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I just paid $9.99 for a carton of 18 eggs. Will prices ever drop? | Opinion Sacramento Bee
Shortly after a prop gun Alec Baldwin was holding fired a bullet that killed a cinematographer and wounded a director on the set of the movie “Rust,” in October 2021, he told the police in New Mexico that he’d be willing to do whatever they requested, including sitting for an interview at the station.
In an interrogation room later that afternoon, detectives began by informing Baldwin of his rights: He had the right to remain silent. Anything he said could be used against him in court. He was free to consult with an attorney; if he could not afford an attorney, one would be appointed for him. And he could stop the interrogation at any point he wished.
“My only question is, am I being charged with something?” Baldwin asked.
Not at all, the police said. Reading his rights, one detective told him, was “just a formality.”
And so, without his attorney present, while the police recorded him, Baldwin talked. And talked. And talked. At that point, Baldwin knew only that the film’s director, Joel Souza, and its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, had been injured; detectives would inform him at the end of the interrogation that Hutchins had died. Still, for about an hour, Baldwin not only answered detectives’ many questions about the shooting but also offered his own theories about the incident and suggested the next steps the police might pursue in their investigation.
To people unfamiliar with the American criminal justice system, Baldwin’s decision sounds reasonable: Something terrible happened, and he wanted to help. But defense lawyers I talked to said Baldwin’s case should serve as a reminder that if you are involved in a serious incident, it’s best not talk to the police unless you have an attorney present.
Prosectors in New Mexico announced last week that they planned to charge Baldwin and Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer, who is responsible for weapons on a movie set, with involuntary manslaughter in Hutchins’s death. They argue that Baldwin had a responsibility to check that the gun he was holding was safe. The prosecutor’s argument has shocked many in the film industry who say that it is the crew’s responsibility, not an actor’s, to ensure that weapons are safe.
In that first police interview, Baldwin told interrogators that Gutierrez-Reed handed him the gun and assured him it was safe: “She said, ‘Do you want to check?’ — and I didn’t want to insult her, we never had a problem. I said, ‘I’m good.’”
Prosecutors have yet to file charges, so it is not clear what evidence they would use against Baldwin or what their legal arguments will be — but given that they’ve said Baldwin violated his legal responsibility to use the gun safely, his admission that he never checked the gun may itself incriminate him.
Also, in a second conversation with the police a week later, Baldwin said it was actually Dave Halls, the film’s first assistant director, who handed him the gun while announcing, “cold gun.” (Halls has since agreed to a plea deal with prosectors.)
“It presents a huge problem if he ever wants to actually testify,” Joshua Ritter, a criminal defense lawyer and former prosecutor in Los Angeles, said of Baldwin’s decision to talk to cops as well as the news media. “If he takes the stand to try to explain his side of things to the jury,” he will need to explain any possible contradictions in these prior statements, Ritter said.
The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution allows Americans to refuse to answer questions from law enforcement. Yet despite the ritualistic incantation on the Miranda warning on every TV police procedural, silence is a right that people can find hard to accept. If you’re convinced of your innocence, aren’t you obligated to help the police solve the matter under investigation? Refusing to talk to the police seems like something people do only when they’ve got something to hide.
I have only a passing interest in Baldwin’s guilt or innocence. Several years ago, though, I came upon the work of James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School in Virginia who has become a Johnny Appleseed of Fifth Amendment advocacy. A video of a lecture Duane gave a decade ago on the importance of the Fifth Amendment, “Don’t Talk to the Police,” has been viewed millions of times on YouTube, and Duane has since given his talk dozens of times around the country. The title of his book “You Have the Right to Remain Innocent” sums up the case for silence, since the presumption of innocence and the burden prosecutors bear to prove guilt even when the accused remains silent are the bedrock of American criminal law.
Duane’s work has turned me into a zealot for the right to remain silent — and when I watched Baldwin blithely sign away his rights, I winced. (His talking to several reporters about the case would be a separate concern.)
Of course, we have no idea how Baldwin’s words will play in his case. But his case hints at the danger that innocent people with far less money and power than Baldwin can bring upon themselves by doing what they think is the “right thing” — talking to the police.
“The average American — even if they’re a highly sophisticated college graduate or a law school student — really doesn’t know an awful lot about the many different ways in which even innocent people can regret for the rest of their lives the biggest mistake of their lives, the decision to waive their Fifth Amendment right and agree to talk to the police,” Duane told me.
