Aurelien, you have again (indeed, as always) eloquantly expressed what has been hidden in plain sight- that our "leaders" stumble about among the detritus of their unexamined assumptions as much as the rest of us. That politics is no more rational than the actors in a play - they speak their lines from a composite script whose familiarity is taken for truth. I wonder if perhaps that's why modern empires tend not to last so long as in the past. The ever deeper layers of sediment emitting ever less coherent bubbles of decaying assumptions, thicken the noxious mental fog we seem to be stuck in. Simple answers are an illusion, but in the press of life, we grab onto them. What a ruddy miracle it is that we've survived so long as it is!
Not that it's a consolation, but political and military leadership don't have monopolies on stubborn adherence to shaky, even falsified, notions. This is theoretical physicist Max Planck on scientific progress: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” The pithier version: advances come one funeral at a time.
Clearly received ideas are the fife and drum corps in the march of folly, but let's not underestimate the allure of dogged persistence, with imagined ultimate vindication thanks to a triumph of the will reminiscent of Samuel Johnson's remark about second marriages. It's as if a necessary condition of (mis)leadership is not competence but confidence, or "confidence"—hence its resemblance to a confidence game—assisted by its groom of the stool, public relations, which doesn't give a hoot for what's real and true but for what controls. If by happenstance it's additionally real and true, well and good, but that's an afterthought. PR is the sword that so many in leadership, public and private, live by. On the steppe they're seeing, albeit through gaps between the fingers over their eyes, that it's not quite the all-purpose wonder weapon they'd thought it to be.
From Aurelian we get a masterful description of the social mechanics of institutional groupthink, which can persist despite underlying tensions and cross-purposes. Observation alone might lead one to conclude that the sole imperative, when confronted with a blunder, is to carry on with the naked procession. Dig we must, for our cause it is just! Such behavior is a playground for proverbs featuring shovels and saws. But I'd like to note one thing further, which Michael Hudson pointed out almost literally on the day the special military operation began. The NATO countries think they're the players; actually they're the marks. From the perspective of (the) imperial capital, what we might call the Ukraine strategy has succeeded brilliantly. It instigated a war on the Russian border that's a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition for Washington. Either way it bleeds and distracts Russia; as for the Ukrainian proxy cannon fodder, as renowned sage of international relations W.C. Fields would say, never give a sucker an even break. D.C. has further envassaled a blustering (when not quaking) Europe while hamstringing its competitor economies. It has been a boon for the "defense" and energy sectors in the U.S. Once more America is in, Russia is out, and Germany is down. What's not to like?
One might chime in, Will Pyrrhus please pick up the courtesy phone? But to the self-styled Straussian philosophers and gentlemen—we can forget about the vulgar masses—the future is uncertain and, at present, far away, and in the meantime, as in most times, local rewards and punishments rule. For outcomes that fall a tad shy of predictions—those that weren't purely rhetorical for the rubes—it's trivial to blame-shift and one-true-Scotsman away any unfortunate shortcomings and toddle along to the next merry mischief. It's a big old world.
So, re Veronica's parting sentence, one more quote, from bug biologist E.O. Wilson: "The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall." Have a nice day!
This is almost certainly un true - by all accounts the Russia economy is growing rapidly, helped by the acquisition of Donetsk which is or was and will be a major industrial centre, defence industries are increasing production and exports, as well as developing new weapons to be used in new ways, and the armies raised, although of course they have suffered losses, are gaining experience and hardening such as the US can only fantasise about
(Also back to population growth)
Plus! the SMO/war has spurred not only Russia but broadly the rest of the world, to ally in finding forms of international trade, relationships, formal alliances, and settlements systems outside the prevailing hitherto US control
Not least provides a very useful breather and case study for China
Did not wiser US politicians used to say that the situation to avoid was an alliance between Russia China and Iran?
Not to mention loss of ground merit and reputation by US (and France) in Africa, particularly Sahel,, but very broadly across the whole of Africa, and in crucial Med countries, Egypt, Algeria and Libya
All that for a weakened Europe?
And - distracts Russia from ...what? Au contraire the war seems to have concentrated refined and encouraged the scattered or inherent tendancies into a unified national program and effort
Gerrard, you think that, and I think that, but Atlanticist elites think otherwise. Are they misguided? Yes, from a perspective of "national interest," which John Mearsheimer frequently calls upon. But there is a small problem with a concept like "national interest." It is a phantom. It does not exist.
I realize that in saying that we pass further into the labyrinthine Derridean funhouse, but here's how I Virgil it out. "National interest" is a composite of local institutional interests with varying alignments, and institutional interests arise from still more local private and personal agendas. Many of those interests, however they are publicly dressed, are first and foremost selfish. That is not to say that cooperative, altruistic motives and actions are purely fictive, or that selfish interests predominate under every contingency and circumstance. It's to say it's less descriptive and predictive to conceptualize better angels as universal and primary. So far that jibes with Mearsheimer’s “realism.”
But Mearsheimer has expressed a certain perplexity about the failure of realism, as he defines it, to explain U.S. backing of Israel. That may be because his reification of "national interest" obscures his otherwise remarkably clearsighted vision of forces, institutional and personal, for which unlimited backing is largely understandable. Ideological predicates will be asserted, and careers will advance. Nor should we underestimate the revanchist, irredentist "irrationalities" that motivate and direct, not just around Israel but also around "new" Europe and the children, and grandchildren, of its diaspora. States, NGOs, and Atlanticist institutions are liberally salted with them. Pathologies of the imperialist heart and mind are unsurprising consequences.
So, as Upton Sinclair put it, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” This is what we see among the elites and their ruinous (from our perspective) polices. In practice "national interest" is an amalgam of salaries, the iron law of oligarchy, the complexity ratchet, and that ancient nemesis, hubris. Do note that I'm not paralleling Margaret Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" by tugging at the loose conceptual threads in the text of "national interest." It's a useful, usable abstraction, but its limits, its conditional nature, must be taken into account.
Here I fancy Derrida nodding in approval from the grave, albeit with some reservations as to the formulation's lack of periphrasis and obscurity. We all have our illusions.
