Star News Network: Questions Swirl Around Law Enforcement’s Response to Uvalde Shooting; AP: SRO Driving Nearby, Not at Campus

This artcle orginally appeared in the Star News Network at https://thestarnewsnetwork.com/2022/05/27/questions-swirl-around-law-enforcements-response-to-uvalde-shooting-ap-sro-driving-nearby-not-at-campus/)

The director of the southern section of the Texas Department of Public Safety cut short his Thursday press conference as reporters shouted questions at him about why local law enforcement was ineffective for the hour after Tuesday’s spree shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School as gunshot victims languished inside. The crisis ended when Border Patrol Tactical officers arrived, engaged shooter Salvador Ramos, and killed him.

DPS Regional Director Victor Escalon: “One more, one more question, please.”

Reporter 1: “Eyewitnesses and some parents of the students were urging that the police go in while you were waiting for a tactical SWAT team. Even some parents were asking to borrow police armor, so they could launch a counterassault on the school.”

Escalon: I have heard that information, but we have not verified it yet.

Reporter 2: What haven’t you verified?

Escalon: “We have not verified that that is a true statement or not, or is it just a rumor out there – so, you got to understand, we’re getting a lot of information. We’re trying to track down what is true. We want to vet it.

That’s all I have for questions. Thank you so much, so look, we appreciate the questions.

Reporter 3: What were your officers doing between 11:44 and 12:44?

Escalon: I got you. Yes, sir. I have taken all of your questions into consideration. We will have updates.

Reporter 3: “We’ve been given a lot of bad information – why don’t you clear this all up? Why don’t you explain to us how it is that your officers were in there for an hour, and yet, no one was able to get inside that room? You guys said he was barricaded. Can you explain to us how he was barricaded, and why you could not breach that door?

Escalon told the reporters he would circle back as he closed the presser.

When the press conference opened, Escalon put out two shocking corrections to the previous official timeline of events: there was no initial confrontation with a school resource officer, and the door to the school was not locked.

The Associated Press reported that an anonymous source said the SRO, the armed guard responsible for the school’s security, was driving nearby and not on the grounds when Ramos entered the school.

Watch DPS Regional Director Escalon’s press conference remarks here.

Black: Access control of a building is the key to the building’s security

Marc Black, who retired from the New York City police department as a detective investigator, said that while many people focus on armed guards, he focuses on a building’s access.

“This is my background from a security and vulnerability perspective from physical security,” said Black, who now is a senior fellow at the Washington-based Gold Institute for International Strategies.

“At all these shootings, here’s the question, and nobody in the press ever asks this. What are the access controls for the school? And where were they deployed? That’s an extremely important question,” he said.

“The access control needs to be robust, and it needs to detect, deter, deny, and delay the threat, so it gives enough time for the good people to distance themselves from the bad guys. Were the doors locked?” the detective said.

“Physical security is done in layers. Did they have security personnel outside the school who can observe the school if there was anything that was suspicious?” Black asked.

“Everybody thinks of the resource officer and guns. If you have a resource officer who’s going for their gun, did the physical security somewhere fail? That’s the last line of defense,” he said.

As troubling as these items were, now the emotional center of gravity for the Robb School shooting is the lack of action by local law enforcement.

Although there were officers in the school coordinating the evacuation of students, faculty and administrators, according to the official timeline, two officers were shot and injured by the shooter soon after he entered the school, and afterward, neither they nor any other officers engaged the shooter until the tactical unit arrived.

The Associated Press spoke to one parent of one of the dead students, who said he demanded the police take action to save the children inside.

Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school as the massacre unfolded. When he arrived, he saw two officers outside the school and about five others escorting students out of the building. But 15 or 20 minutes passed before the arrival of officers with shields, equipped to confront the gunman, he said.

As more parents flocked to the school, he and others pressed police to act, Cazares said. He heard about four gunshots before he and the others were ordered back to a parking lot.

“A lot of us were arguing with the police, ‘You all need to go in there. You all need to do your jobs.’ Their response was, ‘We can’t do our jobs because you guys are interfering,’” Cazares said.

