule. 

It's one thing to model oneself on the great emperors and conquerors of the past — Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Alexander III — but then you have to avoid botching your much-publicised debut on the subjugation stage. 

The oligarchs have probably decided on a policy of wait and see. Time is not on Vlad's side whatever happens. The state will be bankrupt long before its wealthiest citizens, regardless of the sanctions now imposed. 

The nationalists will be fuming. Putin is now in dire need of a bone to toss them. 

I tweeted the other day that Vladimir Putin is currently more likely to be remembered as the 'new' Kaiser Bill (another 'late bloomer') than the new Adolf. 

Some handy Russian proverbs...

Which may or may not be relevant to current circumstances. 

— It is better to have a hundred friends than a hundred rubles 

(Currently approx. six quetzales.) 

— He who doesn’t take risks doesn’t drink champagne 

(One for the oligarchs around you-know-who.)

— If you do something in a hurry, you will make people laugh at you 

— When one has power, there is no need for intelligence

— It’s nice to visit, but it’s better to be home

— If you’re scared of wolves, don’t go in the woods 

(One for Vlad next time he compulsively watches his vid of the sodomisation and death of Gaddafi.) 

— The first pancake is (always) lumpy

(One for yesterday's circumstances perhaps, but the Ruskies do seem to be in need of a workable Plan B.) 

— No point throwing punches after a fight

— Trust, but verify.

Not such a punt after all?

Guatemala's decision to elect a former comedian who had once acted the role of an unlikely yet successful Presidential candidate is looking less flawed — in principle — than it ever has done.

But then...

One damned thing after another...

 

Yes...altered photo.

History is one damned thing after another...someone once said. Might have been Arnold Toynbee, but there are alternative candidates.

The discipline is prone to relativism of this sort because its emphases appear to be entirely subjective, superficially at least. 

Yet if we look at the biological world some of those damn things are clearly more important than others, leading to dramatic, systemic change, be they meteors from outer space or tiny, random mutations. (The former demonstrating their impact in something more like what we call real time.) 

We've possibly reached a critical whataboutery juncture in the war in Ukraine. You may have noticed some of its output already. What about Yemen, Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria and so on. 

There are already echoes of what I will from now on always refer to as the Whoopi Fallacy — the notion that as a fight between white people it is of necessity less historically important than white people apprently think it is. 

History's apparent subjectivity has made it a key raw material in our culture wars. Much of the discipline these days involves the recovery of 'narratives' that have been forgotten or excluded and that is indeed important work, but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that there is a wider universal historical landscape with genuine contours. 

And sure, one can focus elsewhere — on the anthills — for that is the free choice all of us westerners have, but one runs the risk of not spotting the approach of the particularly ravenous lump of history coming to take a bite out of us. 

Sometimes the act of viewing the present through fashionable historical goggles creates distortions of perspective that can feed into burgeoning conflicts. Post 9-11 the so-called War on Terror has been one damned small incident after another, but in the minds of many of the participants, something vastly more significant in the history of the world. 

Current events in Ukraine might be blamed on the delusions and destructive inclinations of one man — which is why the Adolf analogies are filed — but they also have a backstory in westerners perhaps not recognising the BIG history lying camouflaged there in the heart of Europe, like a sniper in the long grass. 

We'd grown accustomed to look for our phantasms elsewhere, often enough in that wildest kind of projected history, the imagined future — cyberwars, naval stand-offs in the South China Sea, clashes of civilisations. 

And then in walks an old warrior, strangely both familiar and unfamiliar — rather like The Return of Martin Guerre — and we are all a bit flummoxed.

* One can easily demonstrate the difference between short and long term 'historical' perspectives in the present by asking the question “Which has been the stand-out atrocious tactical decision of the past week — sending an army full of incompetent, undermotivated fools into Ukraine or bringing on Kepa for the penalties?”

There is also of course, this perspective...