What I'm getting at is that what looks obvious to us, as outsiders observing from the peanut gallery, looks quite otherwise to ladder-climbing, feather-nesting insiders forever on the lookout for the next funding and promotion. From that dynamic, which I'm dialectically describing as "local," analyses and actions arise of a very different sort, such that what succeeds spectacularly in one domain, like climbing the Peter Principle ladder, turns into colossal failure when its bubble comes into pointed contact with a pin, or a Putin.
You may say that that’s well and good, but arising multipolar realities will prove a comeuppance to the smug, insular West. I’m inclined to agree, and time will tell, but that’s not the point. In the here and now, locally, abundant rewards and punishments feed back into the imperial engine to keep it on track, even if that track leads to Ozymandias Station. It is how the best and the brightest, the rich and the powerful, the elites, those who’ve made it, our betters, who quantify smarts by cozy perches and bank accounts, do such monumentally stupid things. They do them by doing what they’ve always done and has served them so well. That, at any rate, is how I make sense of, if you’ll excuse one last use of scare quotes, the “senseless.”
Proverbially, on traces and sediments: It's less what you don't know that's a problem than what you know for certain—or pretend to—that's plain wrong.
Recall what catbird-seated Karl Rove (allegedly) told journalist Ron Suskind: “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." What happens when narrative über alles comes into kinetic contact with a renascent superpower on its border? We're seeing it, and it is a sorry and disturbing sight, like Titicut Follies in pricey suits and stylish scarves.
Are the Atlanticist institutions madness factories or finishing schools? Answer: trick question.
It is an interesting story and very well written and uses Derrida's deconstructivism as a nice scafolding/metaphor.
However, while it might very well represent the bumbling Europeans, it definitely leaves aside the elephant in the room, the US. Wasn't the US that kept pushing for its hegemony and unipolar moment to announce in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. Which then emboldened Georgia later in 2008 and started the war? Wasn't the US that strongly supported the Chechen Wars? Then all the Ukrainians color revolutions.
You cannot really apply the same measure to the US actions against Russia as you do with the bumbling reactions of Europeans. Also, Germany's economic seppuku is rather hard to explain by the sediment. More like the assiduous cultivation of US, especially after the rebuke of European states of the Iraq invasion, of a new elite beholden to US, and that will move lock in step with the US.
Why is that the Russians don't give any attention to European countries any longer? Because they don't matter any longer. It seems that right now they are just sediment, America's sediment...
I'd like to add another piece of sediment. Western think-tanks specialising on Russia are actually very reluctant in hiring Russians. There is no shortage of Russians willing to join them, especially after the start of SMO. And yet they hire Ukrainians, Kazaks, citizens of Baltic states -- anyone but Russians. And people from post-Soviet republics have a very, very funny ideas about Russian and Russians due to sediment of late Soviet and post-Soviet anti-Russian propaganda.
The sediment that buoys a policy does run silent and deep.
I agree that these accumulated debris would make for an interesting research project. I dabble in computational linguistics and have thought that analyzing political discourse over the span of my life time from 1953 onward to be a interesting project.
In a much narrower application than this essay I find the U.S. defense munitions design process to be a morass of inexplicable complexity. The much mocked simple Russian munitions are devastating the Ukrainian army daily. On the other hand our vaunted weapons are not doing all that much to Russian Forces. Reasons for this lack of performance deal chiefly with design that did not account for a possible lack of air supremacy and also, the conditions of the battlefield terrain. (For enlightenment, search for videos showing the steps necessary to launch a salvo of HIMAR missiles. The time, complexity and mass of auxiliary vehicles necessary is daunting. Then comes the Patriot...)
The only conclusion that I find sane is that our weapons are designed for trade shows, not war. Buttressing this bad choice is the faith based allegiance to "markets".
Let's hope that our come to Jesus moment is not Ms. Condoleezza Rice's specter of a mushroom cloud.
An interesting research project from 2015 studied the changes in World Bank documents from 1946-2010 to address some of the questions you raise at the beginning of your comment. The project was called "Bankspeak: the language of World Bank reports, 1946-2010" Here is a link - https://litlab.stanford.edu/projects/bankspeak/
Here's part of the abstract "The language of the World Bank Report has shifted dramatically from 1958 to 2008. Particularly during the last two decades, there has been a shift in semantics and grammar, as the language of the reports has become codified, self-referential, and detached from everyday language. This project explored that shift."
Having served at a very low level in the Federal government on foreign policy matters, I think that if anything you are understating the problem. I saw a lot of ambitious but callow bureaucrats scamper from crisis to crisis. The lack of a national strategy other than “contain everyone” didn’t help.
The sediment you describe is analogous to the complexity ratchet Joseph Tainter describes - adding layers is easy and stripping them off is hard, so eventually you get to a point of crisis where you are so bound by the past you can’t face the future clearly. What is needed is for someone to cut the Gordian Knot. Some place their hope in Trump to do that on the American side, but he is, to put it mildly, no Alexander.
The other issue that makes this worse is the different goals and means of the various NATO countries. Russia has the distinct advantage of not having to coordinate with allies (aside from trying to not make the Chinese look too bad).
A very interesting article. I wonder though where you got the idea that the mass rapes of German women at the hand of the red army didn´t take place? When even the Yugoslav Communists complained to Stalin (read Milova Djilas "Conversations with Stalin"), that the Red Army raped and plundered during their short stay in the Voivodina to such an extent, that it tarnished the reputation of their Yugoslav comrades. Stalin famously answered, why be so prudish when his soldiers were having a little fun.
As to NATO and all these international organisations and their institutional inertia: very interesting look from within. Fact though is as well that the US military was wanting a new base "camp bondsteel". And as to what is happening in Ukraine: for many years any close reader of Russia - Western relations knew that Nordstream was the project to watch. It was opposed by the US from the very start and it was amusing (nor not so) to watch how the Germans tried any kind of subterfuge to enact the project. They were wiggling like worms to somehow escape the clutch of big brother who didn´t want Nordstream. Only by provoking the war in Ukraine did they finally manage to put an end to German-Russian cooperation.
I don’t think he was saying there was no rape. Even Grossman commented on the behavioral change in red army soldiers once outside the borders of the USSR. However, that behavior was hardly unique to the Red Army. The stories of American GIs doing their fair share of raping have been ignored in the choices of historians. There’s WWII plunder from one of my grandfathers on a shelf in my home. And he was American as apple pie. Quite proud of the plunder.