Looking beyond the Baldwin case, Duane argues that a key danger is that in trying to defend yourself to the police, you may unwittingly admit some wrongdoing. Navigating around such dangers is made all the more difficult because courts have given the police wide leeway to lie to people being interrogated.
“They will lie to you about what crime they are actually investigating,” Duane writes in his book, “whether they regard you as a suspect, whether they plan to prosecute you, what evidence they have against you, whether your answers may help you, whether your statements are off the record, and whether the other witnesses have agreed to talk to them — even about what those witnesses have or have not said.”
When you talk to the police, it’s unlikely that your whole story will be relayed to the jury during a trial. Duane argues that federal and state rules of evidence make it much easier for prosecutors and the police to present damaging statements from an interrogation than for defense attorneys to present exculpatory information from the same interview. Say you vehemently deny shooting a man, explain that you’ve never owned a gun and don’t know how to shoot, and point out that you weren’t anywhere near the scene of the crime — but also admit, in passing, that, “Yeah, sure, I never liked the guy, but who did?” Even if all of that is true, Duane says, the jury might hear only the worst at trial, with an officer testifying, “He admitted to me that he never liked the guy.”
Duane says that while prosecutors can ask an officer who interviewed a defendant anything they want about the statement, hearsay rules can greatly limit what defense attorneys can elicit from the officer on cross-examination about other portions of the same statement.
Do these scenarios sound far-fetched? The data says otherwise. Since 1989, the Innocence Project has used DNA evidence to help exonerate 375 innocent people falsely convicted of crimes. About 29 percent of the exonerated had been convicted in part because of false confessions. Research has found that most false confessions occur after interrogations lasting a half dozen hours or more and that virtually all involve police officers lying to suspects. Many also involve implicit promises of leniency that may give suspects an impression that talking is their only way out.
The Fifth Amendment is no mere formality. It is among the best defenses against government overreach that Americans enjoy. We should guard it vigorously. Anytime you’re asked to talk to the police about an incident you are involved in, there are just four words you need to say: “I want a lawyer.”
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Here’s a question: What does Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida think about Medicare? Medicaid? Social Security? The Affordable Care Act?
DeSantis has built his national political image on well-timed and strategically chosen battles. First it was opposition to Covid mitigation strategies and vaccine mandates. Then it was open hostility toward L.G.B. (and especially) T. Floridians and anything and anyone deemed woke. Now it is an escalation of both moves, aimed at seizing the right flank in the Republican presidential contest, which has already begun to move away from behind-the-scenes jockeying to open competition between rivals.
DeSantis says he wants to ban vaccine mandates and restrict mask rules and make Florida a safe haven from what he calls a “biomedical security state.” He also wants state universities to provide the number and ages of students who have sought or received treatment for gender dysphoria, which critics argue is the governor’s first step toward banning those services. And his Department of Education has already rejected an Advanced Placement pilot course covering African American studies on the grounds that it is a tool for political indoctrination. “As submitted, the course is a vehicle for a political agenda and leaves large, ambiguous gaps that can be filled with additional ideological material, which we will not allow,” Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’s press secretary, said.
By no means is any of this trivial or unimportant. Florida is the third-most-populous state. To launch a war on vaccines or use state power to harass transgender students is to make life difficult, even dangerous, for thousands of people.
And yet there is a reason DeSantis has made these issues, and virtually nothing else, the platform from which he hopes to build national power. By leaning into high-profile battles as a culture warrior par excellence for the most reactionary segment of the American public — last year, to give another example, he picked a fight with the Disney corporation — DeSantis has made himself the hero of conservative elites and the bête noire of liberals and Democrats without so much as mentioning his radical and unpopular views on social insurance and the welfare state.
As a congressman, serving three terms from 2013 to 2018 (when he ran for governor), DeSantis was one of the founders of the House Freedom Caucus, the most hard-line and conservative faction in the House Republican conference, now in the spotlight because of its leadership battle with Speaker Kevin McCarthy and its driving role in using the debt ceiling to force spending cuts on an unsuspecting public.
DeSantis was an especially fierce opponent of so-called entitlements and other forms of federal aid. He helped lead the effort to shut down the government over funding for the Affordable Care Act in 2013 and the same year voted to pass a budget resolution that would have cut more than $250 billion from Social Security and Medicare over a decade. In 2017, like most other Republicans, he voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to cut taxes on corporations, high earners and wealthy heirs.
