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I’ve written a number of essays about the war in Ukraine and the larger crisis of which it is part, concentrating less on the purely military side where my expertise is limited, and rather more on its political origins and potential consequences. From the beginning, I’ve covered why and how the West was militarily unprepared for the conflict, how there is no obvious immediate remedy for that, and I’ve insisted on the underlying ideological and quasi-religious nature of western policy towards Russia, I’ve pointed out that the idea of any kind of real NATO intervention is meaningless, that the idea of a “round two” at some point in the future is hopelessly misguided, and that western “rearmament” in the sense that politicians talk about it is effectively impossible.

With this in mind, I briefly looked a while ago at the strategic and political consequences of what seems to be the war’s most likely outcome. In this essay, I want to take some of those ideas a bit further, and treat them perhaps perhaps a bit more widely and more speculatively, given that the end of the kinetic phase of the conflict is obviously closer now.

We first need to have at least a general idea of what the “end” means in this case. The western attention span, famously attenuated as it is, finds it very hard to visualise an “end” that may be months, yet alone years, in the future; still less that other actors (in this case Russia), may have long-term objectives whose final outlines are not yet even visible. It is they who have the initiative, after all, and it is they who will set their victory conditions, not us. Whatever their precise long-term plans may be, it is clear now that the West can delay or complicate them, but not itself prevent them being implemented. (Whether those plans are in all respects realistic and achievable is a different matter, and we shall have to see.)

In attempting to set out what the West might have to deal with, it’s useful to make a simple distinction drawn from military doctrine, which divides operations into tactical, operational and strategic levels. The tactical level is the level of the individual battle, as recently for Avdeevka. The operational level is a sequence of such battles towards a political objective, in this case the destruction of the enemy’s forces and capacity for resistance, which in turn facilitates the strategic objective, which in this case is the announced disarmament, neutrality and “denazification” of Ukraine, and the expulsion of western influence. Whilst this tripartite distinction is known in the West, and even taught in a cursory fashion at Staff Colleges, it has never really been properly assimilated, and cannot be implemented anyway by the West, because the West no longer has a real capability to plan or act at the operational and strategic levels.

As a result, western commentators become overexcited at purely tactical gains and losses and even individual engagements where a tank or an armoured personnel carrier is destroyed, because that is what they can understand. Their inability to distinguish these levels leads to the assumption that, for example, the defeat of a Russian company-level attack on a village somehow necessarily has strategic consequences. In fact, the fall of Avdeevka, whilst important in itself, is only really significant as a (relatively late) step in an operational plan aimed at the destruction of the Ukrainian forces as a whole. This inability to distinguish between different levels of war is also why there is so much excitement about each new tactical wonder-weapon to be sent to Ukraine, as though small numbers of missiles, for example, could have a strategic effect.

Russian doctrine (inherited from the Soviet Union) does try to tie these different levels together coherently. This differentiates it from western doctrine, eg for Afghanistan, which typically runs something like:

• Invade Afghanistan and defeat the Taliban.

• Stuff happens.

• Afghanistan becomes a liberal democratic market economy.

At might be expected, therefore, Russian objectives in this campaign are not purely military: they simply use the military to facilitate them. Broadly speaking, it seems fairly clear that the minimum Russian tactical/operational level objective is a Ukraine from which no serious threat can be mounted for at least a generation. In practical terms, this means that Ukraine will have to be completely disarmed, except perhaps for paramilitary internal security forces, and all foreign troops and security-related personnel will be expelled. It’s doubtful whether there is any need to install a “pro-Russian” government as such: a sensible government that realises the weakness of its position will be quite sufficient.

The West is quite unable to prevent this happening. Longer-range missiles, elderly NATO aircraft and a few more howitzers may have a temporary impact at the tactical level, but that is all. Thus will arrive the first unambiguous conventional military defeat of a western-trained, sponsored, and partially equipped military for a very long while, perhaps ever. This will not be Vietnam or Afghanistan or Algeria, where there was no question about who had conventional military superiority. This is not defeat by brown-skinned men with AK-47s and sandals, which could somehow have been avoided with more of something or other. This is a conventional defeat by a peer enemy, a white nation as well, with better leadership, better planning, better equipment and better tactics, in pursuit of a clear strategic objective. This was not supposed to happen: indeed, it was supposed to be impossible. Nothing in the western collective ego allows for it, and the psychological shock is likely to be terrible.

