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What Regime Change in Russia Means
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
Joe Biden said it about Vladimir Putin. Two seconds later, Joe Biden’s staff members were no doubt thinking it about Joe Biden.
Politics, particularly on the campaign side, is full of people who excel at verbal cleverness, and, as a result, it is full of people who believe that verbal cleverness is the height of intelligence. Cleverness is overrated. But there is a big difference between a policy of working toward “regime change” in Russia and a policy of talking about working toward regime change in Russia. Words matter, and the words of the president of the United States of America matter a great deal.
Biden’s people were, almost immediately, engaged in that great Washington cliché: “walking back the president’s remarks.” Biden’s people do more walking back than Younger Bear.
What President Biden really seems to have in mind is not so much regime change as regime decapitation — getting rid of Vladimir Putin but leaving the rest of the Moscow machinery in place, getting rid of one caudillo in the hope that the next one will be better inclined toward Washington, or, if not more malleable, at least less adventurous.
That is not the worst idea. Putin has enemies; some of them are ruthless enough to remove him from power — which would almost certainly mean assassinating him or executing him after a show trial — and supplant him. That might leave Ukraine and Europe — and Russia — in a better place, and it might serve long-term U.S. interests, which are what President Biden is supposed to be trying to secure.
Then again, it might not.
Vladimir Putin is a problem. But he is not the problem, or the only problem in Russia. And he probably is more of a symptom of the underlying Russian malady than the source of that unhappy nation’s criminal misgovernance. Putin did not create the Russian mafia-state: Russia has had a mafia-state for a very long time, and the worst of its post–Cold War crisis coincided with the efforts of Russian reformers to replace that mafia-state with something more worthy, or at least less indecent. The Russian people did not seem to be buying what the reformers were selling, and the country descended into its current and deepening state of gangsterism and oligarchism.
But we should understand that, as gratifying as it would be to put a toe-tag on Putin, changing Russia’s relationship with the world means changing Russia itself, which means dismantling the mafia-state at the center of Russian national life. That would be a very large and ambitious project of the kind the United States has not often executed successfully. The model here isn’t deposing Manuel Noriega — it is the reconstruction of post-war Japan. The United States has not just defeated Russia in a devastating war and is not occupying the country — but, even if that were the case, the examples of Afghanistan and Iraq suggest that even an occupation is not enough to ensure the success of such a reconstruction. If we are serious about hamstringing Russia until Putin is driven from power, we need to be serious about what kind of outcome we expect (which is not likely to be precisely the same as the outcome we desire) and realistic about the risks involved. We should push on Putin and push hard — but big talk followed by big hand-waving weakens our position.
Putin has overreached and overextended himself, and this has presented the United States and our allies with a historic opportunity: to use economic measures to crush not only the Putin junta but also to deal a potentially lethal blow to the Russian mafia-state itself. But that would take something close to a geopolitical masterstroke, because it would mean not only sustaining the economic sanctions but ratcheting them up strategically even as the Ukrainians sue for peace — and, if necessary, even after some settlement has been reached between Kyiv and Moscow. The Ukrainians have fought heroically, and they deserve all of the support — both practical and moral — that we can offer them. But we also must understand that American interests vis-à-vis Moscow do not begin and end with the invasion of Ukraine. Our interests do not end with a cease-fire or an armistice.
Putin is a menace. But we have a very well-stocked arsenal of weapons with which to fight him, not only through fortifying military assets such as NATO and deepening our security relationship with the European Union, but also vast economic resources and the ability to shut Russia out from a great deal of the world economy — and we don’t require a great deal of multinational support to do it. We also have the ability to beat Putin at his own game, flooding world markets with U.S.-sourced oil and gas, trade in which will enrich both domestic producers and our trading partners abroad.
The Biden administration has a tremendous opportunity in its hands — but it lacks the leadership at the top to make the most of it. The president is too diplomatically clumsy, too parochial in his political interests, too nickel-and-dime in his priorities, and too beholden to the left-wing elements in his party to do what needs doing, especially when it comes to energy policy. Joe Biden is no Vladimir Putin, but one might be forgiven for thinking in a moment of frustration: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
And Furthermore . . .
That being the case, the GOP also has a historic opportunity in front of its collective snout. All Republicans have to do is . . . the thing they failed to do last time around: offer a better alternative who can close the deal. But, for some reason, Republicans have kept the loser at the center of their thinking, their fundraising, and their planning.
The thing about losers is, they lose.
Words About Words
I am forgiving when it comes to the sometimes-stilted English one hears on DW (Deutsche Welle, “German Wave”), the valuable and interesting German public broadcaster. It isn’t any worse — and often is better — than the English of the American media. But two phrases stuck in my mind in a recent broadcast about Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
In the first, the broadcaster referred to the war’s one-month mark as a “grim anniversary.” Grim, yes; anniversary, no. An anniversary is, as the name suggests, annual, from the Latin annus (year) and versus (turning), with the Latin word anniversarius very closely resembling its English cognate. (So closely, in fact, that Microsoft Word keeps changing it to “anniversaries” in my text. Bad Microsoft Word!)
The monthly answer to annual is mensual, and a monthly occurrence is a mensiversary. You don’t see mensual very often, though its cousin, menstrual (both from the Latin mensis, “month,”) is familiar.
A magazine that is published twice a month might be described as semimonthly — not bimonthly — though here at National Review we use fortnightly, which I much prefer.
The second usage that jumped out at me was describing two neighboring countries as “sharing a common border.” As far as I can tell, all borders between two countries are common, and there is no way to have a border that isn’t shared. I suppose that there are situations in which more than two countries or territories come together at a common point: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah share a common border at Four Corners. But that isn’t what people usually mean when they write “share a common border.” We have bordering, adjacent, neighboring, etc., and no need for “share a common border.”
