The War Was The Easy Bit.

Just wait until we get to the politics.

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I had originally started to write about something else this week, but on Saturday morning I began to catch up with the fallout from the Trump/Putin summit in Alaska, and the puzzlement and disappointment that the western media have been channeling. So I thought I would write something briefly about that: I’m starting late and travelling, so this will be a little shorter and less polished than I would ideally like. However.

Two points before we start. I’ve written at some length about negotiations over the last couple of years, and this time I would just invite you to look at my most recent essay on the subject, which includes links to other, earlier essays. Today I will just emphasise yet again how the media continually confuse different types of contacts between governments, and use words apparently randomly. Very briefly, governments have informal exchanges all the time, at all levels. The content may be relatively slight and the intention may be quite limited: maintaining contacts, ensuring positions are understood, and so forth. As the level of the contacts goes up, more attention is paid to preparation and content, so a twenty-minute meeting between, say, the Presidents of India and Brazil at the UN would not be left to chance, even though it might just consist of an exchange of known positions on agreed subjects.

Then, there are organised talks, especially at senior level, whose function is to improve understanding and perhaps bring the two (or more) sides closer on important issues. After that, there are various types of more technical exchanges that might lead to written agreements on some subject, and then there are “negotiations” properly speaking, where the intention is to produce an agreed text, sometimes but not always legally binding, and which can take a great deal of preparation, time and effort. Put simply, people who don’t understand these (and other) distinctions themselves have been confusing everybody else, and are now broadcasting their own incomprehension and disappointment with what recently happened.

I make a point of not criticising individuals in these essays, but I’ll just observe here that analytical skills don’t always transfer very well between areas. What we’re dealing with at this stage of the Ukraine crisis is the politics of international security at the highest level, and it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect that someone with knowledge of, say, command of regular military forces, military technology or intelligence analysis will have the background and experience to understand and comment usefully on what’s starting to happen now. The danger is that such people, pressed for comments by the media, eternally invited to appear on TV or YouTube, or needing to keep Internet sites or journalistic careers going, fall back on platitudes from popular culture, or even the kind of thinking found on those dozens of Internet sites all claiming (in competition with each other, naturally) to tell you how the world really works.

I’m far from suggesting that the current military situation on the ground in Ukraine is unimportant, but it’s also essential to realise that, as we get closer to the endgame, the important action is elsewhere, and much of it will be hidden from public view. The broad outlines of the end of the military part of the Ukraine crisis have been visible for a while, even if the details could still change. By contrast, the extremely complex political endgame has only just started, the players are not really sure of the rules, nobody is really sure how many players there are anyway, and the outcome is at the moment as clear as mud. Thus, it was disappointing, but not really surprising, to read various pundits recently suggesting that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin were going to “negotiate” an end to the war in Ukraine, as though Mr Putin were to pull out a text from his pocket and the two of the them were then to work through it. That is so far removed from reality that it’s hard to actually explain how far removed from reality it is. This essay therefore has the modest, but I hope useful, function of setting out what the various political components of the endgame are likely to be for major political actors, and how they might possibly turn out.

One essential pre-condition for any conclusion (not necessarily “settlement”) is a minimum amount of understanding between the main players about what the final stage of the crisis is going to look like. We would be wrong to expect that every nation would see things the same way—indeed some may never be reconciled—but a crisis like this can never be concluded without an adequate degree of overlap among the main players about an acceptable outcome. I can see this beginning already, in the Alaska meeting. Whilst there were obviously no “negotiations,” and were never going to be, it does look as though the two leaders nonetheless established some common understandings.

On the US side, it’s clear that Mr Trump has decided that the game is over, and that, whilst he’s still saying several different things in public, he’s not going to stand in the way of a Russian-imposed solution, which is in any case the only one there will be. Indeed, he will use the influence he has with other countries to push them in that direction. (No country can “negotiate” on behalf of others of course, so that idea was always nonsense.) On the Russian side Mr Putin has apparently decided that, in spite of the US sponsorship of Ukraine, and its supply of weapons, there is no point in continuing with a confrontational attitude, and that it is best to start work now towards a stable long-term relationship with Washington. This has the added effect of driving a wedge between the US and Europe: a point I return to. Assuming that analysis is correct, and I think it is, then that’s a decent, if modest, outcome for a couple of hours of talks, even if there are suggestions that other potential areas of agreement were not successful, which would hardly be surprising. But of course even such a modest outcome raises very significant questions of implementation both for the US and Russia, which we’ll get onto in a second, never mind for Ukraine and Europe.

