Border troubles

Last week Facebook told me it was the birthday of Volodya, who had led a section of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy or something back at Yale, so I checked in on his feed, remembering that he had not been altogether party line Democrat back during the Trump administration. Don't think he was a flat out Trumper, but he wasn't saying exactly the same things as everyone else. He chairs the Slavics Department at Brown now.

Sure enough, there he was posting some videos of himself as a talking head on Chinese-government sponsored CGTN (their version of RT) arguing that the US was exaggerating the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, grounding his argument on the fact that -- amongst other things -- 100k troops on the border is not much more than the 80k that have been there more or less constantly for the last few years. I fact checked this to the best extent I could using Google for 10 minutes and found that, indeed, in 2018 there had been 80k troops there.

Through numerous channels I am now seeing that the Russians are more or less claiming that the West is manufacturing the crisis in Ukraine for its own benefit. There is some merit to the claim that Biden needs to repair its image after the mud on its face in Afghanistan, but I'm not seeing the motive for Germany and the rest of Western Europe.

Gotta hustle now. In the very big picture, there's no question that the ever-tightening alignment of Moscow and Beijing is not a good sign, and it has been going on for years now. But slow strategic containment is our best approach. Demographic decline and the lack of both Russia and China's ability to generate exportable entrepreneurial ideas in the absence of deep interplay with the West will doom them in the end. But we ourselves need to open up to immigrants to offset our own demographic challenges.