The music was not over but I had to pause it to write this comment.
The problems that the "loss of Ukraine" cause for Western PMC are not evenly distributed. Europeans live in communities with structures that have stood for a millennia and a recorded history even longer than that. To me, this means the casting aside of the PMC of Western Europe will be easier to achieve. The Europeans have a cultural history to buttress their recovery from the mismanagement of their elites.
In my neck of the woods, the United States of America, there is no deep reservoir of history apart from a highly glamorized two century one of exceptionalism. The setbacks we have faced have been swept under the carpet and dwelling upon them is deemed counterproductive and don't you know that we are the essential entity on the planet?
Right at this moment we in the U.S. are not imbued with realists that can talk us down from the shrill cries of doom and disaster that will accompany the failure to encircle Moscow. The right wing of our country might well attribute Russia's success to not having kowtowed to a woke agenda, then turn on a dime to start the march on Beijing.
We lack universal social welfare structures and do not prioritize the health of our citizens here in the U.S. There will be no campaigns built upon righting this oversight, no ground swell for investing in our common welfare. Enemies will be denounced daily, beatings will continue, people will suffer because our finest have been shown to be not so fine.
The U.S. is going to be on a rough ride. May we bear it solely without inflicting the rest of the planet with our convulsions.
I have thought long and hard about which exit scenario would be most advantageous for NATO. Simply prolonging the war a little with more arms deliveries and then moving on to negotiations is the worst option for the West because, for obvious reasons, it will look like the loser, which is associated with a loss of prestige. Not only would everyone blame each other - the most extreme in Ukraine would want to take revenge on the guilty parties with terrorist attacks. Moreover, any incumbent government would have a big problem at the next elections if it were defeated.
So how can you still emerge victorious from a defeat?
The answer is: "Cuba reloaded"
The conflict must escalate to the point where the threat of nuclear war is imminent. The Cuban missile crisis lasted 13 days. That would give the fear enough time to eradicate the desire for a Russian defeat in people's minds. And fortunately, with prudence and a few concessions to the Russians, the great NATO will just about manage to avert a nuclear war. And so we are all glad to have escaped the apocalypse and emerged from the conflict as moral winners.
I suspect the West is caught in the same type of ideological straitjacket that prevented the Soviet Union from making the required changes necessary for long term survival. So while strict communist ideology undermined the Soviet Union, for the US strict neo-liberal and neo-con ideology is undermining our long term survival.
So why is it that the US had to engage in the Ukraine proxy war with Russia to begin with? The Soviet Union was gone. The Warsaw Pact was gone. Communism had been abandoned. Yet thanks to the neo-con Wolfowitz doctrine and the need for neo-liberal militarized Keynesianism the US now requires constant warfare. The trouble is the US is not very good at it as the last fifty years of US military engagements have demonstrated. In addition, our Military-Industrial-Complex is built for profit, not built for purpose, so the US needs to spend ten times what Russia spends to stay even competitive with Russia, or China for that matter. Thanks to dollar hegemony the US has been able to finance the gross overfunding of the military for decades but now with a $34 trillion national debt, an annual $1 trillion dollar military budget, rising interests payments on that debt are now exceeding the military budget. Due to the financial overhead in the US economy it now takes $2.50 in debt to create $1 in economic growth. This is unsustainable.
So as the US prepares to walk away from its disaster in Ukraine in order to gear up for a proxy war with China over Taiwan we are caught in the same ideological straitjacket as those aging Soviet bureaucrats. Fortunately, the Soviet people were much better conditioned for hardship, so they could weather the storm without the violent upheaval that would affect most societies undergoing such stress. The US will not be so lucky.
WONDERFULLY PUT. Thank you! This is really what we have now….”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. […] 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.”
If Macron or NATO puts boots on the ground in Ukraine for deterrence of Russia they will be attacked.
That is a guarantee.
First, even if Russia does not intend to move on these territories, one of the main objectives of the SMO is to prevent NATO troops from being stationed in Ukraine. Therefore, they will be attacked.
Second, the problem with what your expectation of how Russia will react by ignoring them while not guaranteeing their safety is it is ambiguous enough to encourage NATO to put even more troops. That would be a strategic mistake on the part of Russia.
