Posts published in March 2022

Is Fox News’s LTC Daniel L. Davis (Ret.) on Putin’s Payroll?

Is Fox News’s LTC Daniel L. Davis (Ret.) on Putin’s Payroll?

By John R Guardiano on March 6, 2022

It’s not just Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Fox’s pro-Putin appeasers include a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel named Daniel Davis.

There has been a lot of criticism of Fox News primetime hosts Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson for their jarring pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine commentary.

This criticism is well-deserved. But retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, a featured Fox News military commentator, is a far worse Putin shill or stooge.

And, alarmingly, insofar as I have seen, Davis’s pro-Putin propaganda on Fox goes unchallenged by the network’s anchors and reporters:

I report and truth decides. Here is Davis on Fox News, Feb. 24, 2022:

Davis: I think that we’re really misreading what’s going on with Putin here. I don’t think that he’s after trying to rebuild the Soviet Union. I think he means what he’s been saying for 15 years: that NATO and Ukraine is a redline that he will fight to prevent. And he proved it in 2008 with Georgia.

He proved it in 2014 with Crimea. And even as recently as last December, he was saying, “You guys just aren’t believing me. I was serious about this. This is a redline.” And then when he started building up these forces, he was showing us.

We [the United States] had every opportunity to just acknowledge reality and we should have pulled the NATO offer off the table for Ukraine.

That could probably have been the one thing that might have prevented this war entirely. But instead, we wanted to hold with principles and stuff and now the people of Ukraine are paying for that.

Now, let me be very clear: Nobody is responsible for the blood except for Vladimir Putin. Nobody. But we could have mitigated this. We could have.

Fox News Anchor Trace Gallagher: And, you know, Tulsi Gabbard kind of echoed that, Colonel, if you will. She was saying, you know, maybe somebody should have listened at least a little bit to what the President of Russia was saying.

Because if you were saying: Listen, I don’t want weapons. I don’t want NATO weapons that close to my country.

And you know, an example somebody gave tonight was: listen, the United States didn’t want Cuba to have NATO weapons [sic] that close to their country. So, you know, countries are very territorial and they don’t want that.

So, nobody is letting Putin off the hook by any stretch here, Colonel. But what you’re saying is that there might have been a pathway to resolve, earlier in this diplomatic debate.

Davis: One-hundred percent. I’ve been saying for months on this network that that very thing right there: that we had a shot to deescalate this and remove Vladimir Putin’s reason for actually launching an invasion.

Notice: Davis gives a quick and obligatory, pro forma denunciation of Putin as the person responsible for the Russian war against Ukraine. However, the thrust of his commentary is altogether different.

NATO Expansion. The thrust of Davis’s commentary is that America and NATO could have stoped Putin from invading Ukraine if they had simply recognized his “red line” concerning NATO membership.

But this is patently untrue, and we know it is untrue because Putin himself has explicitly said that his concern about Ukraine extends far beyond NATO. Putin views Ukraine as an allegedly lost Russia territory whose sovereignty and independence must be destroyed regardless of what becomes of NATO.

As I’ve explained here and in the Wall Street Journal, NATO’s expansion after the Cold War resulted from Russian threats and aggression; it did not cause Russian threats and aggression.

For Putin,

NATO expansion was always a convenient pretext, but never the reason, for Russia’s invasions of Ukraine… NATO [moreover], saved Europe from Russian military domination, and it would have deterred Russia this time had Ukraine been a NATO member.

Yet, despite this clear and unambiguous history, Gallagher adds insult to injury by agreeing with Davis (!) and saying “somebody should have listened at least a little bit to what the President of Russia was saying.”

Cuba. Gallagher then references Cuba and says, essentially, that when, back in 1962, the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba, the United States took this as a hostile act. So of course, he argues, Russia views NATO encroachment in its near abroad as a hostile act.

Finally, Davis chimes in:

We have to acknowledge that if Russia was trying to have a military alliance with Mexico, and they were gonna put Russian troops on the ground there, there is no way we would ever be satisfied and okay with that.

