The Morning Dispatch: Putin Ratchets Up the Tension With Ukraine

Happy Thursday! That’s it, we’ve got about four good years left: Chris Martin announced yesterday that Coldplay will stop making new music as a band in 2025.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday it had issued an emergency use authorization for Paxlovid, Pfizer’s oral antiviral COVID-19 treatment. Clinical trials for the pill found it reduced the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization or death in high-risk adults by nearly 90 percent when taken within three days of symptom onset, and, as a protease inhibitor, its efficacy is likely not affected by variations to the coronavirus. The drug is expected to be available in pharmacies and hospitals in very limited quantities within days, but the White House said yesterday that, because of Paxlovid’s “complex chemistry,” it will take six to eight months to procure the 10 million treatment courses it purchased as Pfizer ramps up production.

• President Joe Biden announced his administration is extending its pause on federal student loan repayments another 90 days until May 1, 2022, because borrowers are “still coping with the impacts of the pandemic.” Biden had said in August his extension of the moratorium until January 31, 2022, would be the “final” one.

• The Treasury Department announced Wednesday it had issued several general licenses aimed at facilitating humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan while maintaining economic pressure on the Taliban and Haqqani Network. The move will ease certain sanctions on the Taliban and Haqqani Network provided the financial transactions are related to “humanitarian projects to meet basic human needs,” “civil society development,” education, or “environmental and natural resource protection.”

• The Supreme Court announced Wednesday it will hear oral arguments in Biden v. Missouri and Becerra v. Louisiana—challenges to the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large employers and vaccine mandate for health care workers at facilities that receive federal funding, respectively—on January 7, 2022.

• A pre-print, non-peer-reviewed study out of Scotland found that “early national data suggest that Omicron is associated with a two-thirds reduction in the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization when compared to Delta.” 

Is Putin About to Make His Move?

In a meeting of Russia’s top military commanders on Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin dedicated a significant portion of his hourlong remarks to attacking the U.S. and NATO’s presence in the region.

“We’re deeply concerned by the build-up of U.S. and NATO armed forces on our borders and by exercises, including unplanned military drills,” Putin said, accusing the U.S. of creating “guises” to provoke Moscow “thousands of kilometers” away from American territory. “If our Western counterparts continue to push with an aggressive stance, we’ll take military and technical action. We have the full right to respond to any unfriendly steps. We would like to protect our sovereignty and our defense.” 

During the same conference, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu alleged that American military contractors had shipped weaponry with “chemical components” into Ukraine in order to stage a “provocation” in the country’s  Donbass region—the site of ongoing fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby has since dismissed the accusation as “completely false.” 

The increasingly bellicose rhetoric from Putin and Shoigu comes amid Moscow’s massive military build-up near Ukraine’s border, raising concerns that the Kremlin is establishing the pretense for an invasion. 

“[Putin] has to sell his domestic audience on things. So in a lot of these cases, he is projecting—but he has to project to justify his own actions at home, to make it look like the U.S. is pushing him into war rather than the other way around,” Clint Watts, a former U.S. intelligence official and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told The Dispatch. “It’s consistent with policies of preemption. It’s also consistent with jihadists … who say that the West is invading Muslim lands and we are in a defensive posture, therefore we need to attack.” 

Watts sees many parallels between today and 2014. “I think this is highly consistent with what they did in Crimea,” he added. “There’s a pattern that’s pretty consistent, which is, when a Democrat is in power in the United States, then you use force to test their resolve and see if they’ll honor military defense and protection. Obama didn’t, and Biden doesn’t look like he’s going to.”

Russia’s foreign ministry published its desired mutual security guarantees from the U.S. and NATO last week—and indicated Wednesday it’d like to hold bilateral talks with both entities next month—but experts have warned against viewing the draft as a goodfaith proposal. One of Moscow’s demands, for example, is that neither side be permitted to position land-based intermediate and short-range missiles in territory that could threaten the other side. Under this requirement, Russia itself would have to reposition missiles. 