Ok, I am German and 60 years old. I heard countless stories of the behaviour of the various nations towards German civilians. Some thing are so terrible that I don´t want to even think about. Like throwing German red cross sisters into a ditch and burning them with a flame thrower. That one I heard when I was 13 years old. It was a Czech woman who had seen that. (I am partially Czech) Sure GI´s raped. It just wasn´t a mass phemonen. Nor did they kill the women afterwards, rape them 20 at a go a.s.o. I heard all of that from older Germans who had experienced it themselves. Never heard that about GI´s. Nor about the British, the French et al. Why did it happen? First it was a war tactic. By installing insane fear among German civilians the Red Army made sure there were no civilians and no partisans in their back. Anyhow 15 million Germans were slated for expulsion and that tactic saved later troubles. Then the millions of civilians clogged the roads which made fighting more difficult for the Wehrmacht. And then simply it was the result of unceasing hate propaganda by the Red Army. Finally (at least initially) you could do with Germans whatever you wanted. Rape, kill, mutilate. There was no penalty. And that is unfortunately what human beings are like when given the chance. It has nothing to with them having been Russians.
Definately not all Russians were like that. On the contrary. I have also heard of Russians who saved civilians from their own troops. But it was dangerous if you showed to much pity for Germans. Lew Kopelew was sentenced to ten years for this particular crime and Solshenizyn was at least partially also sentenced for that.
Finally: everybody of the older Generation agreed in that black American GI´s were the very best of the occupyers.
honestly, I never understood this discourse. And I'm from a country where people complain about the same thing(we were allied with Germany in WW2).
so... "allied Europe" invades SU. About 20M people die on their side. Roughly 1 in 10, right? Germany has a "scientific programs" about how to execute russians more efficiently. And "scientific proofs" about how slavs are an inferior specie.
"The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slavic people, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation and of the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared."
generalplan Ost, etc. I mean, it's really amazing how the red army wasn't bringing flowers when the wheels turned...
yes, two wrongs don't make a right, fully agree. But considering the circumstances, I'd say they acted better than one could reasonably expect.
and the "laws of war" were always a joke if you ask me. You can't keep people for years in some mud filled holes(as were the conditions on the eastern front) and then be surprised they act like animals. If anything, I'm pleasantly surprised by the amount of people on both sides that seemed to manage and keep their humanity in those conditions.
p.s. - again: I'm not saying that those rapes made any sense. It's not like they brought their dead back to life or anything. And yes, the rapes and pillage were not debunked; they were perfectly real.
but civilization is not natural. If anything, how the two armies acted in ww2 on the eastern front is natural. And that's why the current situation scares me.
if I'm looking from their(russian) point of view, I'd see the europeans preparing to pull the same stunt for the 4th time. With nato expansion and everything that happened after the cold war. Once every 100 years; clockwork.
and I'd be really pissed in their place; like in nuclear royally pissed. That's what scares me.
I agree with you. The main difference to 80 years ago is that our betters in the West are getting into something that they have absolutely no clue about. I always thought that the Soviet leadership was less dangerous than the US leadership because the people like Breshnev and Schmidt knew war.
that's what I don't understand. I'm 44; I definitely don't know war. And I'd like to keep it that way.
But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that war in the current circumstances war is rather deadly. Ok, "our" rockets are better and they'll lose more people; though they're more dispersed. Whatever. That'll sure comfort me a lot when I'll be dead... not.
100% agree with you about the US leadership. Since the US got this dumb idea they "won" the cold war, it seems that each time there's even a remote chance to do something stupid, they're in a rush to do it. They way they missed this huge opportunity in the '90s with Russia defies any logic. Especially as US was able to win the peace after WW2.
I mean, the whole idea about west somehow "winning" the cold war is so stupid it's beyond belief it still survives...
I lived in a communist country for the first 10 years of my life. The last thing anyone cared about was what "the west" is doing. Everyone was so fed up with communism noone was actually willing to do anything. That's how communism collapsed; with a sort of undeclared "general strike".
Not because Reagan ordered another 5 carriers and 10 subs; noone gave a crap about US "star wars". It's not like NATO had any chance to invade and win a war against the Warsaw pact. With or without another 1000 planes and 50 new ships...
Heck, if NATO would've completely disarm and I still doubt the WP armies would obey the orders to invade. Those armies were still mostly conscription based. And everyone was so fed up with communism I doubt orders to invade would be followed.
Auelian helps us understand the muddy hydrology of the PMC -- how sediment production and accumulation correlates with mass and inertia over time. To quote this essay, such things as " ...NATO headquarters...permanent staff...Defence College and... and... and... " form impressive infrastructure for creating and processing sediment. The sediment factory has numerous and complex accretive processes, such as self-hypnosis, self-programming, ingrained bias, political buffoonery, etc. Add in big budgets and the amplifying effects of corporate media, and you have a self-sustaining chain reaction for production of sediment. We are all coated with it.
Aurelian helps us wash it off, but it's pretty sticky stuff.
At this point NATO countries can’t even decide if they want to support Ukraine and, if they do, how they’ll go about it. Pure sable rattling with Russia watching and laughing. The EU, as far as I know, still requires each member nation to adhere to a balanced budget with, ideally, a 2% growth economically per year. How would increasing the production of armaments for Ukraine factor into this? What part(s) of each nation’s growth would be sacrificed?
No, as you mention so well, each member of NATO sees the Ukraine conflict in its own way and, for those very reasons, will likely react differently than any of the others.
If NATO can’t bring itself to decide what the conflict is about collectively, how to defend it or not, how to negotiate with Russia which doesn’t want to do so and how to satisfy Ukraine and not sell it down the river it shouldn’t be there.
Bigger is by no means better or stronger for that matter.
“ The result is a confused, scared and over-stressed ruling class that has started something it now cannot control and which it knows, at some level, will end badly. But it cannot understand the mistakes it made, it’s not very sure how it got into this mess, and it literally cannot envisage any other set of policies apart from continuing the current funeral procession.”
This has been my take since nearly the beginning. Although it is clearly getting much worse by the day. They created a historical moment that is far too big for them. Everything since the failure of a half-thought plan A has been reaction. Each reaction is more counter productive than the last.