As you said, Russia has been trying to avoid a direct fight with NATO but is prepared to fight it. In fact, they have been preparing for this possibility since June 2022 when it became clear that NATO will not stop. NATO putting boots on the ground in Ukraine is exactly such a reason to risk and fight that war.
Very well written! My one *potential* disagreement would be with this: "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"
Structural corruption has, over time, led to a situation where US taxpayers bear the brunt, if not the entirety, of the cost overruns in defense contracts. This issue is exemplified by programs such as the F-35, which, despite its initial promise, has seen its costs balloon, largely due to various complexities and inefficiencies, yet the taxpayer seems to have, often through the backdoor, ate these overruns, not the producer. And companies involved in such contracts frequently derive greater profits from maintenance, replacement parts, and technical services than from the serial production of the equipment itself. These profit areas are often greatly boosted by the very complexities that contribute to the initial cost overruns, creating a cycle that further burdens the taxpayer while benefiting the producers involved.
Are the "tea leaves" starting to become decipherable?
Is this one possible sign: Victoria Nuland "retired" a few days ago. She was passed over for the permanent #2 spot at DOS (she had been "acting"). Biden picked the NSC specialist on Asia to fill that spot. The NY Times speculated that this meant the U.S. was going to concentrate more on Asia in the future.
She was the biggest force behind "tightening the noose around Putin" (as she was recently quoted as saying). Has the music stopped for her fellow neocons, and will they follow her out the door?
Is this a sign that the U.S. will opt to slink away from Ukraine (rather than continue escalating? Is this a sign that magical thinking is dissipating in the Biden Administration? Fear for one's political survival does tend to concentrate the mind....
I think you are generally right about where things are going, but I think the Russians generally take things like Macrons statements, the taurus threat, and the launching of drones the last days from either Finland or estonia on saint petersburg a bit more seriously than you do.
And I think that they have responded, in a very measured but serious manner. The destruction of a cia-bunker was one such answer, the global “failure” of social media yesterday an other, and Lavrovs official display of a possible future rumpUkraine a third.
Will the leaders of the colonial countries get the message? In the end yes, because as you say they don’t have much of an option, but it may take time and the possibility of a catastrophic mistake along the way is clearly still open.
I enjoy your writing, but think this one is a classic. So a rambling response from me.
Whereas it is easy to see western leaders as bereft of strategic insight - and it is not readily discernable to me - I think it possibly a mistake to discount the probability that there is method behind the madness. Personally I put this down to a failure to understand realities. That is, I think that many people look at the situation and the same facts and draw an entirely different picture and set of conclusions. This tends to get reinforced by careerist types who filter information. How many people got promoted because they contradicted the boss? [Actually one of Fredrick the Great's generals is supposed to have said during some battle or other that "His majesty may take my head after the battle, but in the meantime would he please allow me to use it...".
Scott Adams was famously right about Trump in 2016 and has been wrong about most things since. However his two screens image works here. We look at the same thing and the same facts and see different things.
What people who take a different view of the Ukraine War to the MSM/Western narrative see is so fundamentally at odds as to invite censorship. Now in my view, as someone who has been proud to live in the West, and has admired its liberalism (small l), I am dismayed by the mistakes being made wrt Russia and this war, but more so to ourselves. The narrative needs to be controlled apparently, in case "wrongthink" enters into the conversation.
Well my view strongly aligns with that expressed in this piece. Russia will largely decide the terms of the peace, unless WW3 is unleashed. And I suspect peace may come earlier than many imagine.
Looking at the West, the November US election won't be accepted by whichever side that loses, and the tension will ramp up. This has the feeling of 1860 about it, but I might be really off beam here. However if RUSSIA [big bad boogyman] did not previously interfere with elections, now is the perfect moment. And the EU is involved in suicidal navel gazing at present, and NATO divided and weak, and its MIC unfit for purpose. It cannot recruit enough soldiers and has run out of money, and shipped its factories to China. The "west's" global standing has never been lower since WW2 ended.
The author covers what he terms the PMC an awful lot. Well as a paid up member I understand his frustrations. There will not be a reckoning. The real world will move on, and the PMC will convince themselves that they really did come out on top. Cognitive dissonence is a wonderful thing.