DeSantis believes, according to his 2011 book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,” that the framers of the Constitution “strived to construct a system of government that prevented government-mandated wealth redistribution.” Turning his attention to the Affordable Care Act and the federal bureaucracy, DeSantis condemns both as “administrative despotism” that have exerted “stifling constraints on the whole of society.” And while he doesn’t take direct aim at the New Deal and its offspring — the whole book is framed as an attack on the Obama administration — his arguments against redistributive policy should apply as much to Social Security as they do to Obamacare. It is not for nothing that Florida is one of 11 states that has not adopted the Medicaid expansion.
Yes, as governor of Florida, DeSantis has eagerly used a windfall of Covid relief funds to strengthen his political position in the state, with bonuses for emergency medical workers and new money for environmental protection. But that does not mean he has changed his thinking on these larger questions of federal spending.
The upshot of all this is that DeSantis’s opponents should, as much as possible, refuse to play his game. You don’t have to confront him on his terrain. You could instead force him to acknowledge or account for his other, more unpopular political commitments. Interestingly, this is the approach that Donald Trump might take to rebuff DeSantis in a Republican primary contest. “One area in which Trump and his allies smell that kind of weakness in DeSantis is on Social Security,” Rolling Stone reports. Trump, it should be said, used this strategy to great success against his Republican opponents in 2016.
It might be too much to ask liberals and Democrats to take a lesson from the former president, but here they should. The best way to neutralize DeSantis as a political force might be to spend less time on cultural conflict and more time making the clear case that if given the chance, he would slash what’s left of the safety net and use the proceeds to help the rich stay rich.
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A maternity nurse performs a health check on a newborn baby in Fuyang, China, Jan. 17.
Photo: Sheldon Cooper/Zuma Press
Doubleday once published a book with a title—“Too Many Asians”—that would never fly today. Author John Robbins argued that “if humanity is to have a future,” the West would have to see to it that fewer Asians were born in the years ahead. That was 1959.
Robbins was but one voice in a chorus of think tanks, government aid organizations, international development specialists, environmentalists, zero-growthers, doom mongers and do-gooders who all saw population control as the cure for poverty. China’s recent announcement that its population fell by 850,000 last year, the first recorded drop since the Mao-induced famines of the early 1960s, provoked much comment on the social and economic challenges decline brings. Yet conspicuously absent was any recognition that the whole idea that Chinese moms having children threatened the country’s prosperity was, much like Marxism itself, a noxious Western import.
That’s no overstatement. In 1977, World Bank President Robert McNamara spoke in Al Gore-ish tones of apocalypse. Population growth, he said, was the gravest issue the world faced “short of thermonuclear war.” It might even be more dangerous, because population growth was “not in the exclusive control of a few governments but rather in the hands of literally hundreds of millions of individual parents.”
Mao himself was conflicted, given Marx’s view of overpopulation as a problem of capitalism and his own tendency to see China’s population as a sign of its strength. The irony is that China today, like so many of its Asian neighbors that once tried to reduce their populations, is offering financial incentives to have more babies. But once the decline starts it’s all but impossible to reverse.
In 1974, the New York Times summed up the received wisdom in a piece reporting on the United Nations World Population Conference in Bucharest. “The consensus of the affluent industrialized Western nations,” the Times said, was based on the understanding that overpopulation “threatens to overstrain world resources, particularly food.”
This orthodoxy was echoed by almost all the experts of the day: the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Club of Rome (publisher of “Limits to Growth”), the Population Institute, Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown and the Worldwatch Institute, etc. When members of the Reagan administration pushed back—arguing that population growth wasn’t the cause of poverty—they were attacked as yahoos. Herblock published a cartoon of a well-fed Ronald Reagan holding a “world population policy” banner above a sea bursting with impoverished people.
Western groups that pushed population control on the Chinese typically denied that they supported the coercion that often resulted. But they never got too worked up about it, either. If you accept the idea that population growth uncontrolled by government is an existential threat, and if people don’t willingly stop having babies, then coercion is the obvious next step—and it’s far easier in nondemocratic countries such as China.
One example: In 1983, Stanford dismissed student Steven Mosher from its doctoral program after Beijing threatened to close its doors to the university’s scholars. Mr. Mosher, who now heads the Population Research Institute, was doing research in a rural Chinese village when he published photos of pregnant Chinese women, some in their seventh or eighth months, being led off for forced abortions. As a Journal editorial noted about Stanford’s decision, “no one has ever raised significant objections to the veracity of Mr. Mosher’s revelations on this subject.”