Black said after the April 20, 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the NYPD changed its procedure so that patrolmen no longer waited for officers from the department’s Emergency Services Unit (ESU).

“In New York City, if something like this happens, you don’t wait for ESU,” he said.

Black said all officers are trained in the same procedures so that if officers from different parts of the city arrive at the scene of an emergency, they can work together.

“It’d be like this. Maybe we all have the same training. I never met you. You never met me, but coincidentally, now we have this situation, but we’re all trained to the same standard, and we go in,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do there is isolate the scene or actually stop the threat.”

Evans: Often, victims survive gunshot wounds but bleed out without immediate medical attention

Craig Evans, the Northern Virginia Emergency Medical Services Council executive director, said it is surprising that many gunshot victims can survive in a mass casualty situation if they are attended to in time.

“The primary injuries that you can help correct, as a paramedic or on-the-scene initially, are severe bleeding, sucking chest wounds and airway compromises – depending on where the bullet goes,” said Evans, who retired from the City of Fairfax, Virginia, fire department in 2020.

“Immediate intervention makes the difference,” the retired firefighter said.

“If you want to survive a shooting, you don’t need a gun; you need a tourniquet and a 14-gauge needle, in case you have to do a chest decompression on yourself and some dressing, in case you have a sucking chest wound,” he said.

Victims with those injuries can survive, he said. “If those three things can be fixed immediately – but, an hour is a very long time.”

Evans said the Robb School shooting victims, especially the students, would not have much time to wait before they bled out from their wounds.

“The average 10-year-old weighs about 70 pounds so that they would have roughly 2.7 liters of blood,” he said.

“A 15 percent loss of that and you would be in severe shock – about 400-to-500 milliliters of blood – half a liter,” he said. “One 20-ounce bottle of soda is 591 milliliters, so theoretically, one bottle of soda is enough to put a 10-year-old into shock.”

Shock is when the body does not have enough blood to nourish tissue, and the body withholds blood from extremities to preserve the heart, brain and the core, he said.

All other gunshot injuries fall into one of two categories, Evans said.

“The majority of other injuries are either survivable, meaning you can go to the hospital the next day, or they are fatal,” said the member of the adjunct faculty of George Washington University’s Emergency Health Services Department.

“If you got shot in the arm, and it did not hit any major vessels? You could go to the hospital in two days, and you’d be fine,” he said. “If you got shot in the head, you could not survive it. If you got shot in the heart, you could not survive it.”

– – –

Neil W. McCabe is the national political editor of The Star News Network based in Washington. He is an Army Reserve public affairs NCO and an Iraq War veteran

On This Memorial Day…

As we prepare to observe this Memorial Day let us take a moment to remember all the members of our military who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect the freedoms we hold dear.

Let us take a moment to remember ALL our heroes who have sacrificed their lives while taking up the task to defend this nation from those who wish to destroy all it stands for.

Most importantly let us take a moment to thank God for those who continue to stand up and fight to protect our freedom, and to ask for his continued guidance and protection.

O God, our Father, Thou Searcher of human hearts, help us to draw near to Thee in sincerity and truth. May our religion be filled with gladness and may our worship of Thee be natural.

Strengthen and increase our admiration for honest dealing and clean thinking and suffer not our hatred of hypocrisy and pretense ever to diminish. Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life. Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won. Endow us with courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy, that scorns to compromise with vice and injustice and knows no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy. Guard us against flippancy and irreverence in the sacred things of life. Grant us new ties of friendship and new opportunities of service. Kindle our hearts in fellowship with those of a cheerful countenance and soften our hearts with sympathy for those who sorrow and suffer. Help us to show forth in our lives the ideals to Thee and to our Country. All of which we ask in the name of the Great Friend and Master of all. – Amen (West Point Cadet Prayer)