"Full Tonto"

I have been wrong about how far Putin was prepared to go. 

So now I am considering that I may have to avoid being wrong in the future about how far he may be prepared to go. 

History provides us with very few useful examples of conquerors that recognised the stop signals. Maybe Julius Caesar after his visits to Britain, but then he went home and started crossing other lines domestically. 

Putin needs Ukraine to surrender in order to begin to stabilise his situation at home and abroad. If they don't comply in the short-term he may be drawn into a bigger test of resolve, his and the NATO nations, plus countries like Sweden and Finland who may now be inclined to sign up for the longer term response. 

It may seem absurd and profoundly premature to call the start of WWIII, but something has definitely ended — the European security order post-1945. (If the Spanish Civil war was the beta test for WWII, could this be an  long overdue V2.0?) 

Ukraine is not Syria or Afghanistan. Putin has demonstrated that it is a territory of historical strategic importance to Russia yet in doing so has surely sprung open a greater significance to the whole continent. 

The Russian leader made a clear threat to use nuclear weapons against interfering third parties. That changes everything, forever. 

Russia's pariah status will be lasting and more profound than no more Grand Prix, UEFA finals, Eurovision etc. 

And we should be prepared for things to get markedly worse. 

Europe has a Russian gas dependency. Turn off the pipeline and supplies would run dry in six weeks, but if they get a move on now they can reduce the risk significantly and this is one area where Atlantic support remains extremely important. 

The key institutions representing 'the West' have been caught out. I'd maintain that there were significant collective — institutional — failures that made this outcome more likely, but that is certainly not an excuse for Putin's actions this month. 

We can argue about his motivations: the threat posed by an advancing alliance, the threat to his ambition of imitating Peter the Great and re-establishing 'Greater Russia', but underneath it all the real threat has always been transparent liberal democracy and human rights. 

A neutral Ukraine would have been a decent enough idea before, but not any more, especially if Zelensky now signs up for that with a gun against his head.  

Boris says the only acceptable result is for Putin's adventure to end in failure. But there are degrees of failure available here and one could argue that a superficially wounded Putin would present the greatest danger of all. 

Meanwhile, the task ahead for Ukraine is recorded in the history books from the times when these lands were invaded by French and Germans. Avoid final defeat, retreat from or at least dodge around an advancing superior force, play for time and the seasons, wear them down until they lose track of their objectives and their motivation for conquest sags. 

#WeStandWithUkraine

Foolish Things

Oddly out-dated in certain ways as it took place before the Trump presidency, John Mearsheimer's lecture nevertheless serves as a superior backgrounder on some of the deeper causes of the current crisis in Ukraine...

A handful of observations for those that take the time to watch this. 

Putin is not one of those autocrats who has arisen from within a robust democratic tradition and trampled on it. Catherine the Great aside, Russia has always been run by one man and has forever regarded our western liberal values with at least a degree of suspicion. 

Since the end of the Cold War the USA has, as Mearsheimer points out, persisted in the belief that elected politicians will always be pro-American, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary. 

Of course the history of countries like Guatemala (and possibly also Chile) shows that in the fairly recent past the USA had few qualms about over-throwing legitimate democratic regimes. As the USSR started to founder, this policy evolved into support for 'voting', which meant either genuine democracy or an appearance of it, until the self-serving fantasy of the benign hegemon was fully formed. 

There can be no doubt that the US is "pivoting" towards eastern Asia and after Brexit the UK appears to want to come along for the ride. This is one reason that Macron, in the aftermath of AUKUS, has been so obviously desperate to appear useful during this current crisis, and there can be no doubt that Russia is also feeling the early symptoms of declining relevance. And acting on them. 

And yet I think Mearsheimer exaggerates the extent of continental Europe's potential decline in strategic importance to the US, for there are meaningful intellectual and cultural resources at stake there in 'the West' and during the Q&A he seems remarkably optimistic about America's own ability to shake off the rise of right wing extremism. 