Against this there were a handful of lonely voices—including this page—which objected to the outrages against Chinese women and maintained that what was inhibiting China’s development was Chinese communism, not Chinese babies. Among the most eloquent was University of Illinois economist Julian Simon,
who argued that human beings were not just mouths but minds, and that a mind was “the ultimate resource.” He laid out his argument in a seminal book with that title in 1981, at just about the same time Beijing was cranking up its one-child policy.Simon pointed out that by almost every material measure—life expectancy, daily caloric intake, food production—human life was getting better, not worse. In 1985, he added a prediction: If China embraced the free market, it would likely experience labor shortages. Look where we are today.
Last week the New York Times ran a story headlined “Why China’s Shrinking Population Is Cause for Alarm.” The piece hits on some of the casualties of China’s population decline: fewer workers supporting an aging society, the “hundreds of millions of Chinese women” who were forced to abort their babies, the shortage of girls and large surplus of single men with no prospect of marriage, higher costs for the global economy, etc. And no easy fix.
All sound points. If only that were the message being sent 50 years ago—when it might have made a difference.
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
China rolled back its longstanding pandemic strategy “zero Covid,” which had protected the country for nearly three years, in early December. This reversal came after historic public protests calling for an ease in restrictions but amid concern that there was not enough immunity to adequately protect the population.
The timing could not have been worse. A few weeks into a post-zero-Covid reality, the nation’s largest annual migration for the Lunar New Year, which ends in February, has begun. After years of restrictions, travel for 2023 is anticipated to be enormous as urban employees travel home to celebrate with family and friends. The combination of densely packed public transit systems, winter conditions and multigenerational gatherings is so ideal for the study of disease transmission that the Lunar New Year is a common tabletop simulation for training public health officials. This year we’ll actually see any fallout.
The challenge will be made harder by the arrival of the coronavirus’s most infectious subvariant to date, XBB1.5. In the United States, which has high vaccination rates using highly protective vaccines, XBB1.5 accounts for nearly half of all Covid cases. If the U.S. experience is any indication, XBB1.5 could be devastating if it spreads widely in China. Domestically made Chinese vaccines — Beijing has so far refused to import American mRNA vaccines — may provide less lasting protection against the virus and its variants. This is something the world will watch unfold in the weeks ahead.
What can the United States do, presuming our government is motivated to do anything? Given Beijing’s threats to Taiwan, its oppression of Uighurs and efforts to block the investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, Congress may be inclined to take a hard line on China or not do anything for the Chinese government at all. And the newly seated Congress is even more hawkish.
But doing nothing is a dangerous game. A refusal to help could not only cause incalculable suffering and deaths; it risks harming our own hard-earned gains to end the pandemic.
Given the current politics on both sides, direct government agreements seem unlikely. Over the past few years, decades-old U.S.-Chinese research collaborations, including my own research on emerging disease, have decreased. Beijing has also dragged its feet on transparent virus surveillance. However, some U.S.- Chinese academic and commercial partnerships have continued throughout the pandemic in areas such as clinical trials and vaccine research and development. With imagination, several of these collaborations could be quickly redirected to assist China in the coming weeks.
For example, in 2021, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Royal Academy of Engineering in Britain issued a joint statement affirming their commitment to facilitate global action to respond to the pandemic through engineering approaches, including sharing public health information. In December, at least one online pharmacy in China began selling the Covid drug Paxlovid, made by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer, directly to patients. The pharmacy shipped Paxlovid to any Chinese person with a positive coronavirus test. If the Beijing government were to tie the government’s home test result reporting system to the commercial Paxlovid home delivery providers, many lives could be saved.
What can the U.S. government do to help? Although the Chinese government has refused lifesaving assistance from the United States, Chinese physicians, patients and families devastated by Covid have not. U.S. agencies might save more lives and prevent more disruption of the Chinese economy — and our own — by bypassing Beijing and leaning on longstanding academic and commercial partnerships to go directly to the provinces, communities, companies, hospitals and individuals that have the most to lose.