May God bless us all,

WHY AN EU ARMY IS A BAD IDEA – WE DON’T NEED A POLITICAL BLOC OF THE UNWILLING

This paper originally appeared in the New Direction, The European Journal at https://newdirection.online/the-european-journal/article/why_an_eu_army_is_a_bad_idea_we_dont_need_a_political_bloc_of_the_unwilling)

By: Geoffrey Van Orden CBE, Distinguished Fellow

The re-election of president Macron will give a further boost to the idea of an “EU Army”. Over the centuries there have been many attempts to put together a multi-national European army, always under the leadership of one nation and for military purposes. Wellington’s army at Waterloo had more German-speaking soldiers than English. It also included Dutch, Belgians, and many other nationalities. But the current idea of an EU Army is an entirely different project. It has little military value. Its purpose is essentially political – to further European political integration. Far from being a multi-national coalition it is intended to absorb national capabilities into a single Defence Union under the auspices of Brussels. The idea of a European Army without American involvement has been a French obsession since the 1950s. To provide some additional justification,  President Macron developed the terms “European sovereignty” and  “EU strategic autonomy”- two essentially meaningless but inevitably divisive concepts that can only please Moscow.

You might argue that it can only be a good thing if the Europeans step up their defence arrangements. But this has little to do with increasing military muscle. It is not the answer to the plea by successive US presidents for the Europeans to do more on defence. NATO is well established, well proven and credible. 27 of its 30 member countries are European, including 21 that also happen to be EU countries. So why create another structure? 

Any EU force would have to draw on the same limited military resources and would be a duplicative, divisive distraction. EU ambitions already intrude into NATO where coordination structures between the two organisations have now been set up, in spite of the fact that their membership is largely the same. The EU wants to become the European leg of NATO – so where would that leave key non-EU European members of NATO such as the UK, Norway and Turkey? In any case, the EU countries can’t even agree among themselves. Many pay lip service to the idea of CSDP while refusing to participate in any meaningful way. Even the arch-federalist European Parliament, in its most recent report on EU defence, noted that “in over 15 years of existence EU battlegroups have never been used, in particular due to the lack of political consensus among Member States and the complexity of implementation and funding…”

At NATO HQ in the early ‘90s, the French were already pushing for European military capabilities separate from NATO. When the Bosnian crisis began they demanded that the matter should be discussed not at NATO but ‘in another place’ – by which they meant the Western European Union (WEU), a purely European group whose headquarters was just down the road in central Brussels. As a consequence, nonsensically, two allied navies operated in the Adriatic and Mediterranean, one under NATO command and the other under WEU, with more or less the same ships rotating between the two. Once the Bosnian military operations got more serious, even France gave up on this farce and backed the NATO option.

And imagine if the fate of the Ukraine had been left to the EU leadership in Brussels or the French or German governments with their ambivalent relationships with Moscow. Less than a month ago Berlin was refusing to send heavy armour to support the Ukrainians, while both France and Germany were found to have been supplying some €300 million of military equipment to Russia. It has taken the example of the UK, along with front-line nations such as Poland and the Czech Republic, to set an example by providing desperately needed military aid to Ukraine.

There may well be occasions when the US might not wish to get involved in some particular crisis but the best military and civil response should be discussed around the table with all NATO allies. In recognition of this and in order to encourage greater effort by the continental Europeans, the idea of a “separable but not separate” European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI) was floated at the NATO Ministerial in Berlin in 1996. At this time France was not part of NATO’s integrated military structure (which it left in 1966) but it remained a member of the NATO alliance and of the crucial North Atlantic Council where it continued to demand flattery of its vanities. It even retained a seat on NATO’s top-level Military Committee, albeit as an ‘observer’. It insisted that ESDI was inadequate and somehow managed to get its way. Nothing short of a separate military capability under EU political control would suffice. The WEU was soon absorbed into the EU.

