Brilliant analysis, and even full of bon mots! Thank you.
That said, I would suggest some further material, in the areas of international law and military doctrine. "International humanitarian law" is perhaps not so much an "undefined" area as a "refusal-to-define" area. The best example I have is the Israeli academic Yoram Dinstein's book "The Conduct of Hostilities under the Law of International Armed Conflict", in which he defines IHL properly as a confused admixture of legal areas and proceeds correctly to discard most of them as irrelevant (at least to his theme). As to your apparent pre-1939 / post-1945 / UN distinction I also would add that, in international law just as in domestic law, concurrent jurisdiction still applies. So, insofar as UN law has not (somehow) expressly "repealed" or otherwise formally displaced older treaties, those older treaties will still apply, with their own international and national jurisprudence, even if the newer ones do not. If that is right, then the older Geneva (etc) Conventions necessarily remain useful.
On military doctrine I would suggest NATO seems incapable of moving beyond the USA's 1960s-era Air-Land Battle, which presumes both technological superiority in general and air superiority in particular. (not all Western militaries fall into this trap - the one in which I served from the late 1970s made no such presumptions and our training reflected it. Even then we took the view Soviet IFVs were superior to our own US-supplied M113 deathtraps - yet in 2023, almost half a century later, the USA was still giving them to Ukraine)
Perhaps the most illuminating case study on Western doctrinal obsolescence is the USSR's Ogarkov reforms of 1984-5. These were specifically designed to defeat Air-Land Battle even in the face of NATO air superiority. Though they took a decade or so to get going as military doctrines always do (extended by Soviet dissolution), they were (largely correctly) analyzed by LTC Lester Grau of the US Army's Soviet Army Studies Office in a 1990 appreciation https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA231789.pdf. NATO of course did nothing. In 2014 a NATO-trained and -equipped Ukrainian mech brigade was annihilated in minutes without firing a shot. A US colonel in Ukraine tried to blow the whistle, saying the Russians were using a doctrine (in the event, "reconnaissance-strike") to which NATO had no counter. Again, NATO did nothing.
When the war escalated in 2022, the Russians entered Ukraine with just 80-90,000 men (in 2024 Syrski admitted 100,000). Astonishingly, they attacked despite being outnumbered by the AFU 4:1 in troops at the front - especially in trained infantry, which made Western analysts cock-a-hoop at the thought of slaughtering the Russian army. In the event, the Russians nevertheless went through the AFU like a hot knife through butter, using reconnaissance-strike and reconnaissance-fire. The British Army finally reacted in July 2022, standing up an experimental unit "1st Deep Reconnaissance Strike Brigade Combat Team" (2 light-cav regiments, 2 line cav regiments, and no less than 10 artillery regiments), inferably to reverse-engineer Russian doctrine (the name alone gives the game away). US Army field grade officers were rather jealous in published comment, but they needn't have been: the British promptly scored an own goal by apparently giving away to Ukraine most of the army's self-propelled guns (one of the key elements of the Russian doctrine). Even if I'm wrong on that, though 1DRSBCT's activities since then seem shrouded in secrecy, procurement decisions (which are difficult or impossible to hide!) fail to imply doctrinal innovation.
Finally, I should mention Geoffrey Blainey's "The Causes of War", in which he puts a remarkably simple, almost Clausewitzian argument: war/conflict is the norm, but occasionally peace breaks out. Blainey's prerequisite for peace is that both parties reach a common awareness as to their respective power / ability to coerce the other; at which point negotiation becomes feasible again... until they again disagree on that prerequisite. Unless I've misunderstood you, Blainey's position seems to fit with your own approach: so long as Western powers remain incapable of accepting their various superiorities are long gone, pro tanto they will remain incapable of agreeing their relative power position and thus of negotiation with non-inferior adversaries.
Aurelien's essay "And It Goes On," is a characteristically erudite tour of Western strategic incomprehension: the forgotten logic of attrition, the missile revolution nobody will think about, the ruling class whose military culture consists of half-remembered Tuchman and Hollywood folklore. It pairs exceptionally well with Emma Ashford's dispatch (https://archive.ph/KUcx5#selection-3647.0-4299.13) from the Aspen Security Forum, where Condoleezza Rice spent 2026 relitigating the Iraq debate of 2002, where former officials proposed to let Iran "stew in their lousy economy" until reality obediently complies, and where the American public's two-to-one opposition to the war was explained away as the product of Russian and Chinese influence operations.
Ashford's report reads like a field study commissioned to confirm Aurelien's thesis. Every pathology he describes in the abstract walks on stage in Colorado holding a branded microphone. And yet the pairing exposes something else: the precise point at which Aurelien's analysis stops, turns around, and declines to finish its own sentence.
Start with the contradiction Aspen performed all week without noticing it. On panel after panel, speakers agreed that public opinion does not really matter, that opposition to the war reflects poor messaging, generational drift, or foreign manipulation, and in any case constitutes a communications problem to be managed. On other panels, the same community celebrated dissidents from Europe and Latin America and discussed how best to promote democracy abroad.
There is no contradiction, once the names are corrected. In establishment usage, "democracy" has never operationally meant governments doing what their publics want. It means governments oriented toward Washington's preferred order, with the electoral machinery counted as democratic when it produces that orientation and as compromised or "backsliding" when it does not. This is how one tradition accommodates the overthrow of elected governments in Tehran, Guatemala City, and Santiago while calling itself democracy's champion; it is how a Venezuelan oppositionist is an authentic popular voice while an American majority opposing a war is a bot network. Publics matter as instruments of legitimation when they endorse the program and as objects of management when they don't. The rule is applied uniformly, at home and abroad. Aspen merely stated it out loud.
The old Confucian discipline of zhengming, the rectification of names, insists that when names are wrong, language ceases to accord with the truth of things, and the people have nowhere to put hand or foot. Apply it to the Aspen lexicon and the fog lifts at once. "Democracy promotion" rectifies to client alignment. "Stability" means a configuration favorable to us. "Credibility" is a reputation for willingness to inflict violence, which is why it can only ever be spent downward. "Influence operation" means public disagreement with the program. Rectified, the panels were perfectly coherent all along: they were discussing the maintenance of a hegemonic order, in a vocabulary designed to make that discussion sound like something else.
Aurelien sees all of this, the folklore, the incuriosity, the "consensual hallucination" of American agency, and describes it better than almost anyone writing. But notice where his causal chains terminate: in arrogance, habit, nostalgia, an over-dependence on abstract thinking. The West's real problems, he tells us, are "primarily conceptual and psychological." Every explanation stops at a state of mind.