This sounds like you are speaking about ancestral kamma, which has been prevented from coming to full reckoning and reconciliation by the suppression of vengeance by the overlay of words and abstractions.
The Indigenous Australians never needed empire amongst amazing tribal and linguistic diversity because they knew how to manage and utilise vengeance. Vengeance acts without the need for vocabulary.
"The first to do so will be ostracised from the club. So the conference held in Paris over the last couple of days, in the post-Avdeevka panic, was apparently predicated on the requirement that “Russia must not win,” and so fantasies of sending handfuls of western troops were (perhaps) discussed, on the basis that it gave the leaders something to talk about instead of the inevitable Russian victory."
With all due respect, you are high if you think that that the intervention will be limited to "handfuls" of western troops, and certainly not after the first batch gets chewed up.
Anyway, everyone knows that NATO campaign starts with lots and lots of air strikes. Preferably delivered using standoff weapons.
All of which is beside the point - the Russian air defense hasn't performed as advertised. I can wish otherwise all I want, cope, make excuses, insist that everything is fine, but them's the facts.
In the same way that some missiles get through when enough are fired, some aircraft survive. No defense is perfect. But it's worth noting that, if NATO tried to attack Russia via an "air war", it would lose a significant number of planes and pilots. And the West cannot weather, politically or militarily, openly high losses of either combat troops or equipment.
Warfare is like that. Avenues that once were open, close. Those that were closed, reopen. As I said, no defense is perfect; there are constant adjustments and reactions by both sides. The situation will always be fluid, even when it significantly favors one side or the other.
So, um, just how many Soviet era aircraft were "donated" by ex-Warsaw Pact countries in the last two years to allow Ukraine to still have aircraft flying?
Do the West European countries have more than handfuls of troops (with weapons, ammunitions and all) to begin with ?...
That's the big question.
We now hear things like "Only sending in NATO troops can win the war", in much the same way as we heard 2 years ago that sanctions would bring down the Russian economy in a matter of weeks, or that some missiles and a few Soviet-era tanks would be enough to rout a notoriously incompetent Russian army...
No. The French have 80,000 combat troops total. Assume 20,000 might be able to go in theater with another 20,000 for rotation. And if they can be equipped and armed the ability to sustain 20,000 fighting for more than one rotation probably breaks the French military.
Every time a French soldier has died in Mali, the whole operation has been publicly called into question. I can't imagine if the body bags were coming back from Ukraine by the dozen.That would be political suicide.
In any case, it's just a matter of domestic politics: Macron playing the warlord to make people forget about the farmers' problems and taking advantage of the situation to call his opposition pro-Russian. It's quite pathetic...
"If you understand the capabilities of the French armed forces from the point of view of “what they can do in Ukraine,” then what is striking is their completely insufficient weight to solve any combat missions. The four armored and mechanized brigades, with some attached units, comprise a total of 23 tank, mechanized, artillery and engineer battalions (referred to as regiments in French staffing). Having a total of 500-odd units of medium and heavy armored vehicles, including 200-odd tanks, as well as about 100 self-propelled artillery units with a caliber of 155 mm, not counting various auxiliary equipment, air defense, reconnaissance and engineers, they roughly correspond in “weight” one well-equipped Russian division. A fairly large contingent of light infantry, airmobile and amphibious units, equipped mainly with light armored vehicles and artillery, includes 30 battalions, which speaks primarily of the expeditionary “colonial” nature of the army, which has not been prepared for serious battles on land for a long time. Assessing the French potential in such battles, that is, in a large land war, I will say that with the exception of the aerospace part, France today would lose to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Even now, after the failure of the counter-offensive and heavy losses in equipment, the Ukrainian has significantly more armor and guns, and there is no need to talk about combat experience. At the same time, the level of readiness of the French equipment is not high even in peacetime, amounting to 60-65% on average, and for some types of equipment falling to 40% or lower. What then are the French going to do, given that with such readiness they will not be able, even if they decide, to send more than one “heavy” and one “light” battalion group to Ukraine? Of course, we are not talking about war, and the maximum that comes to mind here is an attempt to intervene in some key points that Paris would not want to “give over to Russia.” French garrison in Odessa? They have already tried this, as we remember, just a little over a hundred years ago. However, given that Macron’s brilliant idea to send troops to Ukraine was rejected by almost all major NATO countries, this adventure is unlikely to be realized."
I don't think that the question regarding "the historic distinction between the regions of Yugoslavia that had been part of the Habsburg Empire" and the others was a sediment in the Yugoslavia crisis. Rather that all Europeans and USA (and Russia) leaders were well aware of this at the time. But Germany was the European leader then, no one would seriously object against its will (well, I think Spain to a certain extent did, it's a country with lots of important "sediment", by the way).
In the Ukraine crisis, meanwhile, Germany achieved the remarkable feat of ceasing to be important (for the moment, at least). So, Macron's meeting yesterday was his attempt for France to take the lead (it won't work). But crisis always end one way or another, don't be so pessimistic :). In this case, I have the feeling it will be sooner rather than later. They will find an honorable excuse to abandon the Ukraine project (Trump perhaps?). And even to get the pipeline working again. I may be wrong, of course.
Thank you, once again, for much to think about. You mention that "Shorn of its decorative vocabulary, Derrida’s argument is easy to understand". It's the decorative vocabulary that repels me from reading him - is there another credible source I can read to understand these ideas in more detail?
Aurelien, you have again (indeed, as always) eloquantly expressed what has been hidden in plain sight- that our "leaders" stumble about among the detritus of their unexamined assumptions as much as the rest of us. That politics is no more rational than the actors in a play - they speak their lines from a composite script whose familiarity is taken for truth. I wonder if perhaps that's why modern empires tend not to last so long as in the past. The ever deeper layers of sediment emitting ever less coherent bubbles of decaying assumptions, thicken the noxious mental fog we seem to be stuck in. Simple answers are an illusion, but in the press of life, we grab onto them. What a ruddy miracle it is that we've survived so long as it is!
Not that it's a consolation, but political and military leadership don't have monopolies on stubborn adherence to shaky, even falsified, notions. This is theoretical physicist Max Planck on scientific progress: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” The pithier version: advances come one funeral at a time.