Arguments are made that limited European resources would be more effective if integrated. This has become one of the EU’s main selling points for EU defence. It sounds plausible – but if you add up the defence budgets of 26 EU countries (Denmark has opted out of EU defence) you arrive at a figure of approximately $200 billion (2020) or 1.5% of the accumulated GDPs of these countries. The US spent about $800 billion, which is some 3.7% of GDP. And you certainly do not need EU involvement to create joint forces with allies. The history of purposeful coalitions goes back centuries. In recent times, under NATO, we have had the 14-nation ACE Mobile Force, the UK/Netherlands Amphibious Force, and the German/Dutch Corps as examples of closely aligned national formations. All this has worked perfectly well. There is no need for EU involvement – unless of course your motives are political rather than military.

But wouldn’t it make sense to seize the advantages of economies of scale and procure military equipment together? Again, that happens anyway for a variety of reasons.  You don’t need the EU to get involved. There are examples of both successful and failed collaborations. “Successes” might include the Anglo-French Jaguar and the Tornado and Typhoon fighter projects. Most spending on defence equipment in Europe has been by just five countries, most notably the UK, but the UK, of course, is not now an EU country. Collaboration is usually inefficient but it opens the way to a bigger defence market. That’s the key. But many in the EU would like to close off their defence market from outsiders. That would rapidly run foul of those countries who want to buy US or British or other equipment. Even Germany has just announced its intention to buy US F-35A  fighters.

The most profound case against a single EU Army comes back to the degree to which the nations of Europe wish to retain their national independence. You cannot get closer to the bone of national sovereignty than over the status of national armed forces. I doubt that the citizens of many EU countries would be willing to see decisions about conscription, about the deployment and use of their troops, about fighting on or surrendering, indeed about life and death –  handed over to Brussels. Remember, a highly significant distinction between NATO and the EU is that NATO decisions are inter-governmental, they are taken consensually by representatives of the governments of the NATO members. The EU is a hybrid organisation where governments have handed over certain powers to the EU Commission. At this moment EU defence and military matters are still largely in the hands of member country governments who can exercise a veto. But there is now strong pressure for such military decisions to be taken by a majority vote. If this were to be conceded then Brussels would rapidly be in the driving seat and national capitals would be increasingly side-lined. Certainly the European powers need to increase their spending on defence. But this does not mean handing over strategic decision-making and their military to the EU. What is needed is a revitalised and reinforced NATO, an enhanced coalition of the capable, resilient and willing, not a political bloc of the unwilling.

Geoffrey Van Orden is a Distinguished Fellow of the Gold Institute for International Strategy, former British Conservative Leader and Defence Spokesman in the European Parliament and Founding President of New Direction. As a former senior military officer he was a counter-terrorism specialist, served in the front-line of the Cold War including 5 years in Berlin, and at NATO headquarters.

Is the war in Ukraine stumbling into a nuclear phase?

By Derk Jan Eppink, Distinguished Fellow (Member of the Parliament of the Netherlands (JA21-ECR), formerly an MEP and a journalist)

Seth Cropsey, a former U.S. top military officer, published his vision on the war in Ukraine in The Wall Street Journal on 27 April, writing: “The U.S. should show it can win a nuclear war.” However, what does “winning” mean in case of a conflict with a nuclear power s prepared to deploy nuclear weapons? The war in Ukraine is increasingly turning into a war between Russia and the United States, albeit on Ukrainian soil. A war by proxy.

On 9 May, Russia celebrated its victory over Nazi Germany with a large parade on the Red Square in Moscow, showcasing Russian nuclear weapons, as a big warning to foreign countries. This includes the Sarmat, Russia’s most modern intercontinental missile.

For a long time after the Cold War had ended, the West saw such parades as empty displays of power. For decades, the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe have been discussing controlling their nuclear weapons: from the SALT I and II Treaties, to START and New START. Over the years, that discussion died down, but the nuclear weapons remained, as they were also modernised in the meantime. Today, a generation of politicians that did not consciously experience the Cold War, with political leaders for whom a nuclear conflict is akin to a Hollywood film, is in charge.

Nuclear power as life insurance

Already in 1957, in his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Henry Kissinger described the essence of a conflict with a nuclear power. He stated that a country with nuclear weapons will not capitulate without first having used them. This makes a conflict with a nuclear power by definition different from a conflict with a country without nuclear weapons. For the regime in North Korea, for example, and soon perhaps Iran as well, nuclear power is a kind of life insurance. That certainly applies to the Kremlin.

