About the only time to place any credence to the Wall Street Journal OP/ED page is when they print something so diametrically opposed to their normal line that it signifies a shift in thought behind the scenes.
That is the case with the OP/ED published from two members of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace describing victory for the Ukraine in its war with Russia as "Magical Thinking."
The authors are, "Eugene Rumer, a former national intelligence officer for Russia at the National Intelligence Council, is director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Andrew S. Weiss, who worked on Russian affairs in both the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, is Carnegie’s vice president for studies."
The Carnegie Endowment is a Neocon organization, chock full of former CIA officers and slavering war mongers like Robert Kagan, so this counts as a statement against interest:
As Russian President Vladimir Putin looks toward the second anniversary of his all-out assault on Ukraine, his self-confidence is hard to miss. A much-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive has not achieved the breakthrough that would give Kyiv a strong hand to negotiate. Tumult in the Middle East dominates the headlines, and bipartisan support for Ukraine in the U.S. has been upended by polarization and dysfunction in Congress, not to mention the pro-Putin leanings of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump.
Putin has reason to believe that time is on his side. At the front line, there are no indications that Russia is losing what has become a war of attrition. The Russian economy has been buffeted, but it is not in tatters. Putin’s hold on power was, paradoxically, strengthened following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed rebellion in June. Popular support for the war remains solid, and elite backing for Putin has not fractured.
Western officials’ promises of reinvigorating their own defense industries have collided with bureaucratic and supply-chain bottlenecks. Meanwhile, sanctions and export controls have impeded Putin’s war effort far less than expected. Russian defense factories are ramping up their output, and Soviet legacy factories are outperforming Western factories when it comes to much-needed items like artillery shells.
The technocrats responsible for running the Russian economy have proven themselves to be resilient, adaptable, and resourceful. Elevated oil prices, driven in part by close cooperation with Saudi Arabia, are refilling state coffers. Ukraine, by contrast, depends heavily on infusions of Western cash.
The rest of the article talks about the necessity of containment, says that Putin is bad, and that Russia and Putin are in many ways succeeding beyond the West's wildest expectations.
They also say that we can win this because ……… The Aristocrats!!!!!
If at any time over the past 30 years our foreign policy establishment had allowed even the smallest amount of sanity and reality penetrate their collective blob mind, rather than getting drunk on triumphalism and the "End of History", the entire world would be in a far better place than it is now.
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