Rampant Prescriptivism
Item one: Homophones, as you know, are words that sound alike but mean different things: Hear, here; new, knew; duel, dual; led, lead; gorilla, guerilla; etc. Many of the common misspellings in English are homophone problems: “What lead you to believe that you’d never make a typo?” “The actors did not know there lines.” Most of those aren’t the result of writers’ not knowing how to spell something — sometimes, the fingers do the talking. And if the fingers aren’t always properly connected to the brain, neither are the ears: Last week, Jonah Goldberg mentioned on his podcast that his guest would be talking about rising Russophobia, and I thought to myself: Jonah is a pretty well-known Rousseau-hater, but I don’t think most Americans are familiar enough with Rousseau to have strong feelings one way or the other. The homophone bust (they’re, their, there) is one of the most common errors in English — be vigilant!
Item the second: The past tense of plead is pleaded, not pled. “He pleaded guilty to the crime, and his familiar pleaded for leniency.”
Item the third: As above, you use the possessive to make an adjective out of a noun to modify a gerund: “Most of those aren’t the result of writers’ not knowing how to spell something,” “His dancing was clumsy,” “We were all pleased by his winning the election,” etc.
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com
Home and Away
You can hear me discussing many things on the above-mentioned Remnant podcast with Jonah Goldberg here.
You can read my New York Post column on why Democrats care more about well-off people with college loans than they do about poor people with other kinds of debts here.
You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Wooly Wilds of the ‘Real America,’ here.
My National Review archive can be found here.
Listen to Mad Dogs & Englishmen here.
My New York Post archive can be found here.
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Molly Ivins, Phony
KERA-TV, my local public broadcast outlet, is showing Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins, a documentary about the famous progressive journalist.
Ivins is fondly remembered in Texas, where Democrats can sometimes feel lonely, since they are the majority only in Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, and the Rio Grande Valley. (Poor Democrats.) I remember her the way she should be remembered: as a complete phony.
Ivins was one of those dyed-in-the-wool Texans who was born in California; the family relocated to River Oaks (think Beverly Hills, but in Houston) when her father, an oil executive, took a new assignment. She went to the fanciest of fancy schools (St. John’s) and maintained a prep-school social circle that included, among others, the young George W. Bush. She entertained classmates on the family yacht on the weekends. She worked on her French at Château de Montcel and went to college at Smith, as had her mother and her grandmother before her.
When she decided to embark on a career as an entertainer (journalism isn’t exactly what she did) she developed a ridiculous fake Texas accent heard in no part of the state; before that, “she spoke with an East Coast, educated elite diction, inflected by a junior-year-abroad French accent. She sounded like Jacqueline Kennedy,” as one of her close friends reports. “She was the daughter of corporate power and wealth.”
She was dishonest in a couple of important ways: She sometimes lied about her background, suggesting she grew up in hardscrabble East Texas rather than in River Oaks. And she was a thief, stealing from, among others, National Review’s house misanthrope, Florence King. When King called her out on the plagiarism, Ivins — rich, famous, powerful — was singularly ungracious, and went so far as to call King a “bitch” in her forced apology. (Hooray, feminism.) It never seems to have occurred to Molly Ivins, who had never known anything except affluence, that Florence King was someone who couldn’t afford to be stolen from.
Ivins lambasted politics as a good-ol’-boys’ club, but she was born a member of the club (she bragged that she got a leg up on the competition as a reporter because she spent all her time drinking with political insiders) and was comfortable being a servant of power, as long as the power was Brand D power. She was the opposite of what she often claimed to be: a representative of “the boonies.” She was, among other things, a leading apologist for Bill Clinton, going so far as to refuse to write about the Monica Lewinsky matter at all at the height of the scandal, pressing her fellow political commentators to ignore the story, calling it nothing more than “high school hysteria.”
The self-appointed tribune of the plebs wrote at the time of the Clinton scandal that such things were to be expected of such men: “We in the Boonies understand this; we are not stupid. It’s only the chattering classes who are still sitting around pretending these not very deep subtleties are beyond our grasp.” That is what it looks like when a fake populist recruits the “We the People” — against their will — into service as human shields for the powerful.
But how Ivins loved to talk about “We the People.” “We the People don’t have a lobbyist!” she once thundered at me. (We were on one of those talking-heads panels together when she was attempting to launch a television show of her own.) When I pointed out to her that We the People do, in fact, have any number of lobbyists — because We the People are not an undifferentiated mass of commodity peopledom but farmers, nurses, teachers, taxpayers, journalists, and other employers of lobbyists, that both gun-lovers and gun-haters have lobbyists on their respective payrolls — she did what she usually did when challenged: Say the same thing again, but louder and more angrily. She liked to call lobbyists “lobsters,” and clearly believed this to be very, very clever.
Ivins did have a knack for giving people demeaning nicknames: It was she who popularized “Shrub” for George W. Bush, her one lasting contribution to American letters. A phony, dishonest, gold-plated populist with an affected verbal bluster and a penchant for schoolyard name-calling: You might think of Molly Ivins as a slightly less effeminate Donald Trump. You might as easily think of her as a left-wing Tucker Carlson who stayed in print journalism in part because she never found a way to succeed in television.
What Molly Ivins illustrated most brilliantly is that Aw-Shucks Down-Home Champion of the Regular Folks is a terrific career path for prep-school poseurs who are too dim for law school and too lazy to sell real estate. That lesson has been learned too well, and her heirs and heiresses are all around us.
Putin’s Priorities
Russian government seizes Audemars Piguet inventory.
In Closing
Today is the feast day of St. Gwynllyw Filwr, alternatively Gwynllyw Farfog, friend of King Arthur and patron saint of buying a vowel.
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