There is a scene early on in Nathanael West’s satirical 1933 novella Miss Lonelyheartsthat reeks of depression, despair, and genius. It’s hard to forget. The protagonist is a lovelorn advice columnist for a newspaper in New York City who receives a letter from a teenage girl who describes herself as having the makings of a beauty, with a slender figure that many rave about, but she bitterly notes she has never had a date. Can it be, she asks, because she has no nose?

BIDEN’S LAST HURRAH AGAINST RUSSIA AND PUTIN
Frustration escalates for the the lame duck president

BY SEYMOUR HERSH

The scene came to mind this week as I considered the bitterness of President Joe Biden, who seems to be full of resentment because a group of Democratic Party bigwigs, aware that he was failing, forced him to give up his planned re-election campaign and turn over the fight against Donald Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris, and all the more resentment because she failed to beat Trump as Biden did in 2020.

The president is no longer talking about his failed policy in the Middle East, though American bombs and other weaponry are still flowing to Israel and being put to deadly use. Biden is now trying to stem the losses in Ukraine’s war with Russia. A week ago he gave the Ukraine government, headed by President Volodymyr Zelensky, permission to fire a long withheld advanced American ballistic missile capable of hitting targets 190 miles inside Russia. Days later, he decided to provide Ukraine with landmines capable of maiming and killing all whose paths cross them, young and old, friendly and not. 

I have been told that the strategic implications of the president’s escalation—both Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have nuclear bombs at their fingertips—had not been fully analyzed inside the Pentagon, and that some important offices, sure to have different views about escalation, were never asked for their input. Putin responded by escalating in turn by firing a nuclear-capable ballistic missile at Ukraine and said in a speech that what had been a regional conflict “had now acquired elements of a global character.” The New York Times noted that the response “was meant to instill fear in Kyiv and the West.”

Putin’s explicit warning came a day after Biden’s decision to permit the use of American anti-personnel landmines in an effort to slow Russian advances in the Donbas region. Neither Washington nor Moscow are signatories to the international mine ban treaty that has been signed by 164 parties, but Biden’s decision to deploy the weapon was widely criticized by international human rights groups

Meanwhile, the Russian army, whose front-line troops are exhausted, continues to push forward against their even more undermanned and under-equipped enemy. Ukraine’s successful penetration into Kursk, the scene of a dramatic German defeat in World War II, is now the object of a brutal Russian counterattack, with huge Ukrainian losses in men and equipment. The long-term prognosis for the Ukrainian army remains dire.

Why is Putin, clearly angered at Biden’s willingness to let Zelensky launch missiles at Russia targets, amid his public talk of being at war now with NATO, not moving to go all in against the weakened Ukraine army and the capital of Kyiv? 

The answer could be messaging from Donald Trump, perhaps relayed through a close associate, who has since his election been nominating the most inexperienced and politically radical cabinet in American history. Trump often makes the point in public that America was not at war during his first term as president, which ended in January 2021, conveniently forgetting the then ongoing occupation of Afghanistan as well as US military operations elsewhere. He has been a consistent supporter of Israel and an all-out supporter of the current Israeli war against Hamas, which has morphed into the vicious targeting of the population of Gaza. His foreign policy appointments so far all share a zealous commitment to Israel and unquestioning support for its ongoing war.

Russia is another matter. Trump was precise about the war between Ukraine and Russia in his debate in September with Kamala Harris. And what he said then is consistent with what I am hearing now in my reporting.

“If I were president,” Trump said, the war “would have never started. . . . I know Putin very well. He would have never. . . . gone into Ukraine and killed millions of people. . . . I’ll get the war with Russia and Ukraine ended.” At that point he added, “If I am president-elect, I’ll get it done before even becoming president. . . . That is a war that’s dying to be settled.” 

One of the moderators asked a gotcha question straight out of the Cold War: “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” It was a question to which the vice president would have to say yes. Trump did not. “I want the war to stop,” he said. “I want to save lives that are being uselessly . . . killed by the millions.” A moment later he added of Putin: “He’s got a thing that other people don’t have: he’s got nuclear weapons.”

Trump’s casualty numbers might have been off, but his consistency, especially when pressed, adds to the credibility of what I have been learning in recent weeks: that an understanding about the mechanisms for ending the war has been debated and discussed and even tentatively outlined between informal advisors to Trump and Putin and their teams. I was told by one American that “the lines are open” between those representing the two men, with some vague “assurances sent and received.” 

I have also been told by experts here in Washington who are knowledgeable about Russian political affairs that Putin does not want to make a settlement with Zelensky “until he is good and ready”—meaning that he is going to wait until the currently very successful Russian surge targeted at Donetsk and Kursk plays out. There is said to be concern in Moscow about extensive “stay-behind” intelligence and operational activity in Ukraine that is believed to be organized by American and British agencies.

What is going on now, one American expert told me, is an attempt to change the long-standing American support for containment, exemplified by the Biden administration’s instinctive disdain for the governments of Russia and China, which marred the initial meetings with each in 2021. The Chinese delegation at the meeting in Alaska early that year publicly walked out on Secretary of State Antony Blinken after accusing him and his delegation of attempting to interfere in internal Chinese matters.

Biden has been a disdainful critic of Putin throughout his public life, calling him at various times a “war criminal,” a “murderous dictator,” and a “pure thug.” He famously claimed at a one-on-one meeting in Moscow with Putin in 2011 that he looked into his eyes and told him: “I don’t think you have a soul.” Putin replied, according to Biden: “We understand one another.”

This is not a brief for Putin, a former Soviet intelligence agent who is brutal to his political opponents and runs a government that is quick to put foreign journalists in jail. He is also considered by many in the American intelligence community to be a competent and informed leader. 

Trump’s agenda, I was told, was to find a way once in office not to be haunted by worries about contacts with those who dissent from America’s foreign policy. Hence the idea of working more with military-to-military negotiations as a start. One American told me that “reality over politics and history over headlines” would be a fresh way to close out the murderous war between Russia and Ukraine.

Such tactics are not going to solve the crisis in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, but there must be a better approach than bowing to the Israeli religious right and Benjamin Netanyahu. That will be a test for the president-to-be, whose choices for cabinet roles have left official Washington and the press agog. Ending the war between Ukraine and Russia will be a start. 

There was no way Joe Biden was going to get it done without much more blood being shed.

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/bidens-last-hurrah-against-russia

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         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.