Some of the institutions such as NATO (and perhaps also the EU) may soon appear even less fit for purpose, but integration is here to stay. The ultimate end product of this crisis will surely be a realisation amongst continental Europeans that they can no longer quite so easily lean on the Americans for their defence needs. 

Mearsheimer holds that Putin has been acting rationally and to some extent predictably. We drove our un-Russian values and our integrated institutions right up to his border and then acted surprised when he responded in a way that suggested the Ukraine sat within Russia's zone of vital strategic interests. 

As I have stated before, the correct and somewhat obvious alternative approach would have been to designate Ukraine as a neutral buffer zone as Austria was during the Cold War. 

Mearsheimer thinks that a lack of a proper peer competitor since the collapse of the USSR has led the US to "do foolish things" on the foreign policy front — the "reverse Midas touch" he repeatedly refers to in the video, which he says afflicts both Democrats and Republicans. 

One could question whether confrontation with China is really necessary or whether the US has subconsciously understood that it needs a proper peer competitor to force itself to think more strategically again and has followed this instinct towards the rising sun. 

The conventional foreign policy view is that we are now all 21st century agents and the old ways of balance of power politics are no longer relevant, so whatever happens next in Ukraine could serve as a very striking wake up call as the West has been dabbling in an area that it now cares about a lot less than the Russians and has ended up with a losing hand at the moment of confrontation — because the economic stick is demonstrably inadequate and Putin likely to act with the greater resolve. 

I believe the Russian President will continue to encroach gradually and in reliably ambiguous ways unless a response from the other side provokes him into something altogether more brutal. 

This was in part the meaning of the hairdryer session his spy chief was on the end of yesterday, the unfortunate squirming official having suggested all too un-ambiguously that the objective was to swallow the Donbas whole into the Russian Federation. 

Esos deditos...

Over six years ago Mearsheimer could see that Putin would attempt to wreck Ukraine rather than let it be swallowed by an advancing West. In doing this he is skirting the outer limits of a strategy which could wreck Russia too. 

Perhaps there are those on 'our' side who have considered ways of prodding him that direction — "Full Tonto" — hoping that the rational, well-considered strategy will unravel in the heat of the moment leaving the Kremlin to do some foolish things too, as Vlad discovers his inner Mr Hyde. 

F1-75

Back in 1999-2001 I had the privilege (and the sheer fun) of being responsible for the digital media presence of the Ferrari Formula One team, encompassing the Schumacher broken leg season which almost resulted in Eddy Irvine pipping the German to the Scuderia's first drivers' championship since Jody Scheckter in '79. 

There was as yet nothing like the social media of today, so this online activity and associated offline support was centred on what was then a sophisticated web platform funded by key sponsor Shell International. 

The Internet Archive's Way Back Machine still hosts it in fragmentary and largely textual form, but the real thing was packed with desirable media. 

The annual launch was a major event for the tifosi. Every year we managed the website from 1995 my colleague Simon and then I would receive an email from the patrons of a small bar in Maranello — Ferrari's hometown — expressing their thanks. Not just congratulations, gratitude. 

This year Ferrari has revealed a car adapted to the significant shift in technical regulations that carries the designation — the F1-75 — which commemorates the 75th anniversary of Ferrari's first production car, though it is their 68th in the sport. Relative to the rest of the field it is unconventional, and it is gorgeous. 

I can't remember the last time I concluded that a race-car was a thing of undeniable beauty. I believe it was one of Mika Häkkinen's McLarens during my tenure at his key rivals. 

But this single-seater is cinematic. 

Ferrari has been a little off the pace on the racetrack for the past couple of years. I guess they may not even care if the F1-75 runs like a Reliant Robin at the first GP of the new season in Bahrain next month.