The war in Ukraine requires that politicians who talk about ‘winning’ – like the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, – gain more insight into Russian nuclear doctrine, which is a legacy from Soviet times. Russian military thinking is based on power and huge explosions with the most powerful guns or bombs, like the hydrogen bomb (nicknamed the Tsar Bomb). Here, destruction comes before precision. This nineteenth-century pattern of warfare was visible during the Tsarist Empire as well as the Soviet era and it can be witnessed today under President Vladimir Putin.

Russia’s status is based on its nuclear power

Russia’s status as a great power is not based on its economy – Russia’s gross national product is about the size of the countries forming the Benelux. Russia’s status is founded on its nuclear power, which rivals the nuclear potential of the United States. In 1982, the Soviet Union made a «no first use declaration»: Moscow would not be the first to deploy nuclear weapons. This promise was made during the discussion about placing American medium-range missiles in Western Europe. This helped the peace movement. It should however be recalled that at that point, the Soviet Union had already stationed SS-20 missiles itself.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Russia abandoned its no-first-use policy, in 1993, and it introduced the strategy of preventive nuclear attack. This involves Russia reserving itself the right to strike first as soon as it faces a nuclear threat. This definition has been increasingly broadened. When the nuclear doctrine was redefined in 2010, it also included a conventional attack threathening the survival of the Russian state and its institutions. In 2020, the doctrine was strengthened further. It now also applies to a conventional attack on military bases in Russia, after which Moscow will use tactical nuclear weapons to deter the attacker. This policy is called «escalate to de-escalate» and it applies in the current war with Ukraine.

A thin dividing line of what constitutes «war»

Today, we find ourselves on a thin dividing line of what constitutes «war». The West, in particular the United States, is supplying more and more valuable military equipment to Ukraine. Initially, the arms deliveries were intended to repel the Russian attack, which partly worked.

The question is whether the supply of modern weapons is helping Ukraine or whether it is fuelling the conflict.

Another question is whether Russia, with its tactical nuclear weapons, is in the process of moving to “escalation” in a bid to de-escalate. We are, as it were, slipping imperceptibly into the nuclear phase.

That is a major change in the nature of the conflict.

Politicians without a memory of the Cold War will not hear the alarm bells. Then the battle is no longer about

Ukraine’s sovereignty, which should be the objective, but about the competitive struggle between two nuclear powers.

The command to deploy nuclear weapons is riskier in Russia today than it was during Soviet times.

During the Cuban crisis in 1962, the explosive character of Soviet Party leader Nikita Khrushchev did not seem the best guarantee for a controlled nuclear policy. Fortunately, a hotline was installed: a direct line of communication between the White House and the Kremlin. Under Leonid Brezhnev, who took office in 1964, collective leadership was installed, with more power for the Politburo. Secretary-General Brezhnev was a ruler, but not an autocrat. Putin is a de facto autocrat. Power does emerge from the party, but from the person. The ultimate decision power belongs to him.

A stalemate is needed for a way out of the conflict

The way out of the conflict in Ukraine must be found through negotiations. For that, a stalemate is needed, so that none of the parties has anything to gain. Continuing a war of attrition does not yield anything. Only then will there by a step from the battlefield to the negotiation table.

There, a route to the exit can be found, with questions like: «What should be on the agenda», «what are the goals of each party», and «what room is there for agreements?» With a final compromise, there would be some ‘wins and lose’ for each party. Nobody would be the big ‘winner’.

However, those recklessly pushing for nuclear war will make everyone a loser.