The draft also shifted the goalposts for what acceptable NATO engagement would look like in the region, calling on the defense organization to return to its 1997 status quo. Such a move would reverse many of NATO’s rotational deployments in Poland and the Baltics, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated was off the table in a Tuesday press conference..  (For more on the draft treaties, read this piece by former ambassadors Eric Edelman and Ian Kelly and a former under secretary of defense for policy, David Kramer, in The Dispatch.)

“Moscow has offered two different sets of demands,” Matthew Rojansky, director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, told The Dispatch. “Initially, the focus was on limiting further eastward NATO enlargement, particularly potential membership for Ukraine. Later, additional demands called for limits and even rollback of NATO presence in Eastern Europe, including on the territory of sovereign states which are already NATO members. Washington has shown no enthusiasm for any of Moscow’s demands, but the latter statement would be a clear nonstarter.”

Putin’s geopolitical posturing has been accompanied by Russian cyberattacks on Ukrainian civilian and government infrastructure, which over the past few weeks have grown in their severity and frequency. Hybrid warfare is expected to be a significant component in any eventual invasion, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Klon Kitchen told The Morning Dispatch earlier this month:

“If the Russians were to move into Ukraine, we would expect a pretty significant cyber element to that action in terms of disrupting Ukrainian command and control, their decision-making processes, and hacks against both military and civilian infrastructure,” Kitchen said. “I think that gray zone capability would feature prominently.”

Taken together, the uptick in cyber intrusions, combative—and, at times, erratic—rhetoric from Kremlin leadership, and the mobilization of troops and armaments signal the high likelihood of a Russian offensive into Ukraine come the new year. “They might still pull back at the last minute,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russian-born co-founder of both CrowdStrike and the Silverado Policy Accelerator, “but I think all the indications—both physically on the ground, as well as in cyberspace—are that they’re preparing for war.”

As we noted a few weeks ago, the Biden administration has threatened Putin with various multilateral economic sanctions in an effort to deter further aggression. But it seems increasingly unlikely the West can do anything to throw Moscow off course at this juncture. “I think it’s too late. I think if we had taken some measures maybe six months ago, we could have avoided this escalation,” Alperovitch told The Dispatch. “I don’t see any way out of this unless Putin just decides that this is not in his interests, which he may do.”

Rojansky concurred, arguing that, while the Biden team will pursue a diplomatic de-escalation, it’s unlikely to impact the Kremlin’s calculus. “U.S. and European officials are indicating very clearly that they see the Russian buildup as aimed at a military operation in January or February,” he said. “Putin may have decided to launch this attack regardless of how negotiations proceed. Or he may have taken no decision as yet.”

“The dilemma for the West,” Rojansky continued, “is how much to invest in negotiations versus how much to prepare for conflict. So far, the U.S., Europe and Ukraine itself are trying to balance both.”

House Democrats Heading to the Exits En Masse

It’s been a rough week for Democrats. One day after Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia dealt a potentially fatal blow to President Biden’s multitrillion dollar Build Back Better package on Fox News Sunday, two House Democrats—Reps. Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Lucille Roybal-Allard of California—announced that they will not seek reelection in 2022. A third, Rep. Albio Sires of New Jersey, did the same on Tuesday.

That trio brings the total number of House Democratic retirements thus far this cycle to 23, more than halfway to the 34 House GOP retirements that preceded the 2018 midterms where Democrats flipped a whopping 40 seats and retook the majority. And we still have 11 months to go.

It’s worth pointing out that “retiring,” in this context, is a catchall term for all House members who are not seeking reelection, encapsulating both those who are leaving politics entirely and lawmakers who are launching new bids for elected office. Reps. Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania and Tim Ryan of Ohio, for example, are each running for their respective states’ open Senate seats.

