Strategists do not want to call World War Three what it is!

Illinois- Effingham Daily News echo opinion

Vladimir Putin is violating International Law ... no different than Adolf Hitler. Hundreds of innocent people are being killed every day with illegal weapons by the Russians.

Czar envy: Putin looking at tsarist-era weapons of liberation.

I applaud the actions taken to date, but it is not enough. We need to stop buying Russian oil. We also need to join with our allies to put in place a no fly zone. And if that is not effective then we need to commit military assets.
Yes, stopping the purchase of Russian oil will increase our cost of living. But is it cheaper to experience higher prices today or experience the costs of war and the cost of American lives tomorrow?

I was watching the World Wars three-part series on the History Channel and cannot believe the similarity between today and the Nazi rise to power. Putin is Hitler. But the question now is Biden our Churchill or is he our Chamberlain? And is the U.S. and NATO today walking down the same path Europe took prior to World War II?  Action is the lesser of two evils. Let’s save civilization by action today and not repeat history. (IMO: World War Three began in Syria.)

History taught us, that the world could have stopped Hitler, but did not do so, ... and today we can stop Putin!

Write or call your elected representatives today to urge they take action now!

Darrell Dunteman, Bushnell, IL

(I grew up near Shumway.)

Vladimir Putin: the 21st century evidence of reincarnation of Adolf Hitler?

And this....from The New York Times:

Ilya Matveev is the Russian political scientist who recently described the impact of the West’s sanctions on his country as “30 years of economic development thrown into the bin.”

Matveev is not exaggerating. Economists expect the Russian economy to contract by at least 15 percent of G.D.P. this year. Inflation is spiking. An exodus of Russian professionals is underway. Stories of shortages and long lines for basic consumer goods abound.

The U.S. and its allies have turned to sanctions as a way of taking action against Russia’s atrocities without direct military intervention. But to describe these sanctions as anything short of all-out economic warfare is euphemistic. Measures like these might be cloaked in the technocratic language of finance and economics, but the immiseration they cause is anything but abstract.

Nicholas Mulder is a historian at Cornell University and the author of the terrifyingly relevant new book “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War.”

In it, Mulder focuses on the last time economic warfare was waged at the scale we’re witnessing today, the period between World War I and World War II. And the book’s central lesson is this: We ultimately don’t know what’s going to happen when sanctions of this magnitude collide with the ideologies, myths and political dynamics of a given country. They could persuade the targeted country to back down. But they could also make it so desperate that it becomes more aggressive or lashes out — as Germany and Japan did on the eve of World War II.

So this is a discussion about what kind of weapon sanctions are, whether they actually achieve their goals and how they might shape the future of the Russia-Ukraine conflict (IMO: aka "war") — and the world. We also explore how sanctions “weaponize inflation,” whether they could lead to Vladimir Putin’s downfall in Russia, the toll they have taken on the Russian economy, how the West can leverage its sanctions to help bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, whether a European energy embargo could backfire, how this economic war is destabilizing countries around the world, the humanitarian crisis U.S. sanctions are helping create in Afghanistan, and what a foreign policy that didn’t rely so heavily on sanctions could look like.

This episode is guest hosted by Rogé Karma, the staff editor for “The Ezra Klein Show.” Rogé has been with the show since July 2019, when it was based at Vox. He works closely with Ezra on everything related to the show, from editing to interview prep to guest selection. 

Listen to the whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)

Maine Writer postscript- Ukrainians are fighting for all of Europe and World War Three began in 2015, when Vladimir Putin ordered Russia to intervene and invade in Syria.