Clearly received ideas are the fife and drum corps in the march of folly, but let's not underestimate the allure of dogged persistence, with imagined ultimate vindication thanks to a triumph of the will reminiscent of Samuel Johnson's remark about second marriages. It's as if a necessary condition of (mis)leadership is not competence but confidence, or "confidence"—hence its resemblance to a confidence game—assisted by its groom of the stool, public relations, which doesn't give a hoot for what's real and true but for what controls. If by happenstance it's additionally real and true, well and good, but that's an afterthought. PR is the sword that so many in leadership, public and private, live by. On the steppe they're seeing, albeit through gaps between the fingers over their eyes, that it's not quite the all-purpose wonder weapon they'd thought it to be.
From Aurelian we get a masterful description of the social mechanics of institutional groupthink, which can persist despite underlying tensions and cross-purposes. Observation alone might lead one to conclude that the sole imperative, when confronted with a blunder, is to carry on with the naked procession. Dig we must, for our cause it is just! Such behavior is a playground for proverbs featuring shovels and saws. But I'd like to note one thing further, which Michael Hudson pointed out almost literally on the day the special military operation began. The NATO countries think they're the players; actually they're the marks. From the perspective of (the) imperial capital, what we might call the Ukraine strategy has succeeded brilliantly. It instigated a war on the Russian border that's a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition for Washington. Either way it bleeds and distracts Russia; as for the Ukrainian proxy cannon fodder, as renowned sage of international relations W.C. Fields would say, never give a sucker an even break. D.C. has further envassaled a blustering (when not quaking) Europe while hamstringing its competitor economies. It has been a boon for the "defense" and energy sectors in the U.S. Once more America is in, Russia is out, and Germany is down. What's not to like?
One might chime in, Will Pyrrhus please pick up the courtesy phone? But to the self-styled Straussian philosophers and gentlemen—we can forget about the vulgar masses—the future is uncertain and, at present, far away, and in the meantime, as in most times, local rewards and punishments rule. For outcomes that fall a tad shy of predictions—those that weren't purely rhetorical for the rubes—it's trivial to blame-shift and one-true-Scotsman away any unfortunate shortcomings and toddle along to the next merry mischief. It's a big old world.
So, re Veronica's parting sentence, one more quote, from bug biologist E.O. Wilson: "The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall." Have a nice day!
" Either way it bleeds and distracts Russia "
This is almost certainly un true - by all accounts the Russia economy is growing rapidly, helped by the acquisition of Donetsk which is or was and will be a major industrial centre, defence industries are increasing production and exports, as well as developing new weapons to be used in new ways, and the armies raised, although of course they have suffered losses, are gaining experience and hardening such as the US can only fantasise about
(Also back to population growth)
Plus! the SMO/war has spurred not only Russia but broadly the rest of the world, to ally in finding forms of international trade, relationships, formal alliances, and settlements systems outside the prevailing hitherto US control
Not least provides a very useful breather and case study for China
Did not wiser US politicians used to say that the situation to avoid was an alliance between Russia China and Iran?
Not to mention loss of ground merit and reputation by US (and France) in Africa, particularly Sahel,, but very broadly across the whole of Africa, and in crucial Med countries, Egypt, Algeria and Libya
All that for a weakened Europe?
And - distracts Russia from ...what? Au contraire the war seems to have concentrated refined and encouraged the scattered or inherent tendancies into a unified national program and effort
Gerrard, you think that, and I think that, but Atlanticist elites think otherwise. Are they misguided? Yes, from a perspective of "national interest," which John Mearsheimer frequently calls upon. But there is a small problem with a concept like "national interest." It is a phantom. It does not exist.
I realize that in saying that we pass further into the labyrinthine Derridean funhouse, but here's how I Virgil it out. "National interest" is a composite of local institutional interests with varying alignments, and institutional interests arise from still more local private and personal agendas. Many of those interests, however they are publicly dressed, are first and foremost selfish. That is not to say that cooperative, altruistic motives and actions are purely fictive, or that selfish interests predominate under every contingency and circumstance. It's to say it's less descriptive and predictive to conceptualize better angels as universal and primary. So far that jibes with Mearsheimer’s “realism.”
But Mearsheimer has expressed a certain perplexity about the failure of realism, as he defines it, to explain U.S. backing of Israel. That may be because his reification of "national interest" obscures his otherwise remarkably clearsighted vision of forces, institutional and personal, for which unlimited backing is largely understandable. Ideological predicates will be asserted, and careers will advance. Nor should we underestimate the revanchist, irredentist "irrationalities" that motivate and direct, not just around Israel but also around "new" Europe and the children, and grandchildren, of its diaspora. States, NGOs, and Atlanticist institutions are liberally salted with them. Pathologies of the imperialist heart and mind are unsurprising consequences.
So, as Upton Sinclair put it, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” This is what we see among the elites and their ruinous (from our perspective) polices. In practice "national interest" is an amalgam of salaries, the iron law of oligarchy, the complexity ratchet, and that ancient nemesis, hubris. Do note that I'm not paralleling Margaret Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" by tugging at the loose conceptual threads in the text of "national interest." It's a useful, usable abstraction, but its limits, its conditional nature, must be taken into account.
Here I fancy Derrida nodding in approval from the grave, albeit with some reservations as to the formulation's lack of periphrasis and obscurity. We all have our illusions.
What I'm getting at is that what looks obvious to us, as outsiders observing from the peanut gallery, looks quite otherwise to ladder-climbing, feather-nesting insiders forever on the lookout for the next funding and promotion. From that dynamic, which I'm dialectically describing as "local," analyses and actions arise of a very different sort, such that what succeeds spectacularly in one domain, like climbing the Peter Principle ladder, turns into colossal failure when its bubble comes into pointed contact with a pin, or a Putin.
You may say that that’s well and good, but arising multipolar realities will prove a comeuppance to the smug, insular West. I’m inclined to agree, and time will tell, but that’s not the point. In the here and now, locally, abundant rewards and punishments feed back into the imperial engine to keep it on track, even if that track leads to Ozymandias Station. It is how the best and the brightest, the rich and the powerful, the elites, those who’ve made it, our betters, who quantify smarts by cozy perches and bank accounts, do such monumentally stupid things. They do them by doing what they’ve always done and has served them so well. That, at any rate, is how I make sense of, if you’ll excuse one last use of scare quotes, the “senseless.”