A state of mind is precisely a way of not naming, because minds can simply be wrong, innocently. Name the structure instead, the client system, the think-tank ecology funded by contractors and foreign ministries, the professional class whose careers were built on unipolarity and whose expertise depreciates the moment the frame is admitted dead, and the "errors" stop looking like errors. The ignorance Aurelien catalogs is not a deficit; it is a product. It is cultivated, funded, and selected for, because accurate perception of Russian production capacity or Iranian missile stocks would obligate conclusions the system exists to avoid. Nobody at Aspen is paid to lie. The mechanism is quieter: the funding constitutes the medium in which cognition is cultured, the pipeline differentially promotes those whose sincere priors fit the niche, and by the time anyone reaches the closed-door meetings the filtering has already happened. Sincere at the level of the organism; functional at the level of the medium. Intelligence does not protect against this, the motivated-reasoning literature suggests it amplifies it, furnishing a more powerful engine for arriving where one's professional identity requires.
Aurelien's own principle convicts him. Economists see economic causes of war; human-rights advocates see rights violations; and a career official sees what a career official sees, failures of staff work, expertise, and seriousness. The world as a badly run ministry. His single brush with the material base, dismissing the military-industrial complex because no arms firm cracks the Fortune top fifty, knocks down the crudest version of the structural claim and treats the category as closed, as though political power were a revenue ranking rather than a matter of concentrated interest, districted production, and the revolving door into the very institutions Ashford described.
The rectified title of Aurelien's essay is not "we don't understand conflict." It is: the institutions that pay for understanding conflict are paid not to. He circles that sentence for eight thousand words and declines to write it. Perhaps it is the residual loyalty of a pensioned insider; perhaps the pseudonymous man's one last withheld name; perhaps simply the lens that cannot see itself. The effect is the same either way, a devastating description that indicts no one, a meticulous account of the fog that never asks who owns the fog machine.
The discipline cuts both ways, and a commitment to zhengming binds the speaker first. "The Blob," "empire," "the deep state" can calcify into thought-terminating clichés of the opposition just as easily as "credibility" and "stability" serve the consensus. The test is whether a name still tracks a mechanism one could specify without it. That is the standard the Aspen crowd fails weekly. It is also the standard by which Aurelien, our finest describer of the fog, must finally be measured, and found, on the decisive question, silent.
" Nobody at Aspen is paid to lie. The mechanism is quieter: the funding constitutes the medium in which cognition is cultured, the pipeline differentially promotes those whose sincere priors fit the niche, and by the time anyone reaches the closed-door meetings the filtering has already happened."
Well said. As Noam Chomsky said to Andrew Marr, whose jaw literally drops: "... if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting" - see 21-second clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EPgix5_5w
Organisms are conditioned to respond in ways that increase the odds of their survival. Otherwise they wouldn't be "sitting where they are sitting." In other words, being alive. Funding provides the food and water and education and social status that increases the odds of their survival and the survival of their offspring. Therefore, those of us who are sitting there, talk the talk. Some may even be aware that it is B.S. That is not pathology.
From where I am sitting it feel like you are both analysing the deep grief of devastating failure. Both analyses float on top of a stark truth. The West, as an historical cultural era, is dying.
A truth the English poet Matthew Arnold sadly sang of in his 1867 poem ‘Dover Beach’.
I am not that pessimistic. How many times did the Chinese think that the end of the world has come over them? Look where they are now. Also, remember what Leto II said to Stilgar in front of their Sietch, "Look how beautiful are the young ones". The issue is not the death of the West (they had a huge plague in 1300s that decimated 1/3 of the population, check The Decameron), but what will emerged from the present pile, after the fascist tendencies of EU will expiate, and the US will wake up from its hegemonic fever dream? But we might not live to see it.
Leto II and Stilgar are fictional characters. If the works of a middling level SF writer, from a mediocre work is where you have to get quotes from, God help us.
You make some good points but all boil down to a cultural blindness - much more significant than organised conspiracy. The problem is that people are rewarded for this blindness and employed by organisations that need it. Moreover, people (even from the most genuine academia) do tailor their remarks to the audience they are addressing.
This is what I am hinting at and I appologise for not being explicit in my assertion. There is no conspiracy. Things are always stated, one needs to listen carefully. Though my pointers are Zephyr Teachout, with her work on oligarchy and how it is organized in reinforcing networks, Aristotles' assertion about oligarchy, as being the most resilient political system, and Belcher's mechanism of silence: you have also to watch what it is not talked about. I think Voltaire sid something about what one is not allowed to criticize. But Belcher is more encompassing a bit, I would say. So yeah, this is why I devised my political assessment work making it from a imple axis, authoritarian/democratic, into a triangle, and adding the oligarchic node. It is institutional, you are right.
Your 'pointer' is a failed US would-be politician "with her work on oligarchy" backed up by Aristotle? As for 'Belcher' - never heard of him, but presumably he's another fan of oligarchy. That explains a lot about what you write. Luckily, your prose is so impenetrable that I can glean very little else from it.
Thank you for this comment! I wish Aurelien would comment on this, as your comment genuinely engages the article and points out a possible direction of further understanding. I find Aurelien always useful in addilg a layer of sensemaking to current phenomena that are baffling. Your comment adds yet another layer of sensemaking, and this kind of fruitful engagement is what may lead to developing genuine understanding. This kind of engagement is very rare nowadays. Substack comments are often expressing something in the vein of why is this article not talking about this specific thing that is important to me. This is not communication leading to mutual growth. It does not appear to me that Aurelien is declaring immutable truths, to me it looks more like his way of attempted sensemaking in an environment that is full of poisonous fog. I do not know if anyone sees clearly, so blaming each other for that is adding to that fog, not clearing it. Your comment opens my eyes to the possibility of finding more clarity through wisely comparing and combining viewpoints. Hoping for more comments like yours, and more fine posts by Aurelien to seed more understanding of our predicament.
I like Aurelian a lot, his weekly essays are a must-read for me, but this,
"And the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex: won't they force the war to continue? Maybe not so dreaded: of the largest US companies listed by revenue in Fortune magazine, none of the military companies are in the top fifty. Much economic power lies elsewhere..."
is at best overstated.
Weighing the influence of the MIC by ranking individual companies' revenue is clearly the wrong way to go about it. Not only should the MIC include the entire Pentagon's budget, but also Homeland Security and a substantial portion of law enforcement too.