It turns out that western military equipment, whilst not necessarily bad, is not superior to that of the Russians. It turns out that western military equipment, designed these days primarily for expeditionary warfare, is not ideal for high-intensity armoured battles in Europe. It turns out that the Russians preserved a capability for high-intensity air/land battles that the West largely gave up. It turns out finally that Russia has been developing certain technologies (notably involving missiles) and retaining certain technologies (notably minelaying) which the West never had or has given up, as well as retaining a larger defence industrial base and the capability for surge production. Who could possibly have guessed?

Well, just about anybody, actually. None of this was hidden, and it was enough to keep up with the specialist military press to be aware of it. I explained last week why, at least in part, that never happened. But then, we are where we are, and we are about to be where we are about to be. What are the likely consequences? Starting at the tactical level: what will be the likely results of the belated recognition of the capabilities of Russian weapons and the Russian military: apart, that is, from anger and panic and the search for scapegoats?

First of all, there will be the political reactions, led as always by people who know nothing of the issues, and have not bothered to inform themselves. It will be important to put off the recognition that the West has been defeated by superior leadership, planning, tactics and equipment for as long as possible, so the first reaction, as always, will be If Only. If only more of X or Y had been sent, and more quickly. If only country A had sent equipment B earlier, if only NATO troops had been directly employed in combat roles, if only it had been possible to stop North Korean deliveries of ammunition, if only tanks with better armour had been sent. If only, if only. There will be a phase of vicious and unattractive political cannibalism, as pundits unearth forgotten Twitter posts to support their arguments, and condemn others for inaction or poor decisions. Above all, it will be suggested that not enough money had been sent, as though you could fight a war with American Express cards.

The next step will be to blame the Ukrainians. They did not know how to use western equipment properly, they could not maintain it, their training was inadequate, their planning was wrong, their tactics were faulty, and so forth. The problem, of course, is that most of this is actually the West’s fault. Ukrainians were trained in Europe on western equipment, western officers did the planning and organised the new Brigades that were to take part in the glorious offensive of 2023. NATO doctrine, remember, was held to be infinitely superior to Russian doctrine, just as NATO training would somehow magically ensure a Ukrainian victory. The Ukrainians will be criticised for going too fast, too slow, in the wrong direction or with the wrong tactics. Corruption and diversion of armaments will suddenly be discovered to be a huge problem.

For psychological reasons, it is hard for the West to learn from defeats, because it does not expect them, and does not know how to deal with them when they happen. This results in displays of mental gymnastics to pretend that we “really” won, or that we “should have” won, or that good old favourite,“we won the war,  but we lost the peace,” as though the two could conveniently be separated. But after a while, and not least for career and commercial reasons, certain lobbies will be urging western governments to “learn from experience” in Ukraine, which in practice will mean adopting doctrines or equipment that such lobbies have to sell. The most obvious example of this is lightweight tactical drones, which have surprised everybody with their utility. Western governments will set up Drone Commands, and place competing orders with the few available suppliers for the phenomenal number of drones that would be needed (millions, in fact.) At the moment, the focus is on First Person View (FPV) drones, which are relatively cheap to make and relatively easy to operate. But even if they can be procured in very large numbers, they are not a magical solution to future conflicts, for at least three reasons I can think of. The first is that in most cases the payload is very small: the equivalent of an explosive or anti-tank grenade. They do not compare with artillery, and are not a substitute. A well-placed FPV drone strike with the right warhead might damage or conceivably destroy an armoured vehicle, but that would be all. The second is that there are obvious counter-measures that are already being deployed, in addition, of course to obvious natural obstacles of weather and visibility. The third is simply that drones are just a weapon: they have to be integrated into a coherent doctrine, and used appropriately in combination with other assets. And so far at least, FPV drones seem to be more suited to defensive than offensive warfare.