Some potential solutions include the exportation of successful strategies from the United States’ Operation Warp Speed playbook, which accelerated the delivery of mRNA vaccines from the manufacturer into people’s arms. This huge logistical challenge can be revised for the rapid deployment of a new Chinese-made mRNA vaccine. Other possible initiatives include sharing disaster medicine protocols that extend hospital drug stockpiles to treat many more patients and sharing pandemic-proven strategies to help protect Chinese health care workers during Covid surges. These include prioritizing the protection of bedside nurses, using telemedicine consultants to increase available physicians and grouping clinical workers to reduce workplace infection and absenteeism. One high-impact technology approach would be to share U.S. taxpayer-funded intellectual property that could make average Chinese vaccines more potent.
Those who think the Chinese government is unlikely to cooperate need to do their homework. Though it’s still early, Pfizer was able to secure a deal with China to sell Paxlovid through a state-owned company. In September, Merck & Co. also made a deal with the Chinese state-owned drugmaker Sinopharm to import and market the antiviral medication molnupiravir in China.
Any solution that saves lives, avoids the collapse of the Chinese health care system and reduces the chance of a pandemic reboot is in our national interest. A pandemic catastrophe in China will reverberate around the world, making it a hugely crucial outbreak to contain. Many low-cost solutions are based on hard lessons learned by U.S. health care, and many of these are readily transferable to sister hospitals in China. This will have a trivial cost for taxpayers. It is also in the interest of U.S. national health security — provided you believe pandemics are made far worse by apathy, small thinking and politics.
Michael Callahan is an infectious disease physician scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a former program manager for several Darpa programs and former special Covid adviser to the assistant secretary for public health preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He has been working on viral disease outbreaks and biosecurity in Asia since 2002.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at Andelman Unleashed. He formerly was a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
Asia is hurtling toward a tectonic power shift headlined by ever more rapid changes in population growth. The West, especially the United States, better be prepared.
A dramatic demographic shift is underway after China’s population shrank in 2022 for the first time in six decades. Meanwhile, India, with its continued population growth, is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country by UN estimates as soon as April.
The latest statistics show that China is increasingly coming face-to-face with its one-child policy, which officially ended in 2016 after more than three decades. The policy introduced a number of challenges; perhaps the most paramount is the 4-2-1 problem, where one working individual, by virtue of being an only child, ends up having to support four grandparents and two parents — a huge drain on the working population. It also puts a strain on China’s government-backed pension system.
This crisis is the fruit of a policy designed by the Communist Party to slow population growth and promulgated in an open letter on September 25, 1980, that no family would be allowed to have more than one child. The policy also led to abortions of female fetuses, abandonment and even infanticide due to the preference for sons, and the ratio between men and women eventually began to skew.
Within a decade, the fertility rate had plummeted below 2.1 — a rate sustaining zero population growth.
By 2016, families were officially allowed to have two children, then three children by 2021, and no fines were imposed on families regardless of their size. By then, however, it was too late to reverse the catastrophic demographic trend.
Last year, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that new births fell for the sixth straight year to 9.56 million, while nationwide deaths reached 10.6 million people. New births also mean fewer consumers, eventually a shrinking workforce, a smaller next generation and fewer working Chinese to support their children and retired family members. It is a spiral that may be impossible to reverse.
At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s stringent zero-Covid policies also exacerbated a plunge in the number of marriages. The official China Statistical Yearbook 2022 showed the number of marriages in China dropped to the lowest level on record in 2021, at 7.6 million people.
Hidden in these numbers are some troubling realities for China and for the world economy.
A falling Chinese population means lower domestic consumption, which holds the prospect of seriously affecting companies trying to do business there selling to what will inevitably be a shrinking Chinese domestic market. Consumer brands such as Starbucks, Nike and Under Armour and tech and auto companies such as Apple, Intel, Tesla, General Motors and Ford generate a substantial amount of their global income from Chinese consumers. Tesla makes half of its electric cars in China. Until 2019, Apple had about half of its assembly lines in China, though these numbers began to fall substantially in the ensuing years, hitting 36% last year.
These production figures point to an even more dramatic problem for China as its demographic spiral also means a rapidly shrinking pool of cheap, skilled labor. Western companies are already looking elsewhere, although China’s manufacturing might be difficult to replicate at the same scale in the near term.
India, whose population is projected to pass China’s, is the logical substitute. While China will continue shrinking, India will continue to grow, likely peaking in 2064 at 1.7 billion, up from 1.42 billion today — nearly 50% larger than the projected population of China at that point. In theory, this would be the go-to nation for cheap and even more highly educated labor, especially for high-tech industries.