And it is unrealistic for us to expect Putin to have the exact same thing on his border and be okay with it.

What Davis and Gallagher conveniently ignore: NATO is a defensive alliance of free, sovereign, and independent states.

Putin knows full well that Poland and other NATO countries have absolutely zero intention of ever invading Russia. Nor do non-NATO countries, such as Ukraine, have any interest in invading Russia or acting as a platform for a NATO invasion of Russia—and again, Putin knows this.

Historically speaking, in fact, the East European countries have never threatened Russia; Russia has threatened them, and that remains true today.

The Soviet Union, by contrast, was bent on world domination, which is why President Kennedy, in 1962, acted to ensure that Russian missiles were removed from Cuba.

So no, NATO in Europe near Russia today is not at all the equivalent of the Soviet Union in the Western hemisphere near the United States at the height of the Cold War. This is an utterly false equivalence.

Nor does Mexico have reason to fear an American invasion, which is why there never will be any Russian troops in Mexico. Again, this is a ludicrous analogy divorced from all political and historical reality.

Davis goes on:

All we have to do is just treat Russia the way we did all during the Cold War… We cooperated with them and we had an understanding: We wouldn’t get into their territory and they wouldn’t get into ours, and that was that balance there.

We have to now recognize that this is not 1994 anymore, and we can’t just tell them what is gonna happen, or we’re gonna have an even worse situation than we have now.

Again, this is factually and historically inaccurate and it is the counsel of appeasement. Seldom has so much disinformation and blatant pro-Putin propaganda been crammed into so few words.

What Davis euphemistically calls “cooperation” is appeasement, and that is not what guided American and NATO policy during the Cold War.

Instead, the United States and NATO checked the Soviets—in Greece, Turkey, Korea, Berlin, Cuba, Africa, Asia, Central America, and around the globe. And it is because we checked the Soviets that the Cold War ended and Eastern Europe was freed of Russian domination.

Yet, Davis says that Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, is “their territory,” meaning Russian territory. Putin, of course, agrees; but this is a lie. The countries of Eastern Europe—including Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine—are free and sovereign states, not “Russian territory” that ought to be ruled by Moscow.

So I ask you: is Daniel Davis a Russian stooge? Is he on Putin’s payroll? Or is he simply too historically illiterate and ill-informed to separate fact from fiction?

More to the point, why does Fox continue to feature Davis as a military commentator when he spouts such blatantly pro-Putin, anti-America propaganda? Does this enrich the public dialogue and debate? Is this fair and balanced?

Feature photo credit: Fox News military commentator Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis (L) and Fox News anchor Trace Gallagher (R), captured via screen shots of a Fox News broadcast, Feb. 24, 2022.

Why Has the West Been So Late to Arm Ukraine?

Why Has the West Been So Late to Arm Ukraine?

By John R Guardiano on March 5, 2022

America and NATO viewed Ukraine through the prism of Iraq and Afghanistan—two countries that seemed to lack the will to fight for themselves. They did not realize: Ukraine is very different.

“We must get aid to Ukraine NOW,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). “No half-measures.”

“Please NATO leaders, send all MIG fighter jets that we have—70 altogether, 27 alone in Poland—to Ukraine right now. NOW!” added Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia under President Obama and now a Professor of Political Science at Stanford.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must “put the Ukraine aid bill on the floor Monday for the U.S. to send desperately needed military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine now,” agreed Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

“Waiting on the congressional calendar is unacceptable when people are dying,” he tweeted.

Finally, albeit quite belatedly, America and NATO are arming the Ukrainians. What started out as a token gesture designed simply to show solidarity and friendship with Ukraine has morphed into a serious and sustained effort to enable the Ukrainians to fight off a brutal Russian invasion.

Will it be too little too late? Let us hope not. But it is instructive to understand why the West has been so tardy and myopic about the moral, military, and geo-strategic necessity of arming Ukraine early and earnestly.

The reason is Iraq and Afghanistan. Old generals sometimes mistakenly fight the last war. America and NATO viewed Ukraine through the prism of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The West’s two most recent wars required many American and NATO “boots on the ground” for more than a decade to achieve, ultimately, very little. Western policymakers feared that Ukraine would be another allegedly hopeless cause not worth the hassle and the expense.