There is a term called "social truth" which does a lot here.
Proverbially, on traces and sediments: It's less what you don't know that's a problem than what you know for certain—or pretend to—that's plain wrong.
Recall what catbird-seated Karl Rove (allegedly) told journalist Ron Suskind: “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." What happens when narrative über alles comes into kinetic contact with a renascent superpower on its border? We're seeing it, and it is a sorry and disturbing sight, like Titicut Follies in pricey suits and stylish scarves.
Are the Atlanticist institutions madness factories or finishing schools? Answer: trick question.
It is an interesting story and very well written and uses Derrida's deconstructivism as a nice scafolding/metaphor.
However, while it might very well represent the bumbling Europeans, it definitely leaves aside the elephant in the room, the US. Wasn't the US that kept pushing for its hegemony and unipolar moment to announce in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. Which then emboldened Georgia later in 2008 and started the war? Wasn't the US that strongly supported the Chechen Wars? Then all the Ukrainians color revolutions.
You cannot really apply the same measure to the US actions against Russia as you do with the bumbling reactions of Europeans. Also, Germany's economic seppuku is rather hard to explain by the sediment. More like the assiduous cultivation of US, especially after the rebuke of European states of the Iraq invasion, of a new elite beholden to US, and that will move lock in step with the US.
Why is that the Russians don't give any attention to European countries any longer? Because they don't matter any longer. It seems that right now they are just sediment, America's sediment...
I'd like to add another piece of sediment. Western think-tanks specialising on Russia are actually very reluctant in hiring Russians. There is no shortage of Russians willing to join them, especially after the start of SMO. And yet they hire Ukrainians, Kazaks, citizens of Baltic states -- anyone but Russians. And people from post-Soviet republics have a very, very funny ideas about Russian and Russians due to sediment of late Soviet and post-Soviet anti-Russian propaganda.
The sediment that buoys a policy does run silent and deep.
I agree that these accumulated debris would make for an interesting research project. I dabble in computational linguistics and have thought that analyzing political discourse over the span of my life time from 1953 onward to be a interesting project.
In a much narrower application than this essay I find the U.S. defense munitions design process to be a morass of inexplicable complexity. The much mocked simple Russian munitions are devastating the Ukrainian army daily. On the other hand our vaunted weapons are not doing all that much to Russian Forces. Reasons for this lack of performance deal chiefly with design that did not account for a possible lack of air supremacy and also, the conditions of the battlefield terrain. (For enlightenment, search for videos showing the steps necessary to launch a salvo of HIMAR missiles. The time, complexity and mass of auxiliary vehicles necessary is daunting. Then comes the Patriot...)
The only conclusion that I find sane is that our weapons are designed for trade shows, not war. Buttressing this bad choice is the faith based allegiance to "markets".
Let's hope that our come to Jesus moment is not Ms. Condoleezza Rice's specter of a mushroom cloud.
An interesting research project from 2015 studied the changes in World Bank documents from 1946-2010 to address some of the questions you raise at the beginning of your comment. The project was called "Bankspeak: the language of World Bank reports, 1946-2010" Here is a link - https://litlab.stanford.edu/projects/bankspeak/
Here's part of the abstract "The language of the World Bank Report has shifted dramatically from 1958 to 2008. Particularly during the last two decades, there has been a shift in semantics and grammar, as the language of the reports has become codified, self-referential, and detached from everyday language. This project explored that shift."
Thank you for this reply. I will visit the link soon.
Well put.
Having served at a very low level in the Federal government on foreign policy matters, I think that if anything you are understating the problem. I saw a lot of ambitious but callow bureaucrats scamper from crisis to crisis. The lack of a national strategy other than “contain everyone” didn’t help.
The sediment you describe is analogous to the complexity ratchet Joseph Tainter describes - adding layers is easy and stripping them off is hard, so eventually you get to a point of crisis where you are so bound by the past you can’t face the future clearly. What is needed is for someone to cut the Gordian Knot. Some place their hope in Trump to do that on the American side, but he is, to put it mildly, no Alexander.
The other issue that makes this worse is the different goals and means of the various NATO countries. Russia has the distinct advantage of not having to coordinate with allies (aside from trying to not make the Chinese look too bad).
A very interesting article. I wonder though where you got the idea that the mass rapes of German women at the hand of the red army didn´t take place? When even the Yugoslav Communists complained to Stalin (read Milova Djilas "Conversations with Stalin"), that the Red Army raped and plundered during their short stay in the Voivodina to such an extent, that it tarnished the reputation of their Yugoslav comrades. Stalin famously answered, why be so prudish when his soldiers were having a little fun.
As to NATO and all these international organisations and their institutional inertia: very interesting look from within. Fact though is as well that the US military was wanting a new base "camp bondsteel". And as to what is happening in Ukraine: for many years any close reader of Russia - Western relations knew that Nordstream was the project to watch. It was opposed by the US from the very start and it was amusing (nor not so) to watch how the Germans tried any kind of subterfuge to enact the project. They were wiggling like worms to somehow escape the clutch of big brother who didn´t want Nordstream. Only by provoking the war in Ukraine did they finally manage to put an end to German-Russian cooperation.
I don’t think he was saying there was no rape. Even Grossman commented on the behavioral change in red army soldiers once outside the borders of the USSR. However, that behavior was hardly unique to the Red Army. The stories of American GIs doing their fair share of raping have been ignored in the choices of historians. There’s WWII plunder from one of my grandfathers on a shelf in my home. And he was American as apple pie. Quite proud of the plunder.