But the more fundamental point is that weapons, the ability to make them, and the skill in using them cannot be calculated by the same metrics that, for example, rate the retail, finance, insurance, and real estate sectors.
Weapons are much more like food or fuel. For a few generations now, we've naively assumed that they will always be available, but if you really need a weapon or really need food, you will do absolutely anything to get them.
Do you know that quote, it might have been Milton Friedman, or maybe Paul Krugman, who said "$100 of computer chips are worth $100 of potato chips"? Kinda true, but also totally false.
Now try to extend that logic to weapons and food. If a man with a $100 pistol (but no food) meets a man with $100 worth of potatoes (but no gun), what happens? We certainly hope and pray that they come to a deal whereby both can eat in safety for many years to come, but whatever happens, it isn't the man with the pistol who is going to go hungry.
Weapons follow a logic unlike any other manufactured good.
Mu understanding of what is going on in Ukraine and Iran is handicapped by not being there ,i think that applies to everyone even those directing these conflicts , isnt that always the case with war ? only afterwards do we really begin to find out what was going on.
What i do know is that i disagree with the idea that the USA is the so called policeman of the world , they have no right to do that and it will never work , its best , in my opinion if countries are left to deal with their own conflicts and at most other countries use diplomacy and trade to coerce aggressors .
Its obvious that the USA is trying to take control of all the major oil producing countries in the world thats the plan with Russia and Iran and because of the distance between USA and Russia and USA and Iran the USA is using Ukraine and the EU to fight their battles , likewise the USA is using Irans neighbours and Israel to fight its battles with Iran.
Its not complicated , the USA is the bully of the world and has been since WWII when it took the opportunity to take control of the oul trade by getting nearly everyone to use the american dollar to buy and sell oil.
USA extracts Iraq,s oul sells it , banks the money in new york then controls Iraqi government by releasing or not releasing some of that money to them depending on how well Iraqi govt follows orders.
USA now controls extraction of Venezuela,s oil has stopped Venezuela selling some to countries USA wants to harm for example Cuba and China there are more.USA oil and Venezuela oil is very different Venezuela oil very thick and heavy USA oil thin and light on their own they have uses but when mixed together they are transformed into a valuable state the USA needs so USA now that it has kidnapped the president of Venezuela and his wife and holds them in prison in USA , steals Venezuela oil and mixes it with USA oil all whilst Venezuela is in mayhem following two devastating earthquakes and is pleading globally for donations to repair and rebuild , i watch the tour de france on tv every day and see channel TNT previously BT (British Telecom ) now owned by HBO a USA company asking viewers to donate £10gbp , there is an easier way a more just way to help Venezuela , are you listening USA ? just give Venezuela back the oil money you have stolen and while we are on that subject i say to the UK just give back the £billions of gold bullion the MFI put in the bank of england ( which is actually just the uk govt treasury its not a real bank ) for safety when it judged Venezuela to be heading towards a currency crash some 20 yrs ago.
USA want to do to Iran what it has done to Iraq and what it did to Libya.
USA wants to do to Russia what it did to Iraq and Libya but Russia is too big and powerful and has been there before it knows what the USA gameplan is but nevertheless USA can carry out its plan of worldwide control of oil much easier if Russia is tied up with other things such as defending itself from Ukraine and EU and UK all of whom broke promises over the last thirty years that they would not surround Russia with NATO missiles , NATO missiles largely made in and controlled by USA.
So understanding what is going on in Ukraine and Iran is not really that difficult if you look at the common denominator in all this conflict , the one element that is always involved is the USA be it in Ukraine Iran Russia Venezuela Cuba Iraq Libya Afghanistan Syria Lebanon Palestine Egypt Greenland Canada Kosovo Serbia , lets stop there we could go on and on .
None of these conflicts ( wars ) are ever called the USA war even though it is the USA that always starts them and always fights them in these other countries , USA wars are never fought in USA , the USA has started dozens and dozens of wars since WWII ended , the last time a country attacked the USA was when Japan attacked pearl harbour in WWII and the response of the USA was to drop two nuclear bombs on Japan killing millions of civilians , as the USA like to say , " thats how we roll ".
Its time for the EU and China and Russia , Africa , South America to say no and do what Iran is doing , tell USA to withdraw their threatening military forces and close down their overseas military bases, the UK i dont include because they spawned USA and will always do what they can to support the USA having passed the colonial batton to the USA when the british empire couldnt be continued due to lack of funds it all having been spent on WWII efforts.
“because the very structure and definition of such conflicts is often contested”.
Well, take for example the war in the Ukraine. There are two main accounts:
1. Russia is still an Empire, is greedy for land and invaded the Ukraine without provocation in order to further this expansionism. Ultimately it wants to invade the rest of Europe to add to its empire, which it lost with the fall of the USSR. This is the line adopted by Brussels, Berlin, Paris, London etc.
2. Russia intervened in the Ukraine on behalf of the ethnic Russians in the Donbas and elsewhere who were being subjected to large scale artillery strikes by the US created pro NATO Neo-nazi government in Kiev. This is very briefly the Russian story.
The idea that these two accounts can logically and realistically be ‘contested’ is ludicrous. The first is obviously and provably a farrago of lies and propaganda, while the second approximates to a truth.
This will apply to almost all instances of conflict, except where both sides are lying in their teeth, in which case, what difference does it make?
And:
“The causal chain between . . . are even talking about the same conflict.”
Complete rubbish. Are you really postulating that if the assassination had not happened there would still have been a colonial war in Tanganyika? Like the one in Agadir? Phooey! Taken by itself, that is merely very wild speculation.
And that’s only the third paragraph. It will be a real effort to go any further - probably requiring the help of a good drink.
Soon the Chinese will stop some of their companies supplying 'drone kits' to 3rd party countries that then get shipped to Europe , assembled and sent to Ukraine which with US telemetry get fired into Russia
Once the trade stops, there will be nothing left to attack Russian infrastructure. I suspect the Germans have suddenly woken up to this fact.
Take a step back and think about what underlies Mr. Whelan's comment. There are two parties who could stop the war in the Ukraine very quickly -- the Euros and the Chinese.
The Euros fund and promote their proxy war against Russia. If they stopped paying the bills and supplying the weapons, Zelensky would suddenly see the value of genuine negotiations.
The Chinese provide key items which go into most drones, wherever they are assembled. If China decided to put an embargo on exporting those items, the fighting would first change and then stop.
I can understand the Chinese shrugging their shoulders and thinking that if silly Westerners want to kill each other, they should take the opportunity to make some money. But what is in the Ukraine war for the Euros?