Whether any more detail was seriously “discussed” as opposed to just mentioned—as I see some outlets are suggesting—seems to me doubtful, in such a short meeting. What may have happened is that Mr Putin reiterated the basic Russian position on a number of issues, notably the criteria for agreeing to a ceasefire, and Mr Trump floated a number of speculative ideas for the future, and neither side explicitly objected to what the other had said. That in itself would be a good outcome too.

But we are at a very early stage. The political upheavals that will follow the end of the war promise to be wrenching in their nature and consequences, and it’s critical to understand that a real, global, articulated political settlement may never be possible. Governments will no doubt fall and careers will be ended, but that’s the least of the problems: some political systems actually risk coming apart under the strain. Let’s take the case of the US first, although since my first-hand knowledge of that system is quite limited, I won’t attempt to be too ambitious.

The security “community” in Washington, in and out of government, has two principal weaknesses, which may prove to be terminal in this situation. One is fragmentation and rivalry. There are so many players, with so many ways of stopping or delaying things, that it’s amazing anything ever gets done at all. Mr Obama quite accurately called it “the Blob”, precisely because it is shapeless and directionless, and no-one is in charge. Because it is so difficult to change anything substantial, whilst bitter battles are fought over trivia, even misguided policies tend to endure because too many people are invested in them, and there is no consensus on an alternative. For this reason, US policy can give the impression of specious continuity, simply because no coalition can be assembled to change it. In most cases (Palestine is one) there are not enough personal and professional advantages to individuals in change, as opposed to continuity. Combined with the fact that the realities of life outside Washington impinge only episodically on the decision-making process, this creates a highly artificial, largely enclosed world where reality is allowed in only if it agrees to behave itself.

Delusions of a permanent Directorate in charge in Washington are natural, in these circumstances, as a compensation fantasy: but as I’ve suggested, this apparent permanence is actually better described as inertia, Now of course, with enough effort, some kind of conceptual continuity or post-hoc rationalisation can be imposed on events later. Thus, I see it’s even being claimed that there is a “continuity” between Afghanistan and Ukraine, and that one was “dropped” to permit concentration of resources on the other. This is quite unsupported by evidence, not least since few of the “resources”were common, and in any case the US sent few “resources” to Ukraine. Likewise, I’m old enough to remember the confident predictions that the US would never withdraw from Afghanistan, because too much money was being made there, and there were huge mineral deposits underground, and that Trump or Biden would be assassinated if the withdrawal went ahead. Instead, it was assumed that the war would somehow be continued indefinitely from adjacent countries. How long is it since anyone of importance in Washington even mentioned Afghanistan?

Defeat in Afghanistan was unavoidable, and there was no interest group that was seriously prepared to try to obstruct withdrawal from that country. Moreover, the dynamics of that defeat were comprehensible: it wasn’t the first time in history that low-technology soldiers had outlasted a technologically-advanced army in a low-intensity conflict, and in a situation where the military of the nominal government was ineffective. Rather, everyone had an interest in blaming the defeat on Kabul and burying it as rapidly and as completely as possible.

Ukraine is fundamentally different from that, and one reason why political systems are going to come under immense strain quite soon is that the narrative of “we are winning” or at least “they are losing,” has been so powerful and so universally accepted for so long. Whilst there are those who have been spreading deliberate lies about the fighting, the truth as always is a lot more complex. Principally, there has been a failure of imagination by those whose job it is to do analysis, and supply their analysis to decision-makers and decision-informers. If you hold as a matter of faith that western equipment, tactics, doctrine and leadership are superior, and that the organisation of western economies, particularly that of the US, is the best in the world, then there is no rational way in which Ukraine can be losing. So the first and biggest problem will be to find a consensus narrative that makes the total defeat even minimally comprehensible, never mind acceptable, after so many years of loudly predicting complete victory. Whether the US system is even capable of this is an open question.