The expectation was that, in the face of a vastly superior Russian military force, the Ukrainians would run, hide, and fold—just as, candidly, many Iraqis and many Afghans had abandoned the battlefield in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“Three U.S. officials have told Newsweek they expect Ukraine’s capital Kyiv to fall to incoming Russian forces within days, and the country’s resistance to be effectively neutralized soon thereafter…

“They expect Kyiv to be taken within 96 hours, and then the leadership of Ukraine to follow in about a week’s time.”

That was written Feb. 24, in the early hours of the Russian invasion. Today, 10 days later, March 5, retired Army four-star General Jack Keane says that Russian military forces are “not even close” to Kyiv.

Ukrainians Fight. “They have not been able to encircle the city, which is their plan,” Keane told Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot on Fox News.

The Ukrainians have held them up… You just can’t give them enough credit… They’re standing off a formidable force in the north [of Ukraine], and that force has stalled.

The [Russians] have lost their operational momentum, and there’s nobody behind them.

I mean, there’s not 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 troops that they’re [the Russians] gonna be able to bring up here. They [the Russians] have committed their forces…

So when Zelensky’s screaming [that] he needs arms and ammunition, and the rest of it, we better be getting it to him.

Because he has real opportunity here to do some serious damage to the Russians, and it certainly, [will] impact what an occupation would look like.

Volodymyr Zelensky. Western policymakers, obviously, did not know or understand Ukraine. They did not know Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and they did not understand the Ukrainian people.

Far from running, hiding, and folding, Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have been profiles in courage, tenacity and determination.

“I need ammunition, not a ride,” said Zelensky when the United States offered to evacuate him from the country, warning that Russian mercenaries had been sent to find and assassinate him.

France 24 reports from Kyiv:

“Our fighting spirit is 120 percent. We’re ready to defend our country. “We’re not going to surrender. Never,” says Mikhail, a military engineer.

“Eight years of war in Donbas and still Putin hasn’t admitted his troops were there. But in those eight years, the Ukrainian military has learned how to fight its vile enemy. And now the Russians are suffering heavy losses.”

Another soldier says, “We’re not afraid. We’ve grown tired of fear. We have no other choice but to defend our country. We have to win for our next generation of children—for our future and our freedom.”

The New York Times reports:

In a matter of days, Kyiv went from a busy, cosmopolitan European capital to a war zone—with many citizens abandoning their day jobs and taking up the arms being shipped in en masse.

Now, the newly armed civilians and members of various paramilitary groups are fighting under the loose command of the military in an organization called the Territorial Defense Forces.

“The national call to arms and the mobilization of ordinary citizens to repel the Russian invader does not have any obvious parallels in recent global conflicts,”Mats Berdal, a professor of conflict and security studies at King’s College London, said.

Indeed, Ukraine ain’t Iraq or Afghanistan, and Western policymakers should have known this. Iraq and Afghanistan were, in many ways, civil wars within existing countries. Ukraine, by contrast, is being invaded by a foreign country, Russia, that seeks to conquer and subjugate it.

Ukrainians recall the horrid brutality of life under Soviet occupation during the Cold War, notes Eugene Bondarenko, a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literature.

Thus they see Russia’s latest attempt to subjugate them “as nothing less than an existential threat… Putin has come to destroy Ukrainian culture, language, society and statehood. That’s why Ukraine fights,” Bondarenko explains.

Cohen and Clausewitz. “Why did so many highly intelligent and educated observers get so much wrong?” asks Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

In large part because of the conventional Western “focus on technology at the expense of the human element in war.” Cohen references Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War to understand why Ukraine ain’t Iraq or Afghanistan.

“War,” Cohen writes, echoing Clausewitz,

is a contest of wills; it is unpredictable; it is the domain of accident and contingency; nothing goes as planned; and events are smothered in a fog created by misinformation and fear.

Patriotic fervor, hatred of the invader, and knowledge of place and home weigh a great deal, and thus far so they have.