Then, there are technologies that the West does not yet possess. The most obvious of these are long-range, high-speed missiles, which are extremely hard to stop because of their speed and their ability to manoeuvre in flight. There is no magic to Russian possession of these technologies, it is just that historically the Russians have been keen on missiles, and have put much more effort into them than the West has. But it’s hard to see the West catching up soon, because it simply does not have the technological and industrial base to start such a development programme now, let alone field a significant number of missiles in any reasonable timescale. Of course the West does have missile technologies of its own, but the much-hyped Storm Shadow, for example, has a maximum range of only 550km, is subsonic and is not manoeuvrable in flight. This is not a criticism of the missile itself, it just means that the British and French governments saw no requirement for anything more capable. There is no effective defence against such Russian weapons at the moment, which creates a strategic headache for the West that I will come to in a moment.

There are likely to be several important consequences to Russian successes at the tactical level. It has been suggested that they will have an effect on the defence market, as customers move away from western equipment. This is a bit over-simplified, though. For a start, governments make judgements about buying equipment based on a whole range of economic, industrial, strategic and political factors, as well as just pure performance. Equipment purchases mean that you enter into long-term and complex relations with other nations, which have a whole range of different dimensions to them, and then the equipment itself may be in service for twenty or thirty years. I don’t think there will be an immediate rush to the showrooms in Moscow. In addition, a lot of western weapons are quite good for the purpose for which they were designed. They will still be of interest to any country that doesn’t intend to engage in mass armoured warfare.

Nonetheless, western weapons will no longer be the automatic point of reference for international comparisons. They will not be assumed automatically to be better than others, nor will they dominate the pages of defence technology magazines. Politically, the perception of the failure of western weapons in Ukraine will further undermine the sense of historical technological dominance by the West, now itself clearly disappeared in other areas already. And one shouldn’t overlook the popular culture element either: outside the West, it’s easy for teenage boys and weapons fetishists to download endless videos of western equipment being blown apart by Russian weapons, to the accompaniment of a thunderous rock music score. Nothing will stop Hollywood making Top Gun 6 in 2035, but by then the enemy will have to be Bangladesh or Costa Rica if the film is to be convincing to most of the world.

Finally, there will be calls for the overhaul of western production methods to more closely resemble the much faster and more flexible Russian system for producing “good enough” equipment. It’s argued that western equipment is “gold-plated” and unnecessarily complex and over-engineered. The problem is that these are not trivial differences, and they result from completely different concepts of equipment design, manufacture and procurement, deeply rooted, in turn, in Russian strategy and history. They cannot be transferred easily, if they can be transferred at all.

It’s sometimes argued that this is because western defence companies are exclusively concerned with profits, and western military equipment is built with that in mind. This is an oversimplification, not least because real profits come from series production, the supply of spares and regular updates, not from long and expensive development programmes, and cost overruns, leading to reductions in orders. There’s no reason to suppose that western companies actively want to produce poorly functioning equipment delivered late, and it’s not in their interests to do so. Rather, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, they have actually forgotten why they exist, and the pressure to achieve financial results has made it increasingly difficult for them to carry out their basic function of making equipment. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that, taken as a whole, the western defence industry is losing the technical and management skills to produce effective equipment, and the few remaining areas of expertise are now starting to disappear. Moreover, this is not something you can cure by radical measures such as re-nationalisation, because the technical and managerial skills now lost would take a generation to reconstitute, even if that were possible. The political and strategic consequences, if this judgement is correct, are obviously very profound. Truly, the marketisation and financialisation of the western economy since the 1980s looks more and more like a form of economic suicide.

Let’s move onto the operational level, by which I mean the effects of the sum total of the success of the Russian campaign plan. There will come a point where the UA ceases to be an effective fighting force. It will still have personnel, it will probably still have a number of notionally formed units, and there will be groups defending isolated towns in different parts of the country. At that point, though, the UA will be incapable of acting as a coherent force, and indeed its components may not even be able to communicate with each other. At that point, it’s all over, and the rest is detail. Ukraine will not be capable of offering any further organised resistance. At that point also, western “assistance,” or for that matter encouragement or threats, or efforts to change the leadership, will be ineffective as well.