Originally published in Dutch by Elsevier Weekblad

A talk with John Wohlstetter: Nuclear threat, Beethoven and N.Y. pizza

(This article first appeared in the Charleston Mercury: A talk with John Wohlstetter: Nuclear threat, Beethoven and N.Y. pizza (charlestonmercury.com)

By: Emily Havener

The first thing John Wohlstetter and I talk about is pizza. He’s originally from New York City, and he’s picked up a slice or two at New York City Pizza before our interview. He tells me about his childhood pizza spot growing up in the Carnegie Hill district, Hav-a-Pizza on 86th Street, which sold slices for 20 cents. It closed when pizza was up to 75 cents a slice because the son of the owner figured out he could make more money driving a cab.

John lived in Manhattan for the first 31 years of his life, then moved to Washington, D.C., for 37 more and now finds himself in Charleston as of 2015. He is a true renaissance man, and his career is storied: trading on Wall Street, corporate law, authoring books on war and nuclear proliferation, radio appearances and columns in The Wall Street Journal, American Spectator, The Daily Caller and the National Review online, to name just a few. He is a senior fellow at two think tanks — the Discovery Institute and the Gold Institute for International Strategy. Of immediate importance to our Charleston readers, he is an amateur concert pianist who will be giving a Beethoven concert on May 21 at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

“I was born in Sodom, moved to Gomorrah and now I’m in paradise,” he tells me with an air of being very pleased. “Now, the sidewalks are another matter. They’re a little bit picaresque for my taste.” I explain it’s because we don’t have any mountains, so people who enjoy hiking can come down here and feel at home.

I’ve asked him here to talk about serious topics, though, and soon enough, we move on to D.C. statehood, which he, as an American history lover, legal mind and former resident, has a clear opinion on: “D.C. statehood is, in my view, contradictory to the Constitution. If you look at the 23rd Amendment, it says the district shall never have more than one vote in the House.” States, he says, can gain and lose votes; constitutionally the district can do neither.

However, he agrees that the people living in the D.C. area are disenfranchised voters. His solution is to bring D.C. into Maryland as a county. Residents would be able to vote for Maryland’s senators and gain a seat in the House of Representatives, as well as vote for the state’s governor.

Then he tells me another thing he likes about Charleston: “You can go a week and not have a discussion about politics.” When I respond that some would say it’s a privilege, even perhaps a dereliction of duty, to go that long without discussing politics at this point in time, he disagrees.

“What do you think totalitarianism is? Everything is a political question. It’s not good to be headed in that direction.”

The Ukraine question

Of course, we talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In addition to his work with the Discovery and Gold institutes, John tries to produce at least one article a month — and we discuss his recent one for the Spectator entitled “Ukraine Outcomes: Promise and Peril” in which he outlines demands that must be met for Putin not to view his invasion as a victory.

John’s first trip to Russia was in 1985, where he witnessed first-hand the information control of the USSR. But he says that even though we’re seeing something new in terms of Putin’s direct threat of using tactical nuclear weapons in an ongoing conflict, the Russian president doesn’t hold enough sway over his commanders to carry out that threat.

John says the Russian military has a similar chain of command to ours in terms of deploying its nuclear arsenal. “The leader may give the order but it goes through five operational layers. Putin already would have used nuclear weapons if he could have gotten his commanders to actually fire them. I think the risk of nuclear war is as close to zero as it gets in these things.”

The other difference he sees in this conflict is that it’s being broadcast on social media — “and in this case, social media is showing how savagely the Russians fight. It’s the way they fought for a thousand years.” He says the shock of this clouds our judgment of the situation. “We can’t mirror image and project onto them how we look at these things.” He illustrates this with the story of Stalin telling Walter Bedell Smith, first chief of the CIA in 1947 and ambassador to Russia, “We are no more interested in war than you are, but we are less interested in peace and that is our advantage.”

Then John offers a powerful metaphor: “If I put it in in a slightly different context, let’s go from nations to people. We’re sitting here, and sitting over there is a psychopathic serial killer and a sociopathic professional assassin. They kill for different reasons, one by profession and one under a compulsion. Suppose we say, ‘We have our common humanity. We have common interests in peace.’ How far do you think that’s going to get with those two people? The answer is, not very.”