The other main problem is the fantasy world in which many American policy-makers live: a natural product many would say of the New Age Californian belief that it you want something hard enough, you can have it. A generation ago, an anonymous and possible apocryphal official in the administration of Little Bush is supposed to have said “we’re an Empire now, we make our own reality.” This was an extraordinary statement to have made at any time, but was typical of the unthinking triumphalism of those days, and if it’s not literally true, it does reflect an attitude that many of us noticed then. And if you think about it, who’s going to object to following in the footsteps of the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans and the Ottomans, and having half the world bow down before them in worship? After all, few countries have populations that actively hate themselves (even if contempt for one’s country tends to be an affectation of western liberal intellectuals) nor populations which actively consider their country to be of no importance. Thus, praising one’s country and its importance is always good politics.

But here, it’s taken to psychopathic extremes. The Empire Delusion, or the Empire Syndrome, becomes dangerous when it leads to a serious overestimation of the actual strength and resources of the country, and its actual ability to influence events in the world. After all, reality itself often demands a look-in as well: the last twenty-five years have seen an unbroken series of defeats, disappointments and political and economic crises for this alleged Empire, most recently the scuttle from Afghanistan, and the failure in Ukraine. But then as with all large-scale delusions, apparent defeats are rapidly assimilated into assumed even-more-subtle master-plans that one day will put everything right.

Only this, I think, can explain the extraordinary delusions coming from the Imperial Death Star, that the US is in a position to “force” the Russians to do anything. Passing through London on the eve of the Summit, I saw a headline claiming that “Trump Threatens Putin” if X, Y and Z were not done, which of course they weren’t. So deeply ingrained is the idea of world-spanning US strength and influence, that not only Americans but even those who write about the country, whether sympathetically or aggressively, have come to share it uncritically. After a while, the argument becomes circular: the US is so powerful it must be behind all important events in the world, X is an important event, therefore it can be automatically assumed that the US was behind it, even if US involvement makes no sense, or contradicts the last assertion of US involvement.

You may recall that a couple of years ago, the talk was that if the war did not end soon in a Russian defeat, the US would have to “get directly involved.” What happened to that idea? It turned out that the US had nothing to get involved with. It had no forces in Europe capable of affecting the course of the fighting, and the very limited high-intensity forces it has in the US would have required months, if not years, of preparation, training and installation, and even then would have been incapable of making much of a difference. And yet the delusion continues, not just inside the government and the sycophant media, but among the US’s fiercest critics, who believe that Washington is trying to “provoke a war” with Russia for some reason, which it would certainly lose. Likewise, for all the bellicose political talk, it’s unlikely that the US military is quite so stupid to believe that it can “win” a naval and air war with China over some unspecified issue, at the cost of half its Navy and for no discernible purpose. Yet the delusions continue, and at some level they determine how people in Washington think and feel, since they have no real-world competition. The fundamental approaching crisis is less that the war in Ukraine has been “lost,” than that the US will have forfeited, unmistakably, unnecessarily and very publicly, much of its ability to influence events in the world. For their part, it’s clear that the Russians would prefer a less confrontational and more normal relationship with the US, but it’s equally clear that they are not prepared to sacrifice anything of importance to bring it about. I’m not sure that the US political system, disorganised, delusional and fragmented as it is, can cope with all this.

Which leads to consideration of Russia. Again, I don’t pretend to much specialised knowledge of the country, but there are certain things that political logic suggests are going to create problems in the near future. As I have pointed out, “victory” in this context is a very slippery idea, and may not be achievable in the full sense of the term. There can be no repetition of the 1945 scenario here, and even if the whole of Ukraine were brought under control it would simply give the Russians a new frontier with NATO, which would slightly defeat the point of the exercise. Above all, it’s not clear to me that something the Russians would legitimately regard as “victory,” and that could be marketed to the Russian people as such, could actually be practically agreed, let alone implemented. Above all, there is the question, addressed in my previous essay, of “how much is enough?” There is no rational, algorithmically-derived, answer to the question of how much land needs to be controlled, how far back NATO forces should ideally be pushed, what armaments a future Ukraine could be permitted, and many other things. There will certainly be a whole range of views and pressures, and the possibility of quite serious internal disputes, which will in turn make constructing a Russian negotiating position for the endgame much more difficult. And in any case, political systems and public opinion typically become more radical under the stress of war.