Although there is a tendency to assume that victory requires the wholesale extermination of enemy forces, this is not historically the case. The Germans had very large forces remaining when they surrendered in 1918, and substantial forces scattered around Europe in 1945. In both cases, further resistance was possible, and indeed it happened on a small scale in 1945. But the war was already lost in each case. So we can imagine that in the relatively near future the UA may still have several hundred thousand troops, some notional Brigade-sized formations, and scattered armoured vehicles and artillery pieces: but it is not capable of offering organised resistance any more. What happens then?

In practice, that largely depends on the Russians, and there is little point here in trying to enter into the tired debate about exactly what the Russians will do, whether they will take Odessa, how for West they will go, etc. These are things that the Russians themselves have probably not yet finally decided, and will depend to some degree on what the Ukrainians do, and what the West does. What we can say, is that history shows that a country whose armed forces have been destroyed, and whose allies cannot offer it more than token assistance, doesn’t have much choice about accepting whatever surrender terms the opposition seek to impose. The West, unfortunately, does not seem to understand this.

I don’t want to waste a lot of time on fantasies of “direct NATO involvement” or “boots on the ground,” which are being debated everywhere as I write. These are indeed fantasies, as I have pointed out many times before. Just look at a map. First, you have to get sizeable NATO forces—let’s say six or eight brigades plus supporting equipment—into an assembly area, let’s say between Warsaw and the border with Ukraine. You can’t move modern military units by road: they generally go by rail or sea, so moving a Brigade from Italy to Poland should be an interesting logistical exercise. But what do you do with these forces, laboriously brought up to combat strength, and provided with all their supporting logistics?  Well, you could leave them in Poland to make rude gestures at the Russians. But the problem is that the Russians will be perhaps 1500 kilometres away, and so may not take much notice. Or you could move them, at great cost in time, money and complexity, some 750 kilometres to the East, to deploy them around Kiev. That would take more weeks, if not months. But they would still be around 500 kilometres away from where the fighting actually is, or probably where the Russians will have stopped. So off they go again, but with what objective? The Russians have perhaps 300,000 combat troops in Ukraine, with secure lines of supply, fighting in an area which is broadly sympathetic to them, and only a few hundred kilometres from their frontier. And all the time, from crossing the Polish border, NATO will be attacked by rockets, drones and missiles, by an opponent who enjoys complete air superiority.

To the best of my knowledge, no similar operation has ever been conducted in modern history, and certainly not by a force vastly inferior to its enemy, which has never trained or exercised together, advancing to contact over a distance of a good 1000 kilometres, and subject to continuous attack. (Western aircraft will not be a factor.) And what possible military objective can they be given?

Insofar as anyone in the West has thought these questions through at all, the answer seems to be that NATO forces would be there in an existential fashion only: ie not to do, but just to be. Apparently, the Russians would be scared of a direct confrontation with NATO (which they have indeed tried to avoid) and so would stay away from areas of the country “secured” by NATO forces. This presupposes that the Russians actually want to occupy the areas where NATO forces were deployed, and also that a NATO presence would dissuade them. But whilst the Russians do not want a war with NATO if it can be avoided, they are, I think, ready to engage NATO troops if necessary. And there is no sign that the populations of NATO nations want a war with Russia either. So the sensible Russian response to a token deployment of NATO forces (an idea that seems to have passed through the mind of M. Macron last week) would be to ignore them, to say that they would not be attacked, but that their safety could not be guaranteed, and wait for NATO to quietly begin to withdraw them.