 

The uniqueness of Scuderia Ferrari is twofold. Firstly it is essentially the only Formula One team that is indispensable to the sport. Secondly it is a team that is supported in Italy primarily, but also elsewhere, no matter which pair of drivers are seated in the cars. 

The 2022 Merc, reverting to the more familiar and less woke silver livery, and the green Aston Martin are also easy on the eye, but the F1-75 is on another level entirely. 

I have a little model of the car in which Schumi went straight on at Stowe corner on lap one at Silverstone in 1999 after a loss of pressure in the F399's rear braking circuit.  It's not so lovely.IAt the time i was seated just behind the massed ranks of the bussed in Jordan VIPs and they all cheered the shunt, but clearly felt a bit sheepish almost immediately afterwards when its seriousness became apparent. 

Scotland's David Coulthard — V refers to him as 'necky', though in that characteristic he was later surpassed by Alonso — won the race that day in one of these markedly jorobado vehicles. 

There are Macbooks I considered nifty twenty years ago that now look like bricks. But every decade or so F1 seems to produce an archetypal implementation for the ages.  

F312B (1970)

Fair Play Mate

 

How was your Friday?

Along with hundreds of thousands of others I found myself devoting a considerable part of mine to the BigJet TV live stream from Heathrow in the midst of Storm Eunice. 

However entertaining Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood have been during the Half Pipe and the Big Air, surely the Beeb might find room for Jerry Dyer on the team? 

Go on...drop it, drop it....

I can't speak for everyone, but in my case at least, the Winter Olympics seem to have fostered a taste for live action with premium peril.

Maybe the jetwatchers have a gnarly argot too? 

Kind of fortunate none of those jets executed a backside pretzel followed by a face plant.

Open Position

The world looks and feels different according to how much one has at stake. 

In my line of work this can lead to unhealthy perceptual biases. One can try to train oneself out of them, but they linger, and there isn't really much one can do about that. 

Maybe a month ago Vladimir Putin might have eased up on amassing his forces at various points around Ukraine if some sort of strongish commitment to permanently postpone that nation's eligibility to join NATO had been made. But the western alliance played an odd version of hardball and softball at the same time and that surely tempted Vlad to go all in. 

He now has the kind of substantial open position that I recognise. He will know what he could potentially gain but he will also have a stop position behind him, and this will not be all the way back to the 2021 status quo and the Minsk Accords. We have surely gone beyond the point where he will simply recall half the Russian army to its barracks.

What might Putin's 'stop' be? He knows this is an important year in the US electoral cycle so making Biden look weak and ineffectual will be a must.* Exposing some serious faultlines in western unity, a nice to have. 

I now believe that he will not stand down before the independent status of the breakaway zones like the Donetsk People's Republic has been firmed up. Some permanent new lines on the map. 

He may not move directly on Kiev, at least not immediately. The brigades in Belarus are multifunctional, allowing him to split the Ukranian army's attention, implicitly threaten NATO members along the Baltic and keep the idiot in charge of that other ex-Soviet neighbour in line. 

When Putin was just two years old the US sponsored a coup here in Guatemala which removed a legitimate democratically-elected government. Two years later the USSR sent tanks into Budapest. This was the world the Russian President grew up in and which he appears reluctant to consign to the history books. Being the last man stuck in that milieu possibly comes with some advantages. 

World leaders would appear to be playing a game of 3D chess where not all the key players are moving their pieces on the same levels of the board. 

Putin, for better or worse, has access to the most multi-dimensional perspective, encompassing the present strategic realities, history, myth, economic channels, comfy retirement, ethnic demarcations and so on. 

He knows that whilst westerners will don their retro WWII or Cold War specs at a moment's notice, in general they are now more comfortable arguing over pronouns and more localised controversies than actually responding to the global threats to their more essential interests in the manner of their grandparents. 

On a slightly, but not entirely separate note. I am no trained economist, but when the inflation first started to bite in the early part of last year even I could see clearly that it wasn't going to be 'transitory'. So when I heard the Fed making all those reassurances I concluded that either they are lying or they are incompetent. 