In effect, this problem is as much technical as political. Whilst a limited ceasefire agreement could be locally negotiated, anything else risks the involvement of national parliaments and attempts to find consensus in international organisations, both of which (not to mention their interrelationship) could make any attempts at formal agreements impossible. So it’s easy to see that the Russians could give a unilateral security guarantee to Ukraine, similar to the multilateral Budapest Memorandum of 1994. But the undertakings in that text were not legally binding and the Russians were clear in 2014 that they did not apply any more. So a unilateral political security guarantee, like all such guarantees in history, would only apply until it didn't, whereas a legally-binding security guarantee would be un-negotiable. And the complications of trying to negotiate a treaty which would have to be signed and ratified individually by NATO nations are of mind-numbing complexity. In other words, it may well be that for practical reasons the Russians simply cannot get diplomatically what they want politically, and we shall have to see what the consequences of that will be..

The risk here is that all that will ever be satisfactorily negotiated is an interim ceasefire agreement and perhaps an armistice. Now that may be fine as far as it goes: after all, there’s been an armistice in Korea for seventy years now. The problem is that the number of moving parts is infinitely greater than was the case in Korea, and almost everything of importance would be excluded from such an agreement. The result is likely to be chaos, as different attempts are made at different levels to try to sort out different problems, often temporary and limited, in isolation from each other and sometimes at cross-purposes. There are perhaps three dozen countries involved in the wider Ukraine dossier, and probably no two will have an identical position on any of the dozens of bilateral and multilateral issues that will be raised.

We may therefore see something like a repetition of the Minsk controversy, which turned a limited set of temporary ceasefire and disengagement agreements into a major source of aggravation between Russia and the West. Recall that the purpose of the agreements was to put an end to the fighting and create a zone of disengagement. This suited the Russians, because it wasn’t obvious that the separatists were winning, and politically Moscow would have been forced to intervene, which it didn’t at all want to do at that point. They probably pressurised the separatists to sign, with the bone of some unenforceable political reform commitments from Kiev. Political logic suggests that the French and Germans pressured the government into accepting the ceasefire and giving these political assurances in return for some vague promises of subsequent western support. Thus, a temporary lash-up job designed to freeze the conflict was acceptable because it gave each side a respite from fighting and the opportunity to build up its forces (and in the Russian case its economic strength) for the possible next round. But it was never intended to be a complete solution, or indeed any kind of solution, except to the immediate problem.

This situation now risks happening again on a larger scale. Whilst ceasefires and armistice agreements are relatively easy to negotiate, they are essentially pragmatic documents, and everything that looks difficult will be left out to be returned to later. But there may well be no later, and as the agreements drag on, they will become more and more the focus for disputes and even conflicts, brought about by frustration in being unable to deal with the underlying problems themselves. And in such circumstances, the agreements on a ceasefire and potentially an armistice may themselves start to break down, with unpredictable and dangerous consequences. All this could result in the Russians getting their fingers caught in the mangle, with unpredictable consequences.

I’ll finally touch on Europe because that is where I think the most dangerous and unpredictable consequences may come, and these need to be outlined simply and calmly, without the tone of sneering dismissal that has become the norm. The problem of the Europeans is simple enough: they have never fully trusted the good faith of the United States, and it’s beginning to look as though they were right. To understand why this is so we need to loop back to the late 1940s and the condition of Europe at that point, avoiding currently-fashionable Gnostic interpretations of the beginning of the Cold War (“I’ve had a revelation!” “I know!”) and basing ourselves just on what we do know.

Whilst it’s true that much of Europe was physically destroyed in 1945, the real damage was elsewhere. The Germans had looted everything from the territories they had conquered, from apples to artworks, and the continent was effectively bankrupt and starving, its economy destroyed. Something between 4-5 million Western Europeans had been sent off to Germany as forced labour. Socially and politically the devastation was even worse. Whole systems of government and administration were discredited by the Occupation, an entire European political class was in question, political parties had disappeared and social trust had frequently broken down. Collaboration, which took different forms in each country, had created gaping political wounds that in some cases have yet to heal.

Political differences seemed unbridgeable, and some countries saw widespread political violence. In the powerful Communist Parties of France and Italy, voices argued that the struggle would not be complete until they had taken control of the country in the name of the working class. The memory of the Spanish Civil War was still painfully fresh, and new civil war was in progress in Greece. Few doubted that another widespread conflict would mean the end of European civilisation, already looking pretty shaky.