But every Democratic retirement is a gift to House Republicans, who have to flip only five seats in 2022 to retake the majority. The GOP has its own retirement problem in the Senate—five of 50 are hanging up their spikes, with potentially more to follow—and 12 Republican House members have also announced they won’t seek reelection. But midterm elections are historically very good for the party outside the White House, and most election forecasters are predicting that Biden’s consistently low approval ratings—driven by soaring inflation, a military defeat in Afghanistan, and a stalled domestic agenda—portend a gloomy midterm cycle for Democrats.

There are a number of reasons why a Democratic House member may want to call it quits right now. The few who still represent swing districts could have been deterred by poll numbers that suggest they have no chance of winning reelection. And as 2022 is a redistricting year, others have watched helplessly as Republican-controlled state legislatures carve up their districts for partisan gain. (The decision by Illinois’ heavily Democratic state legislature to do so, for example, played a large role in GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger announcing his retirement.) Even those in safe seats may look at the prospect of shifting to the minority for two to four years and decide it’s not worth the effort. And, of course, some may actually mean it when they say they’d rather spend more time with their family and make money than stick around in a broken institution that boasts a 77 percent disapproval rating.

Like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—the campaign arm of the House Democratic caucus—publicly maintains that all is well. “Incumbent [candidates] or not, we’re confident in our ability to win the House yet again,” DCCC spokesman Chris Taylor recently told Fox News. “House Democrats are heading into the midterms with record-breaking fundraising numbers, earlier than ever investments in organizing, and an agenda that’s wildly popular among battleground voters.”

But all is decidedly not well, and some Democratic members are blaming the DCCC—and its current chair, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York—for making an already bad hand demonstrably worse.

“I think Sean Patrick’s ‘leadership’—and please use air quotes on that—at the DCCC is the reason why we should not have elected colleagues running that organization,” one House Democrat told Politico last week, criticizing the committee’s decision to eschew kitchen table issues in its messaging and focus on controversial issues  like abortion and former President Donald Trump. “This is crazy to me that the DCCC is rolling out a playbook that they know doesn’t work and that they encouraged people in 2018 not to use,” another added.

To many candidates, last month’s gubernatorial election in Virginia served as a cautionary tale, with Democrat Terry McAuliffe demonstrating exactly how not to run a race in the post-Trump era. While Glenn Youngkin focused on issues  like K-12 education, public safety, and taxes, McAuliffe defined his campaign largely in opposition to the former president, and managed to lose a state Biden carried 54 percent to 44 percent in 2020.

The scariest prospect for Democrats, however, might be that they don’t have any better options. “In hindsight, it’s easy to say that McAuliffe shouldn’t have talked about Trump as much as he did, but it may also be that they didn’t really have a better possible strategy because they were on the wrong end of an enthusiasm disadvantage,” Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told The Dispatch. “So it may be that Trump ends up coming up more in 2022 Democratic messaging because they can’t bank on other things working for them.”

David Kochel, a Republican political strategist who has worked on numerous House campaigns, told The Dispatch Wednesday that, were he in DCCC Chairman Maloney’s shoes, his strategy “would be to listen a lot more to the moderate members who figured out how to win in Trump districts, and a lot less to liberals on Twitter.” 

“I’d have Abigail Spanberger on speed dial,” he said, referring to the Virginia congresswoman who carried a district in 2018 that Trump had won by nearly 7 points two years earlier. “And say, ‘What do you think we should do with this? And what do you think we should do with that?’” (A frustrated Spanberger told her colleagues after the 2020 election that Democrats “need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”)

When we wrote about the GOP’s retirement problem two years ago, Michael Steel—longtime press secretary for former House Speaker John Boehner—argued a higher rate of churn is healthy and in line with the Founders’ vision for public service. “We want younger, more dynamic members representing diverse backgrounds, new ideas, new energy,” he said.

In some ways, the tenet holds here as well. On an institutional level, the Democratic Party is unlikely to miss the 80-year-old Roybal-Allard or 86-year-old Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas—each of whom won their most recent election by at least 45 percentage points—all that much. 

But in mass-retirement elections, parties can lose some of those younger, more dynamic members, too. For Republicans in 2020, it was then-Rep. Will Hurd of Texas. And this week, Democrats lost someone they likely viewed as a future leader in centrist Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a 43-year-old former Defense Department official who has won three competitive races in Florida and is serving on the January 6 Select Committee.

