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The Yale historian Timothy Snyder first came to my attention in a footnote of an article in The New York Review of Books. The footnote gave a link to a series of 23 online lectures on the history of Ukraine, which I binge-watched over a period of about five days. I also read his books “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth.” Snyder also has a subscription-only Substack blog to which I subscribe. Snyder travels frequently to Ukraine these days, and his latest Substack article is posted from Kyiv. As the war grinds on, Snyder argues that we in the US must be patient and continue to support Ukraine. He is convinced that Russia will lose and must lose in order to stabilize democracy in the world. Since the article is paywalled, I won’t post a link and I’ll just quote a couple of the money grafs as fair use: “The Ukrainians are defending the legal order established after the Second World War. They have performed the entire NATO mission of absorbing and reversing an attack by Russia with a tiny per...

 In early 1973, my mom drove me to Clinton TN to register for the draft. I still have that draft card somewhere. The following year, my draft number was picked. In the event, the draft ended shortly after and so my draft number wasn't relevant. This experience permanently colored my thinking about when and where I'd place my life on the line. 50 years later, my belief is the same: the US shouldn't send troops to fight and die unless there's an existential threat. Today, the debate is over Ukraine membership in NATO. That membership binds all members to defend each member militarily as though it is a threat to their own homeland. Look, I believe Russia is wrong to prosecute a war against Ukraine. I'm glad to see the US and NATO allies sending weapons to aid Ukraine. But if Ukraine were to be a NATO member, that would be a commitment of US lives and treasure to defend a country halfway around the globe. Would I volunteer? No. Would I volunteer your kids or grandkids? ...

For most of my adult life, I’ve learned history almost exclusively by reading books. I took American and World history in high school and two quarters of American history in college, but after that, I became a history autodidact. I’ve written several book reviews (and published three of them), but this is the first course review I’ve written. In a footnote to an article on Ukraine in New York Review of books by British historian Timothy Garton Ash, he mentioned a series of 23 online lectures from Fall 2022 about the history of Ukraine by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. I’m not a big consumer of video content, but I decided to check them out, and in the space of the first afternoon, I’d already watched five 50-minute lectures. I binge-watched all 23 lectures in five consecutive days. I was primed for these lectures by having read “The Gates of Europe,” a history of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, which turns out to be an assigned text for Snyder’s course. In his first lecture, Snyder discus...

 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" ~George Santayana There are some who seem to believe that Biden is appeasing Putin in Ukraine. Their analogy is to the "appeasement" of Hitler after the Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland which has sometimes been claimed to have led to WWII. While that claim is at best tenuous, it has been used to justify the US quagmires in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Look, Ho Chi Minh was not Hitler. Osama bin Laden was not Hitler. Saddam Hussein was not Hitler. And Putin is not a 70 year-old version of Hitler and Russia is not a modern-day Nazi Germany. I'm a big fan of learning history and learning from history. One thing you learn if you do that is that generals often end up trying to fight the last war. Don't fall for this mistake. This isn't the first time Russia has fallen into the Ukraine quagmire, and Putin made a huge mistake trying to conquer Ukraine. It is a sign of weakness, not strength, that Pu...

This is all about setting the stage for tactical nukes in Ukraine if things continue to go South for Putin. He's already turning Ukraine into smoldering ruins. A few nukes will just speed the process for him. https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/09/europe/russia-putin-nuclear-weapons-intl/index.html