I think it's a farsighted policy that will bring great benefits to the Chinese over the long term. The Chinese aren't supplying weapons, they're supplying dual use components with legitimate civilian uses, that keeps them inside the rules. Tucks, jeeps, motors, cameras, radios, computer chips, even simple molded plastic components are dual use.
If the West ever deployed enough leverage against Beijing to stop supplying them to Moscow then the Chinese have the perfect justification to stop supplying them to Kiev (and Washington, London, Paris, Berlin etc.)
If the argument is put forward that they don't deserve them because they're wicked, but we do because we're righteous, then Beijing can publicly reply with a very long and detailed list of the various shady things that the capitals of the West have done over the last few generations.
By keeping the market open to both sides of the equation Beijing can keep that market for itself. Withdraw from that market and it just gets picked up by someone else.
Washington made this mistake by banning hi-end chip sales to China, thinking it would cripple their AI development. China adapted and is now building them itself, taking the profits and avoiding the blockade.
It's all right for you, matey, you have experience of these matters. How about someone like me who has no experience at all of army, navy, air force, diplomacy, or government?
Actually the answer is that it's been easy for me too. For years I have mocked the US Navy, clearly built to refight the Battle of Midway and clearly no bloody use anywhere near a defended shore. Or manned fighter-bombers, clearly too easily shot down by cheap defensive missiles. Or bombers, obviously better replaced by attack missiles.
It remains me of my father's experience in The War: all the best officers came from "civvy street" or the reserves. The professionals were NBG.
For us citizens of the USA, to better understand current and future events will require a reckoning of our past that we have not been afforded in our education.
Well, your education system has been deliberately degraded for the last fifty or so years, and it was never first class to begin with. There are culprits involved.
In terms of industrial capacity, I believe Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War dives deeply into this and logistics. It was an excellent, massive read at 643 pages.
Typical Aurelien. Right in general - but loose on facts. I agree that "it's not always obvious when wars 'end.'" But the example of WWI is wrong. "(The fighting did not stop everywhere in November 1918, for example.)" The fighting of WWI did stop everywhere in November 1918, with the last holdouts of German colonial troops capitulating on November 25.
Does Aurelien mean the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920 or Great Polish Uprising against Germans in December 1918? - But those were distinct conflicts with different belligerents, some of which did not even exist in the beginning of WWI.
The Baltic-German conflict and the war between Hungary and Romania are quite separate from WWI. Both began in April 1919, more than five months after the Armistice. As I noted before, some parties (Hungary as a separate state, Baltics) were not in existence in 1914. Baltics and Germans were even allies right after the Armistice, fighting the Soviets together.
Yes, these wars were the result of the destruction WWI had wrought. But so were the Russian Civil War and the Posen Uprising I mentioned before, the Russian-Polish War of 1920, and even WWII. But one has to stop somewhere.
The Polish–Ukrainian War of 1918–1919 was a successor conflict to WWI with units raised for the Great war fighting on after the collapse of the Astro-Hungarian Empire
Thank you for another example confirming my point. As above, neither of the belligerents existed before WWI. These were, again, various factions fighting over the pieces of destroyed empires.
On a somewhat related note, I only learned about The Ukrainian Sich Riflemen recently when reading up on Andriy Melnyk, and why his dead bones were worth digging up and transporting from Luxemburg for a reburial in a military cemetery in Kiev.
It's a rather complex story, but suffice to say literally digging up the skeletons of the past is now a Ukrainian political strategy and that old crimes have long shadows.
'We make assumptions about western power and influence which are normatively rather than pragmatically based. We assume that people who sound as though they might think like us actually do think like us, because our way of thinking is just superior. We assume that western doctrine, training and equipment is the best, because we have never seriously researched others, and we look for someone to blame when any of these are shown to be inadequate.'
More than this, it indicates the cultural superiority which is a big achilles heel of 'the west'.
I recall a US soldier in Iraq who shot an unarmed woman saying 'Pity about the chick. I told her to stop and when she didn't had to shoot her. These ignorant ******** don't even speak English'.
Even labeling Gavrilo Princip a Serbian nationalist is, according to some, open to question. At his trial, he did not identify himself as an "Orthodox Serb"—the minimum requirement for someone to qualify as a Serbian nationalist. Instead, he declared himself an "atheist Yugoslav"; this, combined with the fact that all the surviving members of his organization (known as "Young Bosnia") went on to join the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, offers a completely different perspective on the assassin's ideology.
The question of when is it a war or an armed conflict or what is the definition of war is just silly , its a way that agressive governments can cause distractions , when you are the one being attacked you know for sure when there is a war and the term armed conflict is only used by rhe idiots who want to distract from the truth and play down the agression.
I see why governments and organisations distract with these terms and all it shows is the sly inconsiderate motives they have.
Israel decimating Palestine and its people is without doubt a war , just because one side does not have an actual army or navy or air force does not mean its not a war , what it means is that the side that does have an army and a navy and an air force is murdering the other sides unarmed civilian population.
Playing with words and inventing new descriptions doesnt work in these modern times where nearly everyone has access to tv radio books internet.
Israel decimating Palestine and its people is not a war. It´s genocide, nazism and apartheid. Palestinian people have no real army, diplomatic corps, government and trade relations. I´m not talking about those kind of clowns that are now regarded as "Palestinian officials". It´s just like Third Reich all over again, only much much worse.
Brilliant analysis, and even full of bon mots! Thank you.
That said, I would suggest some further material, in the areas of international law and military doctrine. "International humanitarian law" is perhaps not so much an "undefined" area as a "refusal-to-define" area. The best example I have is the Israeli academic Yoram Dinstein's book "The Conduct of Hostilities under the Law of International Armed Conflict", in which he defines IHL properly as a confused admixture of legal areas and proceeds correctly to discard most of them as irrelevant (at least to his theme). As to your apparent pre-1939 / post-1945 / UN distinction I also would add that, in international law just as in domestic law, concurrent jurisdiction still applies. So, insofar as UN law has not (somehow) expressly "repealed" or otherwise formally displaced older treaties, those older treaties will still apply, with their own international and national jurisprudence, even if the newer ones do not. If that is right, then the older Geneva (etc) Conventions necessarily remain useful.