But there is a huge problem here. The bulk of well-educated tech workers are in the west and south of India, where the population growth is the least intense.
Places such as Uttar Pradesh in the north — with 200 million people — are where the huge burst in population is taking place.
But manufacturing is lagging in Uttar Pradesh, which has 17% percent of India’s population but just 9% of its industrial jobs. Moreover, many of India’s most rapidly growing regions are barely accessible for modern commercial transport, and the population is marginally educated. India is on a tear to remedy these inequities, but it will take awhile.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal is to make India a $5 trillion economy by next year, with Uttar Pradesh a $1 trillion economy in 2027. To meet these goals, he’s going to need a lot of help, much of it from abroad.
Already, Apple has begun to shift a slice of its iPhone production from China to India. One in 4 iPhones could be made in India by 2025. Walmart is looking to triple its exports of India-made goods to $10 billion by 2027. All of this will place Modi and his country in direct — and potentially toxic competition — with Xi Jinping and China.
Inherent in the advantage of replacing China by India is that the West will be replacing an oligarchical autocracy with a more-or-less Western-style democracy as its principal economic partner.
Of course, that will leave China increasingly with its own back to the wall, defensive and hostile, faced by a democratic India with a Western tilt. In December, the United States added 36 Chinese companies to a blacklist for trade in high-end technologies after tightening rules on the sale of semiconductor technology to China.
The Biden administration is still making some efforts to heal the open wounds with China — with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He last week. Liu had just made a big pitch at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for more investment in China. But this may be too little, too late.
And there is clearly little interest for the leaders of China and India to mend relations anytime soon. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan in September, there was no bilateral meeting, no publicly recorded smile or even handshake between Xi and Modi, leading former Chinese diplomat Shi Jiangtao to write in the South China Morning Post, “The geopolitical split that is taking place between China and India could not be more obvious. … President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have not met or spoken since a military stand-off began in the disputed Himalayan border region in May 2020.” (Xi and Modi did, however, chat briefly at the G20 dinner in Bali in November.)
As India gears up to displace China as the world’s most populous nation, the United States and the West may be pushed into choosing sides. It is pressure that needs to be resisted as long as possible in the interest of political stability, not to mention economic pragmatism.
Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.
The war in Ukraine could soon get much worse.
Russia may be preparing to launch a major spring offensive, and it could come even before the winter snows start to melt.
The time to give Ukraine what it needs to defend itself and expel the Russian invaders is now. But despite a remarkably unified commitment, some of Ukraine’s supporters in the West are throwing wrenches in the pipeline.
Ukraine believes the Kremlin could make another push to take the capital, Kyiv, and anticipates that Russian President Vladimir Putin will call up some 500,000 more troops in addition to the 300,000 mobilized late last year.
Moscow denies it’s planning a second mobilization, but the independent Russian news outlet Volya, citing sources in Russia’s military, reported that Moscow plans to recruit another 700,000 troops. In addition, Ukraine also faces more than 50,000 private-army mercenaries, most of them Russian prisoners released in exchange for fighting.
On Friday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declared, “This is a decisive moment for Ukraine, in a decisive decade for the world,” following a crucial meeting of Ukraine’s top Western allies at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
Ukraine is fighting against a Russia that has been a pernicious, destabilizing force on the global stage. The West is trying to calibrate its support, but the result of the Ramstein meeting was disappointing for Kyiv and for those who believe Russia must be defeated.
Austin reiterated that the United States will continue to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” urging Kyiv’s friends to “dig even deeper.” Despite the exhortations, however, the defense chiefs failed in one of the principal goals of the meeting, deciding to send battle tanks, which Ukraine says it needs without delay.
The decision on tanks was blocked by Germany, reluctant to send its Leopard 2 tanks or to grant permission to other countries that own them to release them. Berlin fears that Moscow will view the presence of German tanks as a provocation and wants the US to send its tanks to give it cover.
Washington is sending armored fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons but maintains that its Abrams tanks are unsuited for this war because learning to operate them takes too long and they are difficult to maintain. They insist the German tanks are a better fit.
Blocking the transfer of needed weapons to Ukraine is, shall we say, not Germany at its best.
Ukraine’s Eastern European backers, invaded by Russia during the Cold War and earlier, were fuming. Poland’s foreign minister lambasted Germany, reminding Berlin that this is not just an exercise, “Ukrainian blood is shed for real.” The three Baltic states — Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania — demanded that Germany act “now.”