The other thing the West doesn’t understand is that, especially given the above, what it thinks doesn’t actually matter very much. Talk of “not accepting” a Russian victory has overtones of wilful denial of reality, rather than a principled position. (“Accepting a Russian military victory makes my brain hurt.”) Of course in international politics denial can go on for a long time: for twenty years after the end of the Chinese Civil War the West refused to accept the outcome. Even today, a number of countries, including Kosovo, El Salvador, the United States and Tonga have not established diplomatic relations with Iran, and in effect deny the results of the 1979 revolution. But these things can only go on for so long, and at some point the reality has to be accepted. It will, however, be the occasion for blood-letting among western pundits and politicians on a scale never before seen.

As a result, the West has a wildly disproportionate and unrealistic concept of what influence it will  have on the future of Ukraine. The more daring western pundits are starting to think about negotiations, although they are bitterly divided over what concessions to demand from the Russians and what concessions it might be possible to politely ask the Ukrainians to think about giving. But of course there is no reason for the Russians to give or offer anything, and the West has nothing of significance to offer, and no plausible threats to make. (Sanctions will be ended, after all, it’s just a question of time.) In turn, this is because the West has been used to organising, dictating and helping to implement the terms of, peace treaties since the end of the Cold War. I suspect that even the more realistic western pundits envisage that kind of a role for the West, and a negotiation punctuated by regular statements that Washington or NATO finds a particular proposal “unacceptable,” as though that mattered.

Such an outcome (and I do not see how it can really be avoided ) will be a catastrophic political defeat, the like of which the West has not suffered in modern times. Unlike the Russian Revolution and the Communist victory in China, which were shocks to the West but not simple defeats, Ukraine will indeed be a simple defeat, and not one far away like Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. Some governments will not survive, and both the survivors and the victims will engage in endless, bitter polemics with each other about who was to “blame.” More significant, though will be the psychological effects on western political systems and those who control them. Defeat in Ukraine seems unavoidable, but these systems and persons will not accept it and cannot imagine it. This is a recipe for a kind of political nervous breakdown among western elites, many of whom have probably never had no confront brute such reality before. Heaven knows what the consequences will be.

This outcome will also be a defeat for the current intellectual and political dominance of western thinking about the operational and strategic levels of war. Perhaps the Moroccan Staff College invites an American General every year to give series of lectures about strategy. But maybe this year’s lecturer is someone whose highest-level command was a battalion in Afghanistan twenty years ago, and who helped to plan the disastrous Ukrainian offensive of 2023. Actually, maybe not, we’ll get back to you. Likewise, the productions of western Staff Colleges and think-tanks, which have been shown to be hopelessly lacking in insight over the last two years may not be in as great demand. Now again, this does not mean that there will be a simple and immediate replacement of western experts and publications by Russian ones—there are all sorts of practical reasons why not—but it does mean that western expertise and western experts will no longer be treated with unquestioning obeisance.

None of the above, of course, means that the Russians will not seek an agreement with NATO as a whole and the US, along the lines of the draft treaties they tabled in 2021. But that is a different issue, and gets us to the final, strategic, level. Again, we cannot be sure what the Russians will want, and it may be that they have not yet quite decided. But we can be reasonably sure about the strategic objectives. The overall strategic objective will be to make sure that no military threat can be launched from Europe against Russia in the foreseeable future. That means first of all establishing and maintaining military superiority over western Europe and any admixture of US forces. In reality, this superiority already exists, and it seems clear that the Russians now envisage a permanently higher level of defence spending and force levels than in the recent past. Moreover, the longer the present war goes on, the weaker the West becomes, as it uses up and transfers stocks.

Beyond a certain stage, it will be clear that Russia has acquired an unassailable military superiority. Economically-damaged western states will be pushed to return to the levels of forces and stocks they had in 2022, and even bringing their existing units up to full strength with adequate stocks of ammunition and spares is probably too much of a challenge, for practical reasons that I and others have set out at length. The United States (which will probably be more shaken by internecine warfare than any other state) will not have the capability to commit much more to Europe.