On military doctrine I would suggest NATO seems incapable of moving beyond the USA's 1960s-era Air-Land Battle, which presumes both technological superiority in general and air superiority in particular. (not all Western militaries fall into this trap - the one in which I served from the late 1970s made no such presumptions and our training reflected it. Even then we took the view Soviet IFVs were superior to our own US-supplied M113 deathtraps - yet in 2023, almost half a century later, the USA was still giving them to Ukraine)
Perhaps the most illuminating case study on Western doctrinal obsolescence is the USSR's Ogarkov reforms of 1984-5. These were specifically designed to defeat Air-Land Battle even in the face of NATO air superiority. Though they took a decade or so to get going as military doctrines always do (extended by Soviet dissolution), they were (largely correctly) analyzed by LTC Lester Grau of the US Army's Soviet Army Studies Office in a 1990 appreciation https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA231789.pdf. NATO of course did nothing. In 2014 a NATO-trained and -equipped Ukrainian mech brigade was annihilated in minutes without firing a shot. A US colonel in Ukraine tried to blow the whistle, saying the Russians were using a doctrine (in the event, "reconnaissance-strike") to which NATO had no counter. Again, NATO did nothing.
When the war escalated in 2022, the Russians entered Ukraine with just 80-90,000 men (in 2024 Syrski admitted 100,000). Astonishingly, they attacked despite being outnumbered by the AFU 4:1 in troops at the front - especially in trained infantry, which made Western analysts cock-a-hoop at the thought of slaughtering the Russian army. In the event, the Russians nevertheless went through the AFU like a hot knife through butter, using reconnaissance-strike and reconnaissance-fire. The British Army finally reacted in July 2022, standing up an experimental unit "1st Deep Reconnaissance Strike Brigade Combat Team" (2 light-cav regiments, 2 line cav regiments, and no less than 10 artillery regiments), inferably to reverse-engineer Russian doctrine (the name alone gives the game away). US Army field grade officers were rather jealous in published comment, but they needn't have been: the British promptly scored an own goal by apparently giving away to Ukraine most of the army's self-propelled guns (one of the key elements of the Russian doctrine). Even if I'm wrong on that, though 1DRSBCT's activities since then seem shrouded in secrecy, procurement decisions (which are difficult or impossible to hide!) fail to imply doctrinal innovation.
Finally, I should mention Geoffrey Blainey's "The Causes of War", in which he puts a remarkably simple, almost Clausewitzian argument: war/conflict is the norm, but occasionally peace breaks out. Blainey's prerequisite for peace is that both parties reach a common awareness as to their respective power / ability to coerce the other; at which point negotiation becomes feasible again... until they again disagree on that prerequisite. Unless I've misunderstood you, Blainey's position seems to fit with your own approach: so long as Western powers remain incapable of accepting their various superiorities are long gone, pro tanto they will remain incapable of agreeing their relative power position and thus of negotiation with non-inferior adversaries.
Aurelien's essay "And It Goes On," is a characteristically erudite tour of Western strategic incomprehension: the forgotten logic of attrition, the missile revolution nobody will think about, the ruling class whose military culture consists of half-remembered Tuchman and Hollywood folklore. It pairs exceptionally well with Emma Ashford's dispatch (https://archive.ph/KUcx5#selection-3647.0-4299.13) from the Aspen Security Forum, where Condoleezza Rice spent 2026 relitigating the Iraq debate of 2002, where former officials proposed to let Iran "stew in their lousy economy" until reality obediently complies, and where the American public's two-to-one opposition to the war was explained away as the product of Russian and Chinese influence operations.
Ashford's report reads like a field study commissioned to confirm Aurelien's thesis. Every pathology he describes in the abstract walks on stage in Colorado holding a branded microphone. And yet the pairing exposes something else: the precise point at which Aurelien's analysis stops, turns around, and declines to finish its own sentence.
Start with the contradiction Aspen performed all week without noticing it. On panel after panel, speakers agreed that public opinion does not really matter, that opposition to the war reflects poor messaging, generational drift, or foreign manipulation, and in any case constitutes a communications problem to be managed. On other panels, the same community celebrated dissidents from Europe and Latin America and discussed how best to promote democracy abroad.
There is no contradiction, once the names are corrected. In establishment usage, "democracy" has never operationally meant governments doing what their publics want. It means governments oriented toward Washington's preferred order, with the electoral machinery counted as democratic when it produces that orientation and as compromised or "backsliding" when it does not. This is how one tradition accommodates the overthrow of elected governments in Tehran, Guatemala City, and Santiago while calling itself democracy's champion; it is how a Venezuelan oppositionist is an authentic popular voice while an American majority opposing a war is a bot network. Publics matter as instruments of legitimation when they endorse the program and as objects of management when they don't. The rule is applied uniformly, at home and abroad. Aspen merely stated it out loud.
The old Confucian discipline of zhengming, the rectification of names, insists that when names are wrong, language ceases to accord with the truth of things, and the people have nowhere to put hand or foot. Apply it to the Aspen lexicon and the fog lifts at once. "Democracy promotion" rectifies to client alignment. "Stability" means a configuration favorable to us. "Credibility" is a reputation for willingness to inflict violence, which is why it can only ever be spent downward. "Influence operation" means public disagreement with the program. Rectified, the panels were perfectly coherent all along: they were discussing the maintenance of a hegemonic order, in a vocabulary designed to make that discussion sound like something else.
Aurelien sees all of this, the folklore, the incuriosity, the "consensual hallucination" of American agency, and describes it better than almost anyone writing. But notice where his causal chains terminate: in arrogance, habit, nostalgia, an over-dependence on abstract thinking. The West's real problems, he tells us, are "primarily conceptual and psychological." Every explanation stops at a state of mind.
A state of mind is precisely a way of not naming, because minds can simply be wrong, innocently. Name the structure instead, the client system, the think-tank ecology funded by contractors and foreign ministries, the professional class whose careers were built on unipolarity and whose expertise depreciates the moment the frame is admitted dead, and the "errors" stop looking like errors. The ignorance Aurelien catalogs is not a deficit; it is a product. It is cultivated, funded, and selected for, because accurate perception of Russian production capacity or Iranian missile stocks would obligate conclusions the system exists to avoid. Nobody at Aspen is paid to lie. The mechanism is quieter: the funding constitutes the medium in which cognition is cultured, the pipeline differentially promotes those whose sincere priors fit the niche, and by the time anyone reaches the closed-door meetings the filtering has already happened. Sincere at the level of the organism; functional at the level of the medium. Intelligence does not protect against this, the motivated-reasoning literature suggests it amplifies it, furnishing a more powerful engine for arriving where one's professional identity requires.