A frustrated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said, “There is no rational reason why Ukraine has not yet been supplied with Western tanks.”
As it battles Russian soldiers and mercenaries, Ukraine has another worry. One Ukrainian source told CNN that Kyiv is concerned about the shift in the political balance in Washington now that Republicans — some of whom are less than wholeheartedly supportive of Ukraine — have taken control of the US House of Representatives. Ukrainians require the continuing forceful backing they have received from Washington.
Watching from afar, it’s easy to get the impression that Putin may soon end his hapless Ukraine war. After all, this conflict has been an utter disaster for Russia, even if it continues to kill scores of civilians by bombing apartment blocks, and despite an occasional symbolic advance.
Putin has no intention of stopping. He has silenced his liberal critics at home, but he is under pressure from far-right nationalists, including some who own mercenary armies and are showing off their prowess while mocking the Russian army that answers to him, as has Yevgeny Prigozhin, who runs the notorious Wagner Group.
Besides, Putin, who views himself as a clever student of history, may be looking at some of Russia’s greatest victories, which it wrested out of the jaws of defeat.
Russia managed to repel invasions by Napoleon and the Nazis, but the current Russian President may have gleaned the wrong lesson from his predecessors’ prowess. Napoleon and Hitler were the invaders. The Russian empire, and later the Soviet Union, was defending itself.
This time, Russia is the aggressor. Ukraine has the home-field advantage, including the inexhaustible determination to defeat the hated invader.
In fact, history teaches us something else: In 2008, Putin invaded neighboring Georgia and got away with capturing some of its territory. In 2014, he invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and got away with that. Then, last year, he decided to take all of Ukraine.
The lesson is that when the Kremlin’s expansionist military adventures succeed, they are followed by more aggression, more wars, more illegal confiscation of its neighbors’ territory. Moscow’s victories seem to produce more wars of Russian aggression.
Defeating this assault is the best way to secure future peace, to reaffirm the notion that a rapacious country cannot simply swallow a peaceful neighbor — a notion we thought had ended after World War II.
Understandably, Germany emerged from that war with a pacifist bent. But the lesson of World War II is about the danger of allowing aggressive despots to make gains.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz may hesitate to send tanks to fight Russia, as Germany did in the 1940s, but he too may be distilling the wrong lessons from history. German tanks invaded a sovereign country back then. This time, they would be defending one.
Some, in fact, argue that the World War II experience bestows Germany with a unique moral responsibility to provide Kyiv what it needs. (When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, by the way, they invaded Ukraine, one of its republics.)
After the defense ministers at Ramstein announced they had not decided to send tanks, Zelensky, clearly disappointed, reaffirmed that Ukraine urgently needs tanks but added an intriguing comment about what had transpired. “Not everything,” he said, “can be announced in public.”
Sooner or later, I have little doubt, the tanks will come. Already German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has ordered an inventory of the Leopards and suggested that other countries that own them start making preparations in case Germany authorizes the transfer.
Later is better than never, but there’s no reason, no excuse to delay, because Russia is about to make the war in Ukraine even deadlier. The window for preventing a much longer war may soon close.
I am an American Special Forces soldier, a volunteer knowing well the hazards of this profession in which I’ve served quietly for 14 years.
And I helped build Vladimir Putin’s foreign legion.
Green Berets — the “Horse Soldiers” who toppled the Taliban in 2001 — are not Army Rangers or Navy SEALs. We specialize in training and fighting alongside indigenous forces, and our greatest strength is the trust and camaraderie we develop with our counterparts. For years, the Green Berets and the Commandos of the Afghan National Army were a bulwark against the Taliban. It was a partnership forged at immense cost in American and Afghan lives.
Since the precipitous departure from Afghanistan, and in the absence of meaningful government support to the nonprofit organizations who have worked to aid our former allies, many of those highly trained commandos have accepted recruitment offers to fight with the Russian Army in Ukraine. For the 20,000 to 30,000 men that we trained, a steady salary and the promise of shelter from the Taliban is often too good of a deal to pass up — even if the cost is returning to combat.
As the next Congress prepares to investigate the withdrawal and how it went so disastrously wrong, they should examine not only the lead-up to those dramatic days in August 2021 when the Taliban swept into Kabul, but also what happened — and is currently happening — in the wake of their victory. How those who safeguarded American troops are actively hunted. How they’ve suffered under the Taliban. How our government turned a blind eye. How Afghans were forced to pay nearly $600 per person to apply for humanitarian parole, while Ukrainians had the fee waived.