His assessment is that we must keep pushing Putin back so that he asks for a ceasefire, but John fears that the U.S. and other European countries will pull their support and pressure Ukraine to make a less-than-beneficial settlement so as to end the conflict sooner, and Putin will get concessions, such as additional territory in Ukraine.

“That would be a victory for Putin, which is the wrong message to send people like that,” John says. “That’s what happened in the 30s when the British and France gave up Czechoslovakia to Hitler, and he didn’t stop there.

“What NATO and the U.S. can do is increase the supply of weaponry and ammo and basically shore things up. The more they give the Ukrainians, the better chance they have. They’re fighting for their homeland and the Russians are conscripts. I didn’t know in advance how good the Ukrainian army was, let alone that they would built their own anti-ship missiles. I knew that the Russian technology had a relatively thin layer of top technology, but it turns out the systems have significant vulnerabilities.”

Although he agrees with the assessment that a no-fly zone isn’t the answer –— “No fly zone takes too much to impose. Nobody’s ever imposed one on a superpower” — he argues that President Biden, and other world leaders, have not done enough in terms of providing materiel that could have prevented the widespread destruction in Ukraine and ended the conflict in its earliest days. In addition to a misguided assessment of the nuclear threat level, this is due to fear of being seen as provocative.

“That’s a word that should be taken out of the lexicon,” John says with as much heat as I’ve heard yet in our measured conversation. “Everything the free world does that strengthens its position against the unfree world is provocative. So what?” He addresses Putin: “You just put 170,000 troops on the border and you’re telling us it’s provocative if we move some up?”

He also blames the administration for hedging its bets in hopes that Putin will assist in U.S. relations with Iran, but Biden’s recent gaffe put even that distant hope in jeopardy. “If you want this guy to help you, why are you calling him a war criminal and saying he should be put on trial? This is not the brightest idea. I was annoyed when Biden said he’s going to be tried in The Hague and all that. Win the war first; if you don’t win the war, there are not going to be any trials at all.

He has an astute assessment of the American mindset about war: “It’s because we hate war so much that we’re reluctant to get into it, and we’re up against people who don’t feel the same way, and they use our reluctance, at times, to considerable strategic advantage.”

“So let’s say we do get Putin in retreat and he calls for a ceasefire,” I respond. “Where do we go?”

“If Putin gets pushed back across the border, and even if he keeps Crimea, but especially if he loses that, he will not be in office.”

Love of humanity

At this point, John deliberately changes the subject: “We’ve solved all the problems. Now we need to end on an upbeat thing.” Throughout our conversation it’s become clear to me how important music is to him; he’s been playing the piano since childhood, but it was in middle adulthood that something clicked and it took on the priority it holds for him now. He tells me how much he’s looking forward to the concert he’s giving in coincidence with his 75th year: “We’re going to celebrate, two years delayed, the 250th anniversary of one of the greatest human beings who ever lived, one of the greatest creators who ever lived.”

He will be playing his three favorite sonatas by Beethoven, whom he says “brought music out of the aristocracy and sent it out to all of us.” He calls the “Ode to Joy” an expression of Beethoven’s love of humanity.

Beethoven’s eventual deafness makes him something of a kindred spirit as well; John is deaf in his right ear, although he also has perfect pitch. “Beethoven had tinnitus. It was a huge handicap, and when he practiced he had the ability to concentrate, to shut out noise.” Not only that, John says: “He had far hearing; he could hear into the future. The instruments of this day were not capable of producing this sonorities we hear in the ‘Appassionato’ today. It wasn’t till the late 80s that the modern piano was perfected. He may have been the only one of his day who could hear what his compositions really sounded like.”

Music got John through the long, isolated days of the pandemic. “I didn’t want to spend my time staring at flickering images, so I decided to double my practice time and see if I could raise my piano chops. I’m playing 100 percent better than I played two years ago.

“At the piano those first two months, it was the quietness of Walden Pond. There was no traffic, no construction cranes — and I concentrated. And the wonderful thing is, when the sounds came back, my concentration still stayed. I’m going to have a great time finishing the prep for this concert. I am so looking forward to it.”