Aurelien's own principle convicts him. Economists see economic causes of war; human-rights advocates see rights violations; and a career official sees what a career official sees, failures of staff work, expertise, and seriousness. The world as a badly run ministry. His single brush with the material base, dismissing the military-industrial complex because no arms firm cracks the Fortune top fifty, knocks down the crudest version of the structural claim and treats the category as closed, as though political power were a revenue ranking rather than a matter of concentrated interest, districted production, and the revolving door into the very institutions Ashford described.
The rectified title of Aurelien's essay is not "we don't understand conflict." It is: the institutions that pay for understanding conflict are paid not to. He circles that sentence for eight thousand words and declines to write it. Perhaps it is the residual loyalty of a pensioned insider; perhaps the pseudonymous man's one last withheld name; perhaps simply the lens that cannot see itself. The effect is the same either way, a devastating description that indicts no one, a meticulous account of the fog that never asks who owns the fog machine.
The discipline cuts both ways, and a commitment to zhengming binds the speaker first. "The Blob," "empire," "the deep state" can calcify into thought-terminating clichés of the opposition just as easily as "credibility" and "stability" serve the consensus. The test is whether a name still tracks a mechanism one could specify without it. That is the standard the Aspen crowd fails weekly. It is also the standard by which Aurelien, our finest describer of the fog, must finally be measured, and found, on the decisive question, silent.
" Nobody at Aspen is paid to lie. The mechanism is quieter: the funding constitutes the medium in which cognition is cultured, the pipeline differentially promotes those whose sincere priors fit the niche, and by the time anyone reaches the closed-door meetings the filtering has already happened."
Well said. As Noam Chomsky said to Andrew Marr, whose jaw literally drops: "... if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting" - see 21-second clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EPgix5_5w
Organisms are conditioned to respond in ways that increase the odds of their survival. Otherwise they wouldn't be "sitting where they are sitting." In other words, being alive. Funding provides the food and water and education and social status that increases the odds of their survival and the survival of their offspring. Therefore, those of us who are sitting there, talk the talk. Some may even be aware that it is B.S. That is not pathology.
Quite so!
From where I am sitting it feel like you are both analysing the deep grief of devastating failure. Both analyses float on top of a stark truth. The West, as an historical cultural era, is dying.
A truth the English poet Matthew Arnold sadly sang of in his 1867 poem ‘Dover Beach’.
I am not that pessimistic. How many times did the Chinese think that the end of the world has come over them? Look where they are now. Also, remember what Leto II said to Stilgar in front of their Sietch, "Look how beautiful are the young ones". The issue is not the death of the West (they had a huge plague in 1300s that decimated 1/3 of the population, check The Decameron), but what will emerged from the present pile, after the fascist tendencies of EU will expiate, and the US will wake up from its hegemonic fever dream? But we might not live to see it.
Leto II and Stilgar are fictional characters. If the works of a middling level SF writer, from a mediocre work is where you have to get quotes from, God help us.
Again, it is a metaphor and it has several layers, like an onion...
Well, as far as I can see, it is no more successful than the last effort. There are far better sources to use with credibility.
So, no spark of curiosity, to check the volumes out? Let me know your preferred framwork and I will try to oblige.
You make some good points but all boil down to a cultural blindness - much more significant than organised conspiracy. The problem is that people are rewarded for this blindness and employed by organisations that need it. Moreover, people (even from the most genuine academia) do tailor their remarks to the audience they are addressing.
This is what I am hinting at and I appologise for not being explicit in my assertion. There is no conspiracy. Things are always stated, one needs to listen carefully. Though my pointers are Zephyr Teachout, with her work on oligarchy and how it is organized in reinforcing networks, Aristotles' assertion about oligarchy, as being the most resilient political system, and Belcher's mechanism of silence: you have also to watch what it is not talked about. I think Voltaire sid something about what one is not allowed to criticize. But Belcher is more encompassing a bit, I would say. So yeah, this is why I devised my political assessment work making it from a imple axis, authoritarian/democratic, into a triangle, and adding the oligarchic node. It is institutional, you are right.
Your 'pointer' is a failed US would-be politician "with her work on oligarchy" backed up by Aristotle? As for 'Belcher' - never heard of him, but presumably he's another fan of oligarchy. That explains a lot about what you write. Luckily, your prose is so impenetrable that I can glean very little else from it.
Maybe that is your problem, maybe. And I was wrong, it is Brecher: https://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-newsletter-100-amateurs-talk-cancel-pros-talk-silence/index.html
the best comment on Aurelien´s texts ever
Thank you for this comment! I wish Aurelien would comment on this, as your comment genuinely engages the article and points out a possible direction of further understanding. I find Aurelien always useful in addilg a layer of sensemaking to current phenomena that are baffling. Your comment adds yet another layer of sensemaking, and this kind of fruitful engagement is what may lead to developing genuine understanding. This kind of engagement is very rare nowadays. Substack comments are often expressing something in the vein of why is this article not talking about this specific thing that is important to me. This is not communication leading to mutual growth. It does not appear to me that Aurelien is declaring immutable truths, to me it looks more like his way of attempted sensemaking in an environment that is full of poisonous fog. I do not know if anyone sees clearly, so blaming each other for that is adding to that fog, not clearing it. Your comment opens my eyes to the possibility of finding more clarity through wisely comparing and combining viewpoints. Hoping for more comments like yours, and more fine posts by Aurelien to seed more understanding of our predicament.
Just so.
I like Aurelian a lot, his weekly essays are a must-read for me, but this,
"And the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex: won't they force the war to continue? Maybe not so dreaded: of the largest US companies listed by revenue in Fortune magazine, none of the military companies are in the top fifty. Much economic power lies elsewhere..."
is at best overstated.
Weighing the influence of the MIC by ranking individual companies' revenue is clearly the wrong way to go about it. Not only should the MIC include the entire Pentagon's budget, but also Homeland Security and a substantial portion of law enforcement too.
But the more fundamental point is that weapons, the ability to make them, and the skill in using them cannot be calculated by the same metrics that, for example, rate the retail, finance, insurance, and real estate sectors.
Weapons are much more like food or fuel. For a few generations now, we've naively assumed that they will always be available, but if you really need a weapon or really need food, you will do absolutely anything to get them.
Do you know that quote, it might have been Milton Friedman, or maybe Paul Krugman, who said "$100 of computer chips are worth $100 of potato chips"? Kinda true, but also totally false.
Now try to extend that logic to weapons and food. If a man with a $100 pistol (but no food) meets a man with $100 worth of potatoes (but no gun), what happens? We certainly hope and pray that they come to a deal whereby both can eat in safety for many years to come, but whatever happens, it isn't the man with the pistol who is going to go hungry.
