Armas Weekend Reader
12-13 March 2022
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This week: war, Gen X, media malpractice, Cormac McCarthy, and Japanese school lunches. Let’s go —
1) “If the twin premises of neoconservatism have been shown wrong by events, then the twin premises of the anti-interventionist New Right — that America will be fine without any engagement abroad, and the world will allow us a peaceful withdrawal from the same — are being proven wrong this very moment.”
2) “Republicans have increasingly been talking about becoming the party of the multiracial working class. This is less far-fetched than you might think. After all, in a loose sense they already are.”
3) “Amid this escalation, experts can spin out an infinite number of branching scenarios on how this might end. But scores of war games conducted for the U.S. and allied governments and my own experience as the U.S. national intelligence officer for Europe suggest that if we boil it down, there are really only two paths toward ending the war: one, continued escalation, potentially across the nuclear threshold; the other, a bitter peace imposed on a defeated Ukraine that will be extremely hard for the United States and many European allies to swallow.”
https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/03/how-does-this-end-pub-86570
4) “Even now, it might seem odd that the FBI made Halper, then a septuagenarian Cambridge University professor, a linchpin of its top-secret counterintelligence probe codenamed ‘Crossfire Hurricane.’ But a closer look at Halper’s life and work makes that decision seem inevitable. Stefan Halper is the Zelig of modern American political scandal – a chameleon-like, unusually ubiquitous figure who keeps appearing when mischief is afoot.”
5) “As the foreign forces dug in, Ukrainian intelligence got wind of the Russian plan: to send 18 Il-76 transport aircraft into Ukraine from Belarus. Sixty miles to the west, Lt. Kharchenko’s unit of 48 paratroopers jumped into three helicopters and sped toward Hostomel. Their mission: get close enough to the landing strip to take out at least the first Il-76 so no other pilots would dare land.”