This superiority is of a different nature from that which was argued about during the Cold War. In those days, the line of contact ran through western Europe, and NATO forces would fight effectively where they were based. It was the Red Army with its offensive doctrine that would have had to try to blast its way through to the Channel. Soon, the situation will be effectively reversed. Russia has no territorial interests in Europe, and will be happy with a zone around its frontiers over which it has effective control, and where no military forces of any kind are stationed. Depending on how the war finally ends, Russia will not have an important frontier with any NATO country, and most NATO troops in Europe will be stuck in the middle of nowhere, a thousand kilometres or more from the nearest enemy.

However, the main mechanism for Russian dominance will be conventional long-range, high speed and high precision missiles. These are being battle-tested in Ukraine, and I imagine that at least part of the reason for their use is to advertise Russia’s capabilities to NATO nations: it is not clear that this message is being properly received, though. Destructive power is very much a function of accuracy, and a salvo of hypersonic missiles would have the same destructive effect, in principle, as a small nuclear warhead. This does not seem to have been taken into account in western capitals. And as I have suggested, NATO has chosen not to invest in such weapons, and has no effective counters to them.

It is doubtful whether the Russians will press for the formal disbandment of NATO: indeed, from their point of view it is probably better to deal with a single point of contact, and let NATO nations argue among themselves. It is likely that they will insist on all US-owned nuclear weapons being removed from Europe, but by contrast they are unlikely to waste time and effort, and provoke crises, by trying to reduce or eliminate British and French nuclear systems. It is also likely that Russia will want to set out these new arrangements in treaties of some kind, and the West will have to get used to negotiating from a position of relative weakness. Indeed, the biggest destabilising factor may well be the West’s personal and institutional incapacity to understand that its options are limited and its negotiating position is weak.

Many of the potential wider consequences put us squarely into the field of conjecture, and I’ll do no more than mention a few possibilities in passing to conclude. Internally, the loss of Ukraine and the strategic adjustments that will follow will be a shattering blow to the self-image of the Professional and Managerial Caste, and to their radical Liberal ideology. Consider: a state that publicly values religion, tradition, families, culture, language and history has just wiped the floor with a globalist ideology that denies and seeks to destroy all these things. Not only will this cause an identity crisis within the PMC, it will also cruelly expose the fact that current globalist liberal ideology gives people nothing to fight for: indeed, it systematically denigrates and destroys all motives for which people have historically struggled, whether politically, industrially or militarily. Its ideology tells people that they live in evil societies which are structurally racist etc. and whose histories are a cause for shame and humiliation. Nothing is left except a society of interchangeable consumers, and you can’t require a society of consumers to die to defend the principle of free and fair competition. And as I’ve pointed out before, nobody is going to die for the Eurovision Song Contest, either. By systematically emptying Europe of its history, culture and society, and destroying the link between the resident and the citizen, the ideology of Maastricht has produced a population with nothing in common, with no collective interests, and with nothing to defend. I’m not sure things are any better in the US.

Once it becomes apparent that “western values” is essentially an empty slogan, nothing is left for the PMC but to try to mobilise support through continued anti-Russian hatred. But people are becoming tired of hating already, and when Putin’s Legions do not, in fact, march into Poland, and when a weakened and divided West faces a confident and assertive Russia, the epic sulk that will characterise western attitudes to Russia over the next few years will increasingly  be replaced by fear, uncertainty and self-doubt. As it happens, the next few years are full of elections which the PMC is worried it won’t win anyway. If there are any parties, wherever they place themselves politically, who can confidently talk the language of community, solidarity and shared culture, they might find themselves doing extremely well.

Ukraine may be the rock on which the PMC and its ideology ultimately founders, and takes the self-assurance of the PMC down with it. You can’t fight something with nothing: still less can you persuade other people to fight something with nothing. And ordinary people may just begin to wonder whether the Russians, not to mention the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians and practically everybody else in the world, may not be onto something with this history and culture and society stuff. To the extent that there is hope left, in midst of the chaos that the PMC have landed us in, with its economic hardships and political collapse, it may lie there.

But whether the PMC and its ideology will survive the next few years is surely questionable. Liberalism has had a good run—too good in fact—but the music is beginning to fade out. And as Jim Morrison said, when the music’s over, it’s time to turn out the lights .