To the East, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia had been completely absorbed into the Soviet system, not through military action but through intimidation. Could the same thing happen elsewhere? Was that what Stalin wanted? Did anyone have any idea what Stalin wanted? The fear was less of Soviet power as such (though as General Montgomery said all the Red Army had to reach the Channel Ports was “walk”) so much as of political weakness and possible disintegration of Western Europe, and what that might lead to.

The only possible counterweight in the circumstances was the United States, but that country was largely demobilised, and turning inwards on itself in a frenzy of anti-communism. Its main foreign policy preoccupation was China. Whilst the US would scarcely welcome Europe falling under Soviet influence, it wasn’t obvious that the US political system was prepared to fight another war to stop it. Indeed, the big fear was that the US might simply decide to let the Soviets do as they liked, without Europe being able to influence its own destiny. This is, of course, the world of Orwell’s 1984, which sums up the exhaustion and fears of the time better than any other work I know. Orwell utilised a then-influential theory of the American political scientist James Burnham, that the age of the small nation was over, and that the future would belong to largely-indistinguishable mega-states run by a caste that we would now call the PMC. 1984 is partly a satire on this hypothesis, but it depicts, nonetheless, a world entirely dominated by the US, Russia in some form, and China. Europe has disappeared as an independent entity. Airstrip One, as Britain is known, is part of Oceania, dominated by the United States, whereas the rest of Europe is part of Eurasia, dominated by Russia. Orwell’s work expresses exactly the preoccupations about the end of Europe (his original working title was The Last Man in Europe) that agitated the European proponents of the Washington Treaty.

That Treaty was, of course, imperfect, in that for political reasons the US was not prepared to give a real security guarantee to Europe, and has never done so. The stationing of US troops in Europe did provide some reasons for guarded optimism, but they could always be withdrawn. Thus the unofficial motto of NATO commanders during the Cold War: make sure the first man to die is an American. So whilst on the surface all was sweetness and light, the Europeans could never be sure that the US would actually do what it had promised, and its control of the NATO command system meant that if it walked away, there could be no resistance to a Soviet attack or intimidation in crisis. As nuclear weapons became more powerful, more and more people began to wonder if it was actually realistic to imagine that the US would risk its own population in a nuclear confrontation with Moscow. It was not about “being protected,” (the vast majority of NATO forces were European anyway) but trying to make sure that a country with an enormous capacity to affect Europe for good or ill behaved as responsibly as possible, and took European interests into account. The method adopted was rather like that of tying down Gulliver in Lilliput, with many small ropes.

And to be fair, this was largely successful. The temptation to ignore European interests was mostly resisted in Washington, because in the end they were just too significant. But in what seems to be a new level of chaos in Washington policy-making today, this is becoming a real concern again. The possibility that a US President may do something that Europe will regret has always existed, but with someone as impulsive and unreflective as Trump in charge that is becoming a very real risk. Orwell’s political geography may turn out to be right after all.

Ironically, there were many in Europe who saw an escape from this dilemma in 2022. The Russian invasion would surely fail, it was thought, there would be a crisis, Putin would fall from power, the country would develop into a Liberal democracy or maybe even just break up. The threat from the East, the anti-Europe, would at last be no more. Oh dear. It’s doubtful whether any set of expectations in modern history has ever been so brutally and quickly strangled. And this creates a special problem for the kind of economic and socially-liberal society Europe has hurtled towards in the last forty years. As Guy Debord remarked a few years before the end of the Cold War, a Liberal society prefers to be judged “more on its enemies than its results.” This is observably true today: it’s decades since western politicians promised anything to the electorate except suffering, or expected to be rewarded for any achievements. The all-purpose slogan of Liberal politicians, with no real political programme except mindless managerialism, is: if you think we’re bad, look at the other guy. This creates the continued demand for enemies whom you can boss around, dictate to and if necessary attack with impunity, because they are inferior. But this will no longer be possible with Russia, the transcendent Enemy, the negation of every tenet of Liberalism, the society of the Past doomed to disappear. And where will all this surplus antagonism go then, when prudence dictates trying to make friends with Russia again? It isn’t hard to imagine some worrying possibilities.

But this is only one aspect of the problem. The levers of power don’t work any more. No-one answers when we call. The servants have rebelled and are leaving. A western political class drunk for thirty years on illusions of omnipotence and moral superiority is about to be slapped around the face by the large wet fish of reality. Will it survive the experience?