However, the mendacity option has a small caveat. Back in June 2021 we had emerged from the winter surge of covid in the north, but Delta was threatening and the central bankers were all probably aware that it might be too soon to tighten up fiscally. In the US the Fed kept up with the bond purchases and stimulating the economy, presumably in the hope that they'd have a chance to dampen inflation in 2022 when the covid threat had eased. 

In effect they had been staring at the same charts for so long and gambled that the pandemic would relent favourably rather than being topped off by a rapidly-escalating geopolitical predicament. 

Along came Omicron which created a small dent in the recovery. It also demonstrated that 'soaring' inflation really had to be a supply-side issue. And this raises the question — which again, even I could see coming — of whether hiking interest rates is really going to help all that much. Down here in Latin America, it hasn't. 

Back to Putin. He's been listening to Biden saying that the Americans won't respond militarily to any invasion of Ukraine, but instead come at Vlad and gang all guns blazing economically, and he must have had indulged in a chuckle or two. 

High levels of inflation and indebtedness (and wobbly corporate asset markets) mean that this could be precisely the wrong moment to pull a few levers to see what happens. 

* A subset of British analysts seem to think Putin can possibly achieve this by doing nothing — making POTUS cry wolf multiple times and then mock him when nothing actually happens. 

This would be a variant of something I long ago suspected the CIA were doing in the early days of the mainstream Web and USENET: seeding the digital media with stories that sounded like obvious conspiracy bunk in order to camouflage the outrageous stuff that was really happening in parallel areas.  

By inciting Biden to constantly declare the imminence of his invasion, Vlad could be hoping to make it harder for the West and its media to respond as vehemently and coherently as they might when it finally does occur. 

Rolling Stones

The Winter Olympics, aka Mil Maneras de Morir, is an ever more elaborate collection of ways for athletes to potentially do themselves serious physical harm combining gravity and ice...and Curling. 

We found ourselves with a small interlude of nothing else to watch than the latter sport last night — which sometimes feels like a real life reenactment of an electronic game, "except, more boring", adds V — right after the Men's Freeski Slopestyle final, and this perhaps encouraged us to contemplate the hidden perils that might lurk within the discipline. 

The best we could come up with involved a snapped broomstick.

A common enough hazard here in Guatemala at least. 

The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman

This ended up being a bit like a philosophical true crime docuseries exploring some of the greyer areas of our notions of free will. 

As ever with this sort of thing, I wasn't entirely sure how deliberately the key questions were being asked by the film-makers. And whether some of the stuff which had been rather obviously left out, had also been omitted in a calculated manner. 

Two extended cases of puppeteering by a man called Robert Hendy-Freeguard are detailed, in two distinct timelines, one in the early nineties and the other a couple of decades later in 2011-13. 

In the first a crime is very definitely committed and then somewhat less definitely so, and the open-endedness is even more conspicuous in the second. 

How much psychological coercion is required for the law to be broken? 

I think most of us will watch this and understand the ethical lines that were crossed, but will also understand why it is hard for the legal system to pinpoint exactly when a person has been deprived of liberty without obvious physical constraints. This conundrum has after all lain at the heart of our British notions of freedom ever since Hobbes penned Leviathan. 

The really cunning part of Freeguard's plan here was that he somehow prevented his victims from appreciating how they had been co-opted into acting as his accomplices by persuading them that they were accomplices in some other grand, fabricated conspiracy. Yet were they after all, accomplices?

I doubt I am alone in thinking that of all the complex psychologies on display here, it was this man's that became the most fascinating and ultimately entertaining across the three episodes. 

I have come across a handful of conmen over the course of my life and there has always been something almost coarsely obvious about them. 

Many of their sort seem to acquire followers who appear to be knowingly along for the ride, in effect conning the conner into believing they've been conned. 