Weapons follow a logic unlike any other manufactured good.
Mu understanding of what is going on in Ukraine and Iran is handicapped by not being there ,i think that applies to everyone even those directing these conflicts , isnt that always the case with war ? only afterwards do we really begin to find out what was going on.
What i do know is that i disagree with the idea that the USA is the so called policeman of the world , they have no right to do that and it will never work , its best , in my opinion if countries are left to deal with their own conflicts and at most other countries use diplomacy and trade to coerce aggressors .
Its obvious that the USA is trying to take control of all the major oil producing countries in the world thats the plan with Russia and Iran and because of the distance between USA and Russia and USA and Iran the USA is using Ukraine and the EU to fight their battles , likewise the USA is using Irans neighbours and Israel to fight its battles with Iran.
Its not complicated , the USA is the bully of the world and has been since WWII when it took the opportunity to take control of the oul trade by getting nearly everyone to use the american dollar to buy and sell oil.
USA extracts Iraq,s oul sells it , banks the money in new york then controls Iraqi government by releasing or not releasing some of that money to them depending on how well Iraqi govt follows orders.
USA now controls extraction of Venezuela,s oil has stopped Venezuela selling some to countries USA wants to harm for example Cuba and China there are more.USA oil and Venezuela oil is very different Venezuela oil very thick and heavy USA oil thin and light on their own they have uses but when mixed together they are transformed into a valuable state the USA needs so USA now that it has kidnapped the president of Venezuela and his wife and holds them in prison in USA , steals Venezuela oil and mixes it with USA oil all whilst Venezuela is in mayhem following two devastating earthquakes and is pleading globally for donations to repair and rebuild , i watch the tour de france on tv every day and see channel TNT previously BT (British Telecom ) now owned by HBO a USA company asking viewers to donate £10gbp , there is an easier way a more just way to help Venezuela , are you listening USA ? just give Venezuela back the oil money you have stolen and while we are on that subject i say to the UK just give back the £billions of gold bullion the MFI put in the bank of england ( which is actually just the uk govt treasury its not a real bank ) for safety when it judged Venezuela to be heading towards a currency crash some 20 yrs ago.
USA want to do to Iran what it has done to Iraq and what it did to Libya.
USA wants to do to Russia what it did to Iraq and Libya but Russia is too big and powerful and has been there before it knows what the USA gameplan is but nevertheless USA can carry out its plan of worldwide control of oil much easier if Russia is tied up with other things such as defending itself from Ukraine and EU and UK all of whom broke promises over the last thirty years that they would not surround Russia with NATO missiles , NATO missiles largely made in and controlled by USA.
So understanding what is going on in Ukraine and Iran is not really that difficult if you look at the common denominator in all this conflict , the one element that is always involved is the USA be it in Ukraine Iran Russia Venezuela Cuba Iraq Libya Afghanistan Syria Lebanon Palestine Egypt Greenland Canada Kosovo Serbia , lets stop there we could go on and on .
None of these conflicts ( wars ) are ever called the USA war even though it is the USA that always starts them and always fights them in these other countries , USA wars are never fought in USA , the USA has started dozens and dozens of wars since WWII ended , the last time a country attacked the USA was when Japan attacked pearl harbour in WWII and the response of the USA was to drop two nuclear bombs on Japan killing millions of civilians , as the USA like to say , " thats how we roll ".
Its time for the EU and China and Russia , Africa , South America to say no and do what Iran is doing , tell USA to withdraw their threatening military forces and close down their overseas military bases, the UK i dont include because they spawned USA and will always do what they can to support the USA having passed the colonial batton to the USA when the british empire couldnt be continued due to lack of funds it all having been spent on WWII efforts.
"It´s not complicated" - exactly. No need to hide the reality under thousands of words
“because the very structure and definition of such conflicts is often contested”.
Well, take for example the war in the Ukraine. There are two main accounts:
1. Russia is still an Empire, is greedy for land and invaded the Ukraine without provocation in order to further this expansionism. Ultimately it wants to invade the rest of Europe to add to its empire, which it lost with the fall of the USSR. This is the line adopted by Brussels, Berlin, Paris, London etc.
2. Russia intervened in the Ukraine on behalf of the ethnic Russians in the Donbas and elsewhere who were being subjected to large scale artillery strikes by the US created pro NATO Neo-nazi government in Kiev. This is very briefly the Russian story.
The idea that these two accounts can logically and realistically be ‘contested’ is ludicrous. The first is obviously and provably a farrago of lies and propaganda, while the second approximates to a truth.
This will apply to almost all instances of conflict, except where both sides are lying in their teeth, in which case, what difference does it make?
And:
“The causal chain between . . . are even talking about the same conflict.”
Complete rubbish. Are you really postulating that if the assassination had not happened there would still have been a colonial war in Tanganyika? Like the one in Agadir? Phooey! Taken by itself, that is merely very wild speculation.
And that’s only the third paragraph. It will be a real effort to go any further - probably requiring the help of a good drink.
Update:
Fortunately, after that it was mostly plain common sense, and well put, although I agree with the reservations outlined by 'Kouros'.
Soon the Chinese will stop some of their companies supplying 'drone kits' to 3rd party countries that then get shipped to Europe , assembled and sent to Ukraine which with US telemetry get fired into Russia
Once the trade stops, there will be nothing left to attack Russian infrastructure. I suspect the Germans have suddenly woken up to this fact.
Things could develop quite quickly.
Why do you think that will happen James?
Xi will finally respond to Putin's requests.
So what has stopped Xi from responding to such requests for the past four years?
Stop kidding yourself. China will do no such thing.
Take a step back and think about what underlies Mr. Whelan's comment. There are two parties who could stop the war in the Ukraine very quickly -- the Euros and the Chinese.
The Euros fund and promote their proxy war against Russia. If they stopped paying the bills and supplying the weapons, Zelensky would suddenly see the value of genuine negotiations.
The Chinese provide key items which go into most drones, wherever they are assembled. If China decided to put an embargo on exporting those items, the fighting would first change and then stop.
I can understand the Chinese shrugging their shoulders and thinking that if silly Westerners want to kill each other, they should take the opportunity to make some money. But what is in the Ukraine war for the Euros?
Russia is one of the few countries that supports China. Chinese shortsightedness in pursuit of a quick dollar is astonishing.
I disagree.
I think it's a farsighted policy that will bring great benefits to the Chinese over the long term. The Chinese aren't supplying weapons, they're supplying dual use components with legitimate civilian uses, that keeps them inside the rules. Tucks, jeeps, motors, cameras, radios, computer chips, even simple molded plastic components are dual use.
