Perhaps the most surprising story of the past year has been the abysmal performance of the Russian military in its invasion of Ukraine. Clumsy tactics, military trucks with dry-rotted tires, rations and medicines that expired decades ago, troops making targets of themselves by talking on cellphones, even the use of raw conscripts as human waves to detect Ukrainian positions in lieu of conducting proper reconnaissance. It has been a saturnalia of incompetence from a nation which most observers, including many military experts, had believed would roll over Ukraine in a couple of weeks.
Now consider China, a country that many Americans appear to think is almost diabolically efficient. As the COVID pandemic began to spread in early 2020, it quickly became evident that sensible social distancing measures were in order, calibrated to a level that most reasonable people could tolerate without being overly disruptive to social life. When highly effective mRNA vaccines became available early in 2021, it was imperative to administer them as widely as possible.