Ok, I am German and 60 years old. I heard countless stories of the behaviour of the various nations towards German civilians. Some thing are so terrible that I don´t want to even think about. Like throwing German red cross sisters into a ditch and burning them with a flame thrower. That one I heard when I was 13 years old. It was a Czech woman who had seen that. (I am partially Czech) Sure GI´s raped. It just wasn´t a mass phemonen. Nor did they kill the women afterwards, rape them 20 at a go a.s.o. I heard all of that from older Germans who had experienced it themselves. Never heard that about GI´s. Nor about the British, the French et al. Why did it happen? First it was a war tactic. By installing insane fear among German civilians the Red Army made sure there were no civilians and no partisans in their back. Anyhow 15 million Germans were slated for expulsion and that tactic saved later troubles. Then the millions of civilians clogged the roads which made fighting more difficult for the Wehrmacht. And then simply it was the result of unceasing hate propaganda by the Red Army. Finally (at least initially) you could do with Germans whatever you wanted. Rape, kill, mutilate. There was no penalty. And that is unfortunately what human beings are like when given the chance. It has nothing to with them having been Russians.
Definately not all Russians were like that. On the contrary. I have also heard of Russians who saved civilians from their own troops. But it was dangerous if you showed to much pity for Germans. Lew Kopelew was sentenced to ten years for this particular crime and Solshenizyn was at least partially also sentenced for that.
Finally: everybody of the older Generation agreed in that black American GI´s were the very best of the occupyers.
honestly, I never understood this discourse. And I'm from a country where people complain about the same thing(we were allied with Germany in WW2).
so... "allied Europe" invades SU. About 20M people die on their side. Roughly 1 in 10, right? Germany has a "scientific programs" about how to execute russians more efficiently. And "scientific proofs" about how slavs are an inferior specie.
"The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slavic people, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation and of the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared."
generalplan Ost, etc. I mean, it's really amazing how the red army wasn't bringing flowers when the wheels turned...
yes, two wrongs don't make a right, fully agree. But considering the circumstances, I'd say they acted better than one could reasonably expect.
and the "laws of war" were always a joke if you ask me. You can't keep people for years in some mud filled holes(as were the conditions on the eastern front) and then be surprised they act like animals. If anything, I'm pleasantly surprised by the amount of people on both sides that seemed to manage and keep their humanity in those conditions.
p.s. - again: I'm not saying that those rapes made any sense. It's not like they brought their dead back to life or anything. And yes, the rapes and pillage were not debunked; they were perfectly real.
but civilization is not natural. If anything, how the two armies acted in ww2 on the eastern front is natural. And that's why the current situation scares me.
if I'm looking from their(russian) point of view, I'd see the europeans preparing to pull the same stunt for the 4th time. With nato expansion and everything that happened after the cold war. Once every 100 years; clockwork.
and I'd be really pissed in their place; like in nuclear royally pissed. That's what scares me.
I agree with you. The main difference to 80 years ago is that our betters in the West are getting into something that they have absolutely no clue about. I always thought that the Soviet leadership was less dangerous than the US leadership because the people like Breshnev and Schmidt knew war.
that's what I don't understand. I'm 44; I definitely don't know war. And I'd like to keep it that way.
But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that war in the current circumstances war is rather deadly. Ok, "our" rockets are better and they'll lose more people; though they're more dispersed. Whatever. That'll sure comfort me a lot when I'll be dead... not.
100% agree with you about the US leadership. Since the US got this dumb idea they "won" the cold war, it seems that each time there's even a remote chance to do something stupid, they're in a rush to do it. They way they missed this huge opportunity in the '90s with Russia defies any logic. Especially as US was able to win the peace after WW2.
I mean, the whole idea about west somehow "winning" the cold war is so stupid it's beyond belief it still survives...
I lived in a communist country for the first 10 years of my life. The last thing anyone cared about was what "the west" is doing. Everyone was so fed up with communism noone was actually willing to do anything. That's how communism collapsed; with a sort of undeclared "general strike".
Not because Reagan ordered another 5 carriers and 10 subs; noone gave a crap about US "star wars". It's not like NATO had any chance to invade and win a war against the Warsaw pact. With or without another 1000 planes and 50 new ships...
Heck, if NATO would've completely disarm and I still doubt the WP armies would obey the orders to invade. Those armies were still mostly conscription based. And everyone was so fed up with communism I doubt orders to invade would be followed.
Auelian helps us understand the muddy hydrology of the PMC -- how sediment production and accumulation correlates with mass and inertia over time. To quote this essay, such things as " ...NATO headquarters...permanent staff...Defence College and... and... and... " form impressive infrastructure for creating and processing sediment. The sediment factory has numerous and complex accretive processes, such as self-hypnosis, self-programming, ingrained bias, political buffoonery, etc. Add in big budgets and the amplifying effects of corporate media, and you have a self-sustaining chain reaction for production of sediment. We are all coated with it.
Aurelian helps us wash it off, but it's pretty sticky stuff.
Thank you Aurelien🙏
At this point NATO countries can’t even decide if they want to support Ukraine and, if they do, how they’ll go about it. Pure sable rattling with Russia watching and laughing. The EU, as far as I know, still requires each member nation to adhere to a balanced budget with, ideally, a 2% growth economically per year. How would increasing the production of armaments for Ukraine factor into this? What part(s) of each nation’s growth would be sacrificed?
No, as you mention so well, each member of NATO sees the Ukraine conflict in its own way and, for those very reasons, will likely react differently than any of the others.
If NATO can’t bring itself to decide what the conflict is about collectively, how to defend it or not, how to negotiate with Russia which doesn’t want to do so and how to satisfy Ukraine and not sell it down the river it shouldn’t be there.
Bigger is by no means better or stronger for that matter.
“ The result is a confused, scared and over-stressed ruling class that has started something it now cannot control and which it knows, at some level, will end badly. But it cannot understand the mistakes it made, it’s not very sure how it got into this mess, and it literally cannot envisage any other set of policies apart from continuing the current funeral procession.”
This has been my take since nearly the beginning. Although it is clearly getting much worse by the day. They created a historical moment that is far too big for them. Everything since the failure of a half-thought plan A has been reaction. Each reaction is more counter productive than the last.
Peace,
This sounds like you are speaking about ancestral kamma, which has been prevented from coming to full reckoning and reconciliation by the suppression of vengeance by the overlay of words and abstractions.
The Indigenous Australians never needed empire amongst amazing tribal and linguistic diversity because they knew how to manage and utilise vengeance. Vengeance acts without the need for vocabulary.
Peace.
"The first to do so will be ostracised from the club. So the conference held in Paris over the last couple of days, in the post-Avdeevka panic, was apparently predicated on the requirement that “Russia must not win,” and so fantasies of sending handfuls of western troops were (perhaps) discussed, on the basis that it gave the leaders something to talk about instead of the inevitable Russian victory."