Following the gross malfeasance of the withdrawal, I didn’t think that there were more red lines to cross, any further moral injury that could be inflicted on those of us who served or worked to save our allies. Yet, with this soul-sickening revelation that our closest partners will now bleed for Russia, here we are. Again.
We should have seen it coming. We abandoned our closest partners wholesale: what choice were the commandos left with? Those left behind are suffering destitution, famine, persecution from the Taliban.
Mr. Putin, suspect though his promises may be, provides hope. If they fight for Russia, their families might live under better conditions, they might earn the $1,500 recruitment incentive and they might earn Russian citizenship. The irony is that those who head to the front lines in the Donbas will be shredded by the very same American-built weapons that once supported them in battle.
I cannot blame those Afghan commandos who fight for Russia; to do so would deny them agency in their own survival.
And it was a deft and cunning move from Mr. Putin, who increases the lethality of his frontline soldiers without risking Russian lives. These soldiers are not amateurs, conscripts or convicts. This is a battle-tested special operations force, trained by America’s best. They might not tip the scales of Russia’s war, but they are competent. Ukrainians will die by their hands.
The Taliban must also be rejoicing. The most dangerous core for a resistance movement is fleeing the country.
Meanwhile, our national shame is perpetuated and a generation of Special Forces is saddled with mitigating the damage from America’s previous conflict while their task of winning the trust of allies — present and future — is made more difficult and more dangerous.
Compounding the tragedy is the fact that there is an army of volunteers, grass-roots organizations, and boutique nonprofits (including one that I founded) champing at the bit to help. Yet we are stymied at every turn by cowardice, political dysfunction and a lack of resources.
In July, during a video conference with members of the various nongovernmental organizations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken voiced his gratitude toward these groups, acknowledging our assumption of the State Department’s responsibilities, and expressing that “We need you to continue to do so.” Why though? Why is it incumbent on American civilians, veterans and active service members to dedicate our own time and resources to rebuild our nation’s honor?
The private refugee sponsorship initiative known as the “Welcome Corps” touted by Secretary Blinken as the “the boldest innovation in refugee resettlement in four decades” is a missed opportunity. At the very earliest, by-name sponsorship will not take effect for Afghans until at least mid 2023, effectively dooming hundreds who could be saved with immediate, decisive action. Aid at an indeterminate point in 2023 is not good enough. They need it now. If our leaders intend to wash their hands of Afghanistan, they should support the nongovernmental organizations who have stepped up to do their job for them.
I don’t know if our efforts in Afghanistan were in vain, and the memory of a fallen brother in arms complicates that question. I see the improvements to infrastructure, the generation of women and girls who received an education. But the motto of the Green Berets is “De Oppresso Liber” — To free the oppressed. The country we bled for to keep free is gone, and the very weapon we created to keep oppression at bay has been co-opted by tyranny.
Deploying to Afghanistan was easy. Trying to hold a government-size moral failing at bay feels like running a relay with no one reaching to receive the baton. Our morality has been taken for granted and we are tired. Tired of swallowing our anger. Tired of an endless moral injury. Tired of the red lines and red tape.
I can only imagine the betrayal our Afghan counterparts must feel.
I have little more to give. I’ve sacrificed finances, career opportunities and medical school aspirations. Relationships and my well-being have borne the brunt of it. I don’t begrudge those who carry on with life as usual, though I sometimes feel disconnected from them. To keep myself in equilibrium, I often feel as though I must put on a mask to hide the shame, humiliation and rage.
Tremendous advances in military medicine have been made during 20 years of war, but there is no coverage offered for a battered conscience. If I want help from the Veteran’s Administration, I lie. I lie and say this impotent, lonesome anger bloomed from a tunnel outside Kandahar where some Taliban fighters thought they were safe from the explosives I carried.
I’ll look to the healing of my own moral wounds as best as I am able. I hope that Congress in turn can lead, and help our nation start healing in it’s own right by honoring the promises we made to those who went into combat on our behalf.
It is the very least we can do because if we don’t offer our allies hope and meaningful action, someone like Vladimir Putin will.
Mr. Kasza served as a Green Beret in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now in the National Guard and founded the 1208 Foundation, which provides humanitarian aid and immigration advocacy to Afghans who served with American Special Forces.
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