If the West ever deployed enough leverage against Beijing to stop supplying them to Moscow then the Chinese have the perfect justification to stop supplying them to Kiev (and Washington, London, Paris, Berlin etc.)
If the argument is put forward that they don't deserve them because they're wicked, but we do because we're righteous, then Beijing can publicly reply with a very long and detailed list of the various shady things that the capitals of the West have done over the last few generations.
By keeping the market open to both sides of the equation Beijing can keep that market for itself. Withdraw from that market and it just gets picked up by someone else.
Washington made this mistake by banning hi-end chip sales to China, thinking it would cripple their AI development. China adapted and is now building them itself, taking the profits and avoiding the blockade.
It's all right for you, matey, you have experience of these matters. How about someone like me who has no experience at all of army, navy, air force, diplomacy, or government?
Actually the answer is that it's been easy for me too. For years I have mocked the US Navy, clearly built to refight the Battle of Midway and clearly no bloody use anywhere near a defended shore. Or manned fighter-bombers, clearly too easily shot down by cheap defensive missiles. Or bombers, obviously better replaced by attack missiles.
It remains me of my father's experience in The War: all the best officers came from "civvy street" or the reserves. The professionals were NBG.
For us citizens of the USA, to better understand current and future events will require a reckoning of our past that we have not been afforded in our education.
Well, your education system has been deliberately degraded for the last fifty or so years, and it was never first class to begin with. There are culprits involved.
All wars are bankers' wars - https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2026/04/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-iran-and.html?m=0 > through the means of USURY - https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2026/02/veriphysics-treatise-005-vox-popoli.html?m=0 - did Jesus come to make USURY not sinful? - https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2023/12/christianity-vs-churchianity-study-in.html?m=0 - https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2024/03/usury-faq-or-money-on-pill-zippy.html?m=0 - who was called out as DaSynagogue of Satan in the Bible? And by whom?
Where does the term "Forgive us our debts!" originate?
Are you getting the picture?
In terms of industrial capacity, I believe Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War dives deeply into this and logistics. It was an excellent, massive read at 643 pages.
Typical Aurelien. Right in general - but loose on facts. I agree that "it's not always obvious when wars 'end.'" But the example of WWI is wrong. "(The fighting did not stop everywhere in November 1918, for example.)" The fighting of WWI did stop everywhere in November 1918, with the last holdouts of German colonial troops capitulating on November 25.
Does Aurelien mean the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920 or Great Polish Uprising against Germans in December 1918? - But those were distinct conflicts with different belligerents, some of which did not even exist in the beginning of WWI.
I was amused by his claim that the Russian and Soviet militaries did not emphasize artillery.
Quite the opposite.
Me too.
Fighting between German units and nationalist armies in the Baltic countries was part of WWI and lasted well into 1920.
Romania rejoined the war on the eve of the armistice and fought Hungary until May 1919.
You may argue that those weren't "the real WWI", but they existed only as part of WWI and as direct consequences of it.
The Baltic-German conflict and the war between Hungary and Romania are quite separate from WWI. Both began in April 1919, more than five months after the Armistice. As I noted before, some parties (Hungary as a separate state, Baltics) were not in existence in 1914. Baltics and Germans were even allies right after the Armistice, fighting the Soviets together.
Yes, these wars were the result of the destruction WWI had wrought. But so were the Russian Civil War and the Posen Uprising I mentioned before, the Russian-Polish War of 1920, and even WWII. But one has to stop somewhere.
The Polish–Ukrainian War of 1918–1919 was a successor conflict to WWI with units raised for the Great war fighting on after the collapse of the Astro-Hungarian Empire
Thank you for another example confirming my point. As above, neither of the belligerents existed before WWI. These were, again, various factions fighting over the pieces of destroyed empires.
"...did not even exist in the beginning of WWI."
is different from
"...neither of the belligerents existed before WWI."
You're switching goal posts.
The Ukrainian Sich Riflemen were created in August 1914 and had units that were still fighting through late 1919 and even into 1920.
Aurelien's statement "The fighting did not stop everywhere in November 1918." is perfectly correct.
On a somewhat related note, I only learned about The Ukrainian Sich Riflemen recently when reading up on Andriy Melnyk, and why his dead bones were worth digging up and transporting from Luxemburg for a reburial in a military cemetery in Kiev.
It's a rather complex story, but suffice to say literally digging up the skeletons of the past is now a Ukrainian political strategy and that old crimes have long shadows.
'We make assumptions about western power and influence which are normatively rather than pragmatically based. We assume that people who sound as though they might think like us actually do think like us, because our way of thinking is just superior. We assume that western doctrine, training and equipment is the best, because we have never seriously researched others, and we look for someone to blame when any of these are shown to be inadequate.'
More than this, it indicates the cultural superiority which is a big achilles heel of 'the west'.
I recall a US soldier in Iraq who shot an unarmed woman saying 'Pity about the chick. I told her to stop and when she didn't had to shoot her. These ignorant ******** don't even speak English'.
Even labeling Gavrilo Princip a Serbian nationalist is, according to some, open to question. At his trial, he did not identify himself as an "Orthodox Serb"—the minimum requirement for someone to qualify as a Serbian nationalist. Instead, he declared himself an "atheist Yugoslav"; this, combined with the fact that all the surviving members of his organization (known as "Young Bosnia") went on to join the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, offers a completely different perspective on the assassin's ideology.
It seems to me that in Western capitals it’s always and everywhere 1939 and every opponent a Hitler.
Predictably, unintended cosmic hilarity ensues … 🙄
The question of when is it a war or an armed conflict or what is the definition of war is just silly , its a way that agressive governments can cause distractions , when you are the one being attacked you know for sure when there is a war and the term armed conflict is only used by rhe idiots who want to distract from the truth and play down the agression.
I see why governments and organisations distract with these terms and all it shows is the sly inconsiderate motives they have.
Israel decimating Palestine and its people is without doubt a war , just because one side does not have an actual army or navy or air force does not mean its not a war , what it means is that the side that does have an army and a navy and an air force is murdering the other sides unarmed civilian population.
Playing with words and inventing new descriptions doesnt work in these modern times where nearly everyone has access to tv radio books internet.
Israel decimating Palestine and its people is not a war. It´s genocide, nazism and apartheid. Palestinian people have no real army, diplomatic corps, government and trade relations. I´m not talking about those kind of clowns that are now regarded as "Palestinian officials". It´s just like Third Reich all over again, only much much worse.
A lot to take in …..