Afghanistan becomes a liberal democratic market economy.",
in the face of such cartoonish incompetence, it is hard not to presume that there is in fact another agenda in play, where the supposedly desired end result is not actually of any real significance, and is merely a rhetorical bone tossed to infantile ideologues to pacify them.
Since the USA military will not be able to enforce our rulers will onto the outside world, I expect that their "doubling down" will be aimed INWARD. And all the wonderful new mechanisms for social control will be turned up to 11, along with deploying the time tested ones such as re education camps- "Drying up the sea the guerillas swim in" via rural depopulation/relocation to "secure hamlets" or other euphemistically named large open air prisons. Recent political statements beginning the dehumanization of rural & conservative white people as "hateful", "racist" and "anti semitic" are telegraphing who the next enemy is likely to be.
And after Dept. of Homeland Security carries out a new world rerun of the British/Scotts "enclosures", Cargill, Black Rock, Goldman-Sachs et alia will have a consolation prize of all the farm lands taken from USA small holders to make up for all that land in a Ukraine they paid for but now will never earn a dime from...
I can guess how those descendants of previously displaced borderers, Scotts-Irish & etc. will react.
If there IS really a method to the latest PMC madness, the breakup & balkanization of the USA must be a primary aim?
Satisfying as far as it goes but wish you'd address differences between the US and Europe. While Nuland etc have failed to achieve maximal objectives from making Russia an enemy, they can at least claim to have separated it from Europe, fulfilling a Mackinderite agenda and tying Europe more to the US. Europeans have no such consolation. They can even imagine themselves to have been manipulated by Washington.
You wrote: “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. “
Kosovo is not a country nor will ever be.
Kosovo is a living reminder of how “Rules Based Order” works.
Everything that the West accuses Russia for, NATO did in 1999 against Yugoslavia.
Nice to see the West defined more clearly. As the Western State of Mind distinct from its populace who are undefinable truly.
To say WE when mentioning the West discredits the courageous voices speaking out in opposition to an elites
agenda.
The operational aspect as you describe is what is fascinating as it also includes aspects without military weapons such as sanctions. Sabotage EU’s energy supply with its destruction of its industrious culture.
Without the weaponary this wouldn’t happen as it forced into this violent confrontation.
Thanks for structuring our insights into understanding what the hell is happening.
The music was not over but I had to pause it to write this comment.
The problems that the "loss of Ukraine" cause for Western PMC are not evenly distributed. Europeans live in communities with structures that have stood for a millennia and a recorded history even longer than that. To me, this means the casting aside of the PMC of Western Europe will be easier to achieve. The Europeans have a cultural history to buttress their recovery from the mismanagement of their elites.
In my neck of the woods, the United States of America, there is no deep reservoir of history apart from a highly glamorized two century one of exceptionalism. The setbacks we have faced have been swept under the carpet and dwelling upon them is deemed counterproductive and don't you know that we are the essential entity on the planet?
Right at this moment we in the U.S. are not imbued with realists that can talk us down from the shrill cries of doom and disaster that will accompany the failure to encircle Moscow. The right wing of our country might well attribute Russia's success to not having kowtowed to a woke agenda, then turn on a dime to start the march on Beijing.
We lack universal social welfare structures and do not prioritize the health of our citizens here in the U.S. There will be no campaigns built upon righting this oversight, no ground swell for investing in our common welfare. Enemies will be denounced daily, beatings will continue, people will suffer because our finest have been shown to be not so fine.
The U.S. is going to be on a rough ride. May we bear it solely without inflicting the rest of the planet with our convulsions.
How will it end?
I have thought long and hard about which exit scenario would be most advantageous for NATO. Simply prolonging the war a little with more arms deliveries and then moving on to negotiations is the worst option for the West because, for obvious reasons, it will look like the loser, which is associated with a loss of prestige. Not only would everyone blame each other - the most extreme in Ukraine would want to take revenge on the guilty parties with terrorist attacks. Moreover, any incumbent government would have a big problem at the next elections if it were defeated.
So how can you still emerge victorious from a defeat?
The answer is: "Cuba reloaded"
The conflict must escalate to the point where the threat of nuclear war is imminent. The Cuban missile crisis lasted 13 days. That would give the fear enough time to eradicate the desire for a Russian defeat