March 4th, 2022: The State of the Union, and the State of the War in Ukraine
This week, Paul Brandus shares the news following a week of open conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the State of the Union address from President Biden, the latest environmental report, and an economic update.
President Biden’s State of the Union address — with Russia’s war Ukraine topic one.
The war intensifies — and as the casualties pile up, Vladimir Putin says it’s going according to plan.
And disturbing news on climate change — perhaps the most alarming report yet.
I’m Paul Brandus — you’re listening to West Wing Reports from Washington — it’s Friday, March 4th.
Vladimir Putin’s comment that the war — in his mind — was going well came in a 90-minute phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron.
A French report says the call was quote “not so friendly” — Putin intends to stick with it — and when the call was over Macron let it be known that the worst was yet to come.
It’s already horrific of course — death raining down on Ukraine’s cities — with schools and apartment buildings hit. The sound of that explosion from a CBS News crew — which also spoke with a grief stricken man whose wife was killed.
Casualty counts are impossible to verify — Ukraine says more than two-thousand civilians have been killed. As for troop deaths, Russia admits it has lost more than five hundred - -but Ukraine says Russian deaths are at least seven-thousand — while the Pentagon here says the number is somewhere in between.
This — is called the fog of war, by the way — we’ll never know the actual numbers, What we DO know — is that the war is now in its second week — appears to be getting worse - with no end, for now, in sight.
Ukraine took the first eleven minutes of this year’s Sate of the Union — a huge chunk of time on a topic that has reshaped discussions about national security, the economy and energy policy — and the Biden presidency itself. The president spoke of how NATO — the North Atlantic military alliance — seems more united than it has been in decades:
That’s not all. Germany — announced a big boost in defense spending and rolled out plans to move away from being dependent on Russian energy. There’s talk now that Finland, and Sweden might join NATO — and together, the U-S and it allies lowered a swift and harsh hammer on the Russian economy. All of this has angered Putin — he even put his nuclear force in alert — a scary throwback to the darkest days of the Cod War.
At the United Nations — a vote to condemn the Russian invasion was overwhelming — just five countries voted to support Putin, including pariah states like North Korea, Syria and the puppet state of Belarus.
An overwhelming vote indeed — but — two major countries abstained from voting — China and India. The Western world is unused and firmly opposes the Russians, but China and India could be economic lifelines to keep the Putin regime afloat. China is already buying more oil from Russia than from Saudi Arabia, for example — and will also likely buy whatever natural gas that Russia can no longer sell to the West.
Where do we go from here? Putin remains defiant — and his foreign minister — Sergei Lavrov — said he’s willing to talk anytime with Ukrainian officials. That prompted this response from one Ukrainian lawmaker:
Gotta love that guy — that kind of defiance — and the Russians think they’re going to win the war?
There was more to the State of the Union than the war, of course. The economy has been growing rapidly and job creation has been at all-time highs — but inflation is the worst in decades.
Biden acknowledges the pain — and in the days after his speech, oil prices hit triple digits — food, housing, everything’s up.
He said the pandemic is easing — and things are getting back to normal — that’ll help the economy.
And he hasn’t given up in his Build Back Better plan — but look for it to be packaged in smaller pieces that he hopes will have a better chance of getting passed.
The president’s approval — in both aggregators — Real Clear Politicds and FiveThirty eight — puts his approval at just over 41-percent. It’s a sign that the Democrats are likely to lose the House, and possibly the Senate in the November midterms.
If you’ve never been in a hurricane — that’s what they can sound like — a frightening sound. Future storms could be even more intense — just one part of a big new global report on climate change — it says things are getting worse faster than the world is adapting.
And buckle up — the report says things are going to get worse, and faster — it predicts the world will be sicker, hungrier, poorer, gloomier and way more dangerous in the next two decades. More heat, more storms, more flooding in some areas, more drought in others.
What a gloomy week this has been. But there have been some bright spots.
Since January of last year, nearly seven million jobs have been added to the U.S. economy — seven million.
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As we wrap up this week, I wanna take you back to 1983 — something happened in the first week of March that year that is suddenly quite relevant today.
That of course, Ronald Reagan — and in one of the most famous speeches of his presidency, he referred to the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire.” He said that communism was morally corrupt. The year before he told the British Parliament that “the march of freedom and democracy” would leave the Soviet Union and what it stood for on the “ash heap of history.” And he was right.
It’s something to think about as we watch Russia — and its once and forever KGB man Vladimir Putin — invade Ukraine and threaten the rest of us.