The first I came across was a man who went by the name of Perry Shah who wined and dined my parents in Marbella in the early 80s, claiming to be a close descendent of the King of Afghanistan. From day one my father confided to me that this would lead inevitably to a request for money in a hurry once we had returned to London. Which, of course, it did. 

I have also come across a related species  — the snake oil salesmen — who are perhaps distinguished by their tendency to end up at least partially self-bamboozled by the fantasy world they build around themselves. 

Well below the threshold for legal intervention in our modern commercial world are those who would market a product that only really exists in fully-completed, functional form inside their own heads. One might posit that our global economy has come to depend on them. 

Winter Olympics, week one...

Seven days into Beijing 2022 and there are questions...

Where are all the medal ceremonies?

Why are the Aussies so good at snowboarding?

Why can't the BBC — given their carefree utilisation of apparently non-expert presenters and commentators elsewhere (Steve Cram on the curling...) re-deploy Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood to their other marquee sporting properties, such as Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final and the snooker? Please...

Why does Biden think it important mention that the Russians might invade Ukraine even during the Olympics? Like, the tanks could roll, even on Valentine's Day...

Anyway, no matter how hard the BBC have tried to make their presenters look like lost and lonely avatars in Second Life, the Chinese have really taken it to the next level when it comes to making the real look virtual...

The big chutzpair: Norwegian gold medallist completes final run holding national flag.

How Ruud

The Decrepit Fox

I have a theory — which President Biden is doing his best to disprove — that the older one is the less likely one is to assume that any dispute between Russia and Ukraine is something the rest of us ought to be forcibly sticking our noses into. 

To me, with my background in visits to the USSR before the fall of the wall and possibly even more relevantly, of study (in a high alcove of the CU Library) of the expansion of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century, this looks much more like a complicated civil war than any straightforward clash of east-west worldviews. On some levels a bit England-Scotlandy.

Perhaps Biden is old enough to have some version of those never-updated 1930s goggles on. 

Yet during the Cold War everyone seemed happy to agree the neutrality of Austria, a nation that arguably was more naturally aligned westwards. Why not repeat the trick? 

As opposed to say, repeating Khrushchev's Cuban gambit. 

And why not accede to Putin's most basic demand — never to offer Ukraine membership of the competing club. Does NATO really want to assume that level of premium risk anyway? 

There are, I suppose, some strategic considerations given the present state of global geopolitics. John Lewis Gaddis, a recognised authority on such matters, has a handful of historical strategic moments for us to usefully ponder here. 

For example, he flags up the relatively advanced age of Pericles on the eve of the Peloponnesian War as a key factor in his apparent intransigence — or stubbornness. 

The Athenian leader took a number of steps which alarmed the Spartans, who made their revocation a key condition for avoiding war. 

Right to the end the Spartans tried to continue the jaw jaw, but in the end Pericles refused to even receive their emissaries. Gaddis sees this as the end product of the flexible younger Pericles — a fox — maturing into a hedgehog incapable of relenting. 

"Pericles at first steered with flows — a strategy of persuasion. When not all were persuaded, though, he began steering against flows — a strategy of confrontation." (On Grand Strategy.)  

In 431 the Spartans invaded and two years later Pericles was dead of plague, leaving his fellow Athenians to the ignominy of defeat. 

Gaddis draws parallels between the uncompromising Megarian Decree issued by Pericles with the US response to the invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950. Truman understood this as a formal test of American resolve, one which dismantled the existing walls separating vital from peripheral interests. 

"The heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection. Decades devoid of reflection may follow." (On Grand Strategy) 

And Korea was undoubtedly on the path to Vietnam. 

Biden's own line in the sand appears to have been strong enough to provoke the Bear, but surely not strong enough to make any difference to the fate of Ukraine should Putin press ahead. 

As Boris suggests...

