SURPRISE! THE ISLAMOPHOBIC INSURRECTION DEFENDER AT THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ALSO A PUTIN APOLOGIST

In the opinion section of The New York Times, Christopher Caldwell writes:

The United States’ recent promise to ship advanced M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was a swift response to a serious problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war.

That's odd, because straight-news reporting in the Times says that Russia is still struggling in Ukraine:

Britain’s defense intelligence agency said on Tuesday that Russia had been trying to launch “major offensive operations” since early last month, with the aim of capturing the rest of the Donetsk region, which includes Bakhmut. But it had “only managed to gain several hundred meters of territory per week,” because of a lack of munitions and maneuver units, the agency said in its latest daily assessment of the war.

“It remains unlikely that Russia can build up the forces needed to substantially affect the outcome of the war within the coming weeks,” the agency concluded.

Many paragraphs into his opinion piece, it becomes clear that Caldwell doesn't just believe the Russians are winning -- he believes they should win. He sings a sob story about Russia and Putin that could have come from Tulsi Gabbard doing a guest appearance on Tucker's show:

The largest country by area on the planet has no reliable exit into the world. The most reliable route runs through the Black Sea, where it crosses the trade routes that link the civilizations of Asia to the civilizations of Europe....

Russians say the war is about preventing the installation of an enemy military stronghold on the Black Sea, strong enough to close off what has for centuries been Russia’s main access to the outside world. Without Ukraine, Russia can be turned into a vassal state. That NATO intends to bring about the subjugation, breakup or even extinction of Russia may be true or false — but it will not sound implausible to a Russian.

Many Americans cannot resist describing Mr. Putin as a “barbarian” and his invasion of Ukraine as a “war of aggression.” For their part Russians say this is a war in which Russia is fighting for its survival and against the United States in an unfair global order in which the United States enjoys unearned privileges.

Caldwell doesn't want to say it in so many words -- that might risk his status as a pundit who is welcome in polite circles -- but it's clear which country he regards as the villain:

... the Biden strategy has a bad name: escalation. Beyond a certain point, the United States is no longer “helping” or “advising” or “supplying” the Ukrainians, the way it did, say, the Afghan mujahedeen during the Cold War. It is replacing Ukraine as Russia’s main battlefield adversary. It is hard to say when that point will be reached or whether it has been already. With whom is Russia at war — Ukraine or the United States? Russia started the war between Russia and Ukraine. Who started the war between Russia and the United States?

Caldwell, a Putin apologist now, not long ago was a January 6 apologist. In a Times op-ed last July, he insisted that the insurrection was no big deal:

Were we really that close to a coup? ...

The stability of the republic never truly seemed at risk. As Michael Wolff writes of Mr. Trump in his new book, “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.”

And it was perfectly reasonable for these fine folks to show up with weapons and bear spray:

Contesting the fairness of an election, rightly or wrongly, is not absurd grounds for a public assembly. For a newly defeated president to call an election a “steal” is certainly irresponsible. But for a group of citizens to use the term was merely hyperbolic, perhaps no more so than calling suboptimal employment and health laws a “war on women.”

And hey, you gotta admit they had a point:

Republicans had — and still have — legitimate grievances about how the last election was run. Pandemic conditions produced an electoral system more favorable to Democrats. Without the Covid-era advantage of expanded mail-in voting, Democrats might well have lost more elections at every level, including the presidential.

Because, of course, we forced Republicans at gunpoint not to take advantage of the mail-in voting option themselves.

And in October, he described the work of the January 6 committee as McCarthyism:

Certainly there were constitutional crimes that day. But the committee members have been too inclined to look at the Republican Party as a nest of subversives, much as certain anti-Communists did the Democrats at some of the colder points in the Cold War.

This is the same Christopher Caldwell whose 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, applied the Great Replacement Theory to Muslims settling in Europe. A laudatory Times review summarized its message:

Through decades of mass immigration to Europe's hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are "patiently conquering Europe's cities, street by street."

Caldwell is loathsome in so many different ways. It's appalling that he's writing for the Times and not RT or the American Thinker, where he belongs.