i’ll be happy to give you one example of what I think Biden is doing right. First, let me give you a quick critical thinking lesson. I taught critical thinking in the California state university system for 20 years, so you are getting something valuable here for free. it’s important to recognize the difference between metaphorical abstractions and concrete examples. The “example“ you gave me was only a metaphor. There is no actual bud that could have been nipped here. My guess is that the rest of your list contains nothing but metaphors of this sort. compare those metaphors to these concrete examples taken from an article by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
The Biden administration . . .assembled a powerful package of deep and broad economic sanctions and warned the Russian leader that if he invaded Ukraine, he’d be betting his whole farm — the economic viability of his country and regime. Tragically, Putin bet the farm, and the results have been swift and merciless.
The Russian ruble-based stock market has been closed ever since Russia’s major financial institutions were either placed under sanctions or thrown off the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system, Barron’s reported, but “the dollar-denominated secondary listings of Russian companies in London are still trading. The destruction of market value is astonishing.” It added that shares in Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, “have collapsed more than 99 percent since mid-February, when its stock traded at around $14.” Last Wednesday in London trading, Barron’s noted, “the shares bottomed out at 1 cent.”
On Thursday the rating agencies Fitch and Moody’s “downgraded Russia by six notches to ‘junk’ status, saying Western sanctions threw into doubt its ability to service debt and would weaken the economy,” Reuters reported.
Ever since Putin faced sanctions in 2014 for annexing Crimea and fomenting rebellion in eastern Ukraine, he has been amassing reserves of foreign currency and gold — some $630 billion worth — to try to insulate Russia from more global sanctions by giving his central bank all the ammo it needed to protect the value of the ruble. Or so he thought.
“It turns out that Russia’s foreign reserves strategy had a major flaw: About half of the money was held overseas in foreign banks — and now Russia can’t get to it” because of the sanctions, noted Fortune. So the ruble savings of many Russians are being ravaged.
Bloomberg quoted Marina Gretskaya, a 32-year-old Russian living in London who moved last year to work in communications. She kept a ruble savings account in an online Russian bank, Tinkoff. Two weeks ago, her assets there were worth $7,400. On Monday, the ruble plummeted more than 30 percent against the dollar. That evaporated more than $2,000 from her savings. “It’s a month’s salary,” she said. The same is almost certainly true for tens of millions of Russians — and it’s just starting.
Oh, and by the way, in this wired world, guess who owns a significant portion of Russia’s commercial airline fleet. Not Russia.
Roughly two-thirds of Russia’s commercial airliners were made by Boeing (334 jets) or Airbus (304), Reuters reported. A significant portion of those are owned by Irish leasing companies. The Dublin-based AerCap, the world’s biggest airplane-leasing company, owns “152 aircraft across Russia and Ukraine valued at almost $2.4 billion,” The Irish Times reported. In addition, the Dublin-based companies SMBC Aviation Capital and Avolon own 48 aircraft between them that are leased to Russian airlines.
E.U. sanctions require those companies to repossess all those planes on lease to Russian airlines by the end of March. And Boeing and Airbus announced that they will no longer service or provide spare parts for any of these planes. On Saturday, Russia’s state airline, Aeroflot, said that it would suspend all international flights because of “additional circumstances that prevent the performance of flights.” Domestic flights are sure to follow.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/opinion/putin-ukraine-china.html?referringSource=articleShare
Note that this list contains lots of proper names of real things, not metaphorical flowers. (AerCap, SWIFT system, Sberbank etc.) it also contains specific numbers describing changes in those things. ( Sberbank shares are now worth 1 cent etc.) What these names and numbers show is that Biden correctly predicted what Putin was going to do, and formulated a complex system of international strategies in response. We are still in danger, of course, but Biden has a strategy for dealing with that danger, which is better than any other strategy I can imagine. This artful maneuvering is not the sort thing that could be managed by a senile man.