“I think it’s hard for people in politics—and especially in Washington—to understand that someone at my age would ‘retire’ … without having some sort of scandal, or without fear of losing a reelection, or without immediately running for another position or job,” Murphy told Politico this week. “But really, right now I need to be with my family.”

Worth Your Time

• Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas is “a GOP anomaly,” Olivia Beavers observes in a Politico profile of the congressman. “In the roiling cauldron of Republican politics, where one perceived misstep can get a lawmaker scorched by the ex-president or the entire right-wing online ecosystem, Crenshaw’s candor stands out,” she writes. “He sparked ire on the right earlier this month for comments—caught on tape in his home state of Texas—that separated his fellow House Republicans into two camps: ‘Performance artists … ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well,’ and ‘legislators.’ … Anyone who listens to Crenshaw and concludes he’s moving away from Trump, though, isn’t listening closely enough. As he sees it, his party needs to back up its rhetorical bombs with facts. When fellow Republicans can’t do that, he’d prefer they pipe down.”

• The New York Times’ Neil Irwin has an interesting article this week looking at the potential parallels between the economies of the 1980s and 2020s—if the Federal Reserve pulls off its pivot. Noting the December 1981 unemployment and inflation rates were 8.5 and 8.9 percent, respectively, Irwin describes how then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker used interest rates to, one at a time, tame them both. “What would a full reverse Reagan economy look like over the next few years?” he asks. “Over the course of 2022, inflation starts to fade. Consumers shift some of their spending back toward services and away from physical goods, corporate supply chain managers figure out how to adjust to whatever changes in demand prove permanent, and demand moderates as the Fed moves toward somewhat higher interest rates and Congress does not repeat its pandemic spending binge of the first half of 2021. But, crucially, in the best-case scenario for Mr. Biden and the Democrats, the Fed doesn’t overdo it. Just as the Volcker Fed was able to achieve a simultaneous drop in unemployment and inflation in 1983 and 1984, the Powell Fed faces the delicate task of trying to bring down inflation while not acting so aggressively as to undermine further improvement in the job market.”

• In a piece for Wisdom of Crowds, Shadi Hamid tries to understand why those who have the least reason to fear COVID-19 are generally also the ones who fear it the most. “[This is] understandable in light of prevailing moods. Feeling like you’re a victim even if you’re not is the dominant cultural sensibility of the day,” he writes. “This innate disposition can cause problems when denied its natural outlets. If a particular segment of the population, on average, is less likely to believe in God, belong to an organized religion, have children, or be married, then they will, on average, need to look elsewhere for anchors and pivots. And we know that meaning can be derived from panic, fear, and even illness, particularly if you believe your suffering is in the service of the common good.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• On Wednesday’s Dispatch Podcast, Sarah, Steve, David, and Jonah discuss the coming Omicron wave, Joe Manchin and the state of Build Back Better, the latest on Russia and Ukraine, and a whole lot more.

• Jonah’s Wednesday G-File (🔒) champions the return of the normals. “The majority of Americans are better than their political representatives and, eventually, their hunger for sanity will prevail,” he writes. “In the short term, we will keep zig-zagging between parties overpromising the normal and underdelivering it. But so long as the system works, odds are the normal will inherit the future.”

• Nancy French and David French have another follow-up in their series on Kanakuk Kamps. Former counselor Pete Newman is serving two life sentences plus 30 years for sexually abusing young boys. In this piece, the pair report that the camp blocked a recommendation to fire Newman from his supervisor years before Newman admitted he’d abused campers.

• Also on the site today, Chris Stirewalt looks back on a week of notable quotes from the world of politics.

Let Us Know

Barring something truly extraordinary happening in the next few hours, tomorrow’s TMD will be off the news and focused on the holidays. 

To that end, what are your family’s holiday traditions? We’ll include some of our favorites in Friday’s newsletter!

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).