With all due respect, you are high if you think that that the intervention will be limited to "handfuls" of western troops, and certainly not after the first batch gets chewed up.
Anyway, everyone knows that NATO campaign starts with lots and lots of air strikes. Preferably delivered using standoff weapons.
Russia has the most advanced air defense systems in the world. The NATO aircraft would be quickly chewed up.
And logistics prevents more than a handful of troops being used in the Ukraine without a long build up.
Well, there still are Ukrainian aircraft flying, so that advanced air defense may not be all it's cracked up to be.
Are they crossing the line of conflict? I don't think so...
They are firing missiles from time to time.
Yes, but not from very close up. And with Turus going only 500 km, and you subtract the buffer, it won't go far into Russia.
All of which is beside the point - the Russian air defense hasn't performed as advertised. I can wish otherwise all I want, cope, make excuses, insist that everything is fine, but them's the facts.
In the same way that some missiles get through when enough are fired, some aircraft survive. No defense is perfect. But it's worth noting that, if NATO tried to attack Russia via an "air war", it would lose a significant number of planes and pilots. And the West cannot weather, politically or militarily, openly high losses of either combat troops or equipment.
It's been two years already. This isn't "nobody's perfect".
Warfare is like that. Avenues that once were open, close. Those that were closed, reopen. As I said, no defense is perfect; there are constant adjustments and reactions by both sides. The situation will always be fluid, even when it significantly favors one side or the other.
OK, so cliches and excuses. Got it.
So, um, just how many Soviet era aircraft were "donated" by ex-Warsaw Pact countries in the last two years to allow Ukraine to still have aircraft flying?
Did those ex-Warsaw pact countries also donate pilots? I've seen no evidence of this.
Moreover, donations aside, Ukraine still has aircraft and flies them.
I wish they didn't, but wishing won't make those planes go away or kill their pilots.
Do the West European countries have more than handfuls of troops (with weapons, ammunitions and all) to begin with ?...
That's the big question.
We now hear things like "Only sending in NATO troops can win the war", in much the same way as we heard 2 years ago that sanctions would bring down the Russian economy in a matter of weeks, or that some missiles and a few Soviet-era tanks would be enough to rout a notoriously incompetent Russian army...
No. The French have 80,000 combat troops total. Assume 20,000 might be able to go in theater with another 20,000 for rotation. And if they can be equipped and armed the ability to sustain 20,000 fighting for more than one rotation probably breaks the French military.
Every time a French soldier has died in Mali, the whole operation has been publicly called into question. I can't imagine if the body bags were coming back from Ukraine by the dozen.That would be political suicide.
In any case, it's just a matter of domestic politics: Macron playing the warlord to make people forget about the farmers' problems and taking advantage of the situation to call his opposition pro-Russian. It's quite pathetic...
https://nitter.poast.org/simpatico771
"If you understand the capabilities of the French armed forces from the point of view of “what they can do in Ukraine,” then what is striking is their completely insufficient weight to solve any combat missions. The four armored and mechanized brigades, with some attached units, comprise a total of 23 tank, mechanized, artillery and engineer battalions (referred to as regiments in French staffing). Having a total of 500-odd units of medium and heavy armored vehicles, including 200-odd tanks, as well as about 100 self-propelled artillery units with a caliber of 155 mm, not counting various auxiliary equipment, air defense, reconnaissance and engineers, they roughly correspond in “weight” one well-equipped Russian division. A fairly large contingent of light infantry, airmobile and amphibious units, equipped mainly with light armored vehicles and artillery, includes 30 battalions, which speaks primarily of the expeditionary “colonial” nature of the army, which has not been prepared for serious battles on land for a long time. Assessing the French potential in such battles, that is, in a large land war, I will say that with the exception of the aerospace part, France today would lose to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Even now, after the failure of the counter-offensive and heavy losses in equipment, the Ukrainian has significantly more armor and guns, and there is no need to talk about combat experience. At the same time, the level of readiness of the French equipment is not high even in peacetime, amounting to 60-65% on average, and for some types of equipment falling to 40% or lower. What then are the French going to do, given that with such readiness they will not be able, even if they decide, to send more than one “heavy” and one “light” battalion group to Ukraine? Of course, we are not talking about war, and the maximum that comes to mind here is an attempt to intervene in some key points that Paris would not want to “give over to Russia.” French garrison in Odessa? They have already tried this, as we remember, just a little over a hundred years ago. However, given that Macron’s brilliant idea to send troops to Ukraine was rejected by almost all major NATO countries, this adventure is unlikely to be realized."
Well, we've been hearing that the much-hyped counteroffensive failed because of lack of air support.
That's where it will start.
Duh.... more NATO is invincible rubbish
Back to good old square one, airstrikes
Like those which have been so successful against Ansar Allah?
With planes that only operate is it 30% or is it 40% of the time?
RF AD is good, and missiling the wherever airstrips the F whatevers take off from even gooder
One could say their consciousness of the truth has gone rotten .
Overripe with hubris is worse than
A bruised banana for your morning breakfast.
Poor diet?
I don't think that the question regarding "the historic distinction between the regions of Yugoslavia that had been part of the Habsburg Empire" and the others was a sediment in the Yugoslavia crisis. Rather that all Europeans and USA (and Russia) leaders were well aware of this at the time. But Germany was the European leader then, no one would seriously object against its will (well, I think Spain to a certain extent did, it's a country with lots of important "sediment", by the way).
In the Ukraine crisis, meanwhile, Germany achieved the remarkable feat of ceasing to be important (for the moment, at least). So, Macron's meeting yesterday was his attempt for France to take the lead (it won't work). But crisis always end one way or another, don't be so pessimistic :). In this case, I have the feeling it will be sooner rather than later. They will find an honorable excuse to abandon the Ukraine project (Trump perhaps?). And even to get the pipeline working again. I may be wrong, of course.
Thank you, once again, for much to think about. You mention that "Shorn of its decorative vocabulary, Derrida’s argument is easy to understand". It's the decorative vocabulary that repels me from reading him - is there another credible source I can read to understand these ideas in more detail?