But a passionate desire for freedom and independence, coupled with an indomitable will to win, can carry a people on so far.

Brute Russian force and a clear Russian willingness to commit war crimes ultimately will prevail—unless America and NATO can rush arms and equipment to Ukraine fast enough to alter the political and military equation.

Will the West succeed or will it be a day late and a dollar short, as they say? We don’t know. Time will tell. Stay tuned.

What we do know is that the war in Ukraine is very different from the recent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the West needs to respond accordingly.

Feature photo credit: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (R), courtesy of Newsweek.

Why the West Mustn’t Give Putin an ‘Off-Ramp’ or a ‘Face-Saving’ Way Out

Why the West Mustn’t Give Putin an ‘Off-Ramp’ or a ‘Face-Saving’ Way Out

By John R Guardiano on March 1, 2022

Defeat and discredit Putin so that a new Russian leader and a new Russian leadership class can emerge.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had barely begun when the councils of caution warned that we must tread carefully and give Putin an “off-ramp” or a way that might allow him to “back down while retaining some semblance of face.”

It sounds so reasonable and so judicious—especially after Putin intimated that he might be prepared to use nuclear weapons. But in fact, this is exactly the wrong approach.

Giving Putin an “off-ramp” and allowing him to “save face” will allow him to retain power in Russia. It will inspire and motivate like-minded Russian politicians who wish to inherit his mantle of political authoritarianism, military imperialism, personal plunder, and misrule.

It will mean that Putin will live, politically, to fight another day and to continue menacing Europe, America, and the West.

Thus the only wise and acceptable course of action is to defeat and discredit Putin: so that he is replaced by a new Russian leader who respects international norms, international law, and the territorial sovereignty of free and independent states.

The Russian Elite. This is achievable. Russia, after all, is not Iraq or Afghanistan. Despite its myriad problems, Russia has a well-educated elite that can assume the reins of political power and exercise political authority.

But this will not happen, and it cannot happen, unless and until Putin is defeated and thoroughly discredited in the eyes of his countrymen, especially the Russian elite.

As we have noted, Putin serves at the pleasure of a rich and cosseted Russian mafia oligarchy. If and when this oligarchy finds that Putin is bad for business, it will force him from power.

But that won’t happen if we insist on creating a safe space for Vladimir and a zone of comfort in which he can “save face.”

As for Putin’s brandishing of nuclear weapons, perspective is needed.

First, nuclear saber rattling is nothing new for the Russians. During the Cold War, the Soviets often intimated that they might use nukes, or that a nuclear conflagration might result should America and the West not accede to their demands. So take their latest threat with a big grain of salt.

Second, as Russia’s poor military performance in Ukraine thus far is amply demonstrating, the Russian military is subpar.

Their conventional military units are formidable on paper, but surprisingly weak in battle. Nuclear weapons and cyber warfare capabilities are about all the Russians have to intimidate and frighten the West. So of course they play that card diplomatically and in communications designed for public consumption.

But in truth, as Alexander S. Vindman points out:

Despite Putin’s bluster, the rules of great-power competition and confrontation have not changed since the beginning of the Cold War. But we have forgotten how to confront a belligerent, saber-rattling Russia.

A previous generation of policymakers would have managed tensions while standing up to intimidation and calling out incendiary rhetoric. In truth, Russian leaders have no interest in a nuclear war or a bilateral conventional conflict that they would certainly lose.

The West has far more room to maneuver than it appears to grasp.

In other words: nuclear saber-rattling by Putin is a reflection of Russian weakness, not Russian strength.

The bottom line: America and Europe need a new Russian leader and a new type of Russian leadership. We need Russian leaders who, at a minimum, respect international norms, international law, and the territorial sovereignty of other states.

But this objective never will be achieved if we insist on accepting Putin’s misrule as inevitable and as something that we must recognize and accommodate.

“Off-ramps” and “face-saving measures” for Putin are inimical to achieving the West’s desired end state: a Russia free of Putin and Putinism.

Feature photo credit: Associated Press photo of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (L) and jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (R) courtesy of Sky News.