Polling shows a voting public that wants to have it all ways, never mind the consequences.

The U.S. media and Washington political establishment has been unified in condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in lauding the Ukrainian resistance.

Putin is not a military general. He is a modernist leader, a trained spymaster and strategist who understands that war is a continuation of politics by other means (Clausewitz). Accordingly, if we want to grasp Putin’s motives we should refrain from trying to assess Russia’s military campaign in terms of ‘strict military objectives.’ We should instead look at the military campaign as a political instrument that is set to mobilize a global and regional geopolitical shift and on a mammoth scale.

In my report on “Day Sixteen” of the Ukraine-Russia war a couple of days ago, I provided a brief summary of the opening segment of the 9 March edition of the Russian political talk show “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov.” I directed special attention to the words of Mosfilm Director Karen Shakhnazarov, who set the tone for an unusually grave discussion of war prospects and political stability within Russia.

In central Singapore there’s a small hill with a locked door in one side. A guide will open it and take you into the darkness of an underground passage which leads eventually into a dimly-lit set of twenty-six subterranean rooms. This was once the bunker which formed the command-and-control centre from which British generals organized the defense of the strategic colony in the weeks after Pearl Harbor.

It’s easy now to claim Putin was always going to invade Ukraine and that unless the West stood up to him, this would simply be the first step in rebuilding the Soviet empire. But maybe it’s much simpler than that; maybe, having ignored his security concerns for so long, we (the West), chose to call his bluff, and he wasn’t bluffing. Maybe we are at least partly responsible for this mess.

Normally when the U.S. and its allies are involved in a war they’ll at least pay lip service to the notion that they have nothing but good will for the people of the enemy nation.

The administration’s highest priority right now should be to incentivize the Ukrainian government to conclude a compromise peace agreement with Russia to provide Putin with a face-saving “exit ramp” to allow Russia to end the war.

When war erupts, we are tempted to assume that diplomacy has failed. In fact, most states use force and diplomacy simultaneously. This assessment applies negotiation analysis methods to the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine—and, indirectly, NATO—to determine the likelihood of a negotiated ceasefire agreement that would end the Russian invasion and open the door to a more comprehensive peace deal. As of this writing, we assess that the probability of such a ceasefire is very unlikely (5-20%) but not an “almost no chance” outcome (1%-5%) that can be fully dismissed.

We hold in our hands vast power to both create and destroy, the likes of which have never been seen in history.