Nostalgia Fest #1

This marks the start of an occasional series on the musical compositions that today deliver for me the most combustive thwaaaack of nostalgia. 

Sometimes I may explain the urge to pine, but I won't feel obliged to. They might not be the greatest pieces of music ever composed, but they surely speak for themselves. 

I recall that in the undergrad circles within which I mixed, we were generally rather sniffy about Rachmaninov.

Rack-jack-me-off we use to call him. 

Liking anything quite so 'Romantic' was like heading off to the National Gallery and making a b-line for the room with all the Renoirs.

And yet my best friend at Cambridge had an old vinyl copy of this LP and I soon had a CD (and cassette) of the same. 

Whatever we thought of the music it was the man behind the keys that drew us in. 

And in the light of everything that has happened since, including the passing of my friend, I'd be hard pressed to name a single record of greater significance in my life.  

I can now say that I later had the privilege of being present at two live recitals given by Sviatolslav Richter, both at the RFH. On each occasion he played from within a shimmery pool of shadows, the only strong light on the score in front of him, which he leaned towards as if encountering for the first time. 

I've witnessed a lot of great great musicians perform on that same stage — not just classical, the likes of Stan Getz and Miles Davis as well —  and Richter has been the only one to read the music as he plays. Naked showmanship? Perhaps. The resulting mood of intimacy within such a grand auditorium is what has stuck in the memory. 

On both occasions it was also the pieces he threw himself at during the encores that exhilarated beyond earlier expectation. 

On the first occasion I was with my much missed friend, then on the second I was with V when Richter was doing the rounds for the last time just a few years from his death in August '97. His fingers must have been getting a little stiff already, for his bravura rendition of one of Bartok's bagatelles seemed full of small but noticeable errors and yet was almost indescribably thrilling nonetheless. 

The summer after my friend was killed I visited his wife and (very) small child in the idyllic Hampshire village they had shared. There was a degree of awkwardness surrounding the obvious fact, which she bravely recognised, that the contents of the house (such as the piano and my friendship with her late husband) had deeper roots in his life than she did. She waved towards a pile of LPs. This one was on top. 

The 355 (2022)

This espionage 'thriller' is so utterly formulaic it verges on parody. Though unaccompanied by any underlying sense of humour. 

Paris, France; London, England; Shanghai, China...

Lupita Nyong'go is the best of the international spy quintet here. I thought Chastain was also going to be good in a kick-ass role, but then she went to Morocco dressed like one of those ludicrous Americans one sees around here suitably atired for a rowing regatta on the African savannah. 

Before leaving Paris Penelope Cruz (no longer encumbered by her wobbly attempt at a Colombian accent) clearly had time to stop on the Rue Saint-Honoré to refresh her wardrobe. She was handed the most 'I never signed up for this' part, and visibly struggles with it, though in fairness has been almost no assistance by the screenplay. 

There's a predictability to almost every scene once the plot gets rolling, at least until the final act which first acquires an uncomfortably dark and nasty edge and then fizzles out rather bizarrely. 

It all kicks off with a drug deal that isn't a drug deal, right outside Bogotá, which still goes wrong, of course times two, and then we are off to a series of gratuitous proper city locations as our (initially) four female agency employees team up on an off-the-books chase after a 'drive' that can do every imaginable nasty thing to all of our connected stuff. 

They are of course forced to go 'rogue', simultaneously tasked with saving the world and clearing their own names. I then started counting the number of times during the Craig years that 007 lost or surrendered his official status. In spy movies this is becoming a bit 'hand me your gun and badge'.

The title is derived from Agent 355, the codename of a female spy for the Patriots during the American Revolution. We learn this basically irrelevant piece of information just before the end credits roll. 

How it started...

 

As for how it's going...Spotify's strategy of becoming the Netflix of audio has hit a few podholes.  

(PS: Back in the late nineties we sold our company to a pair of individuals, one of whom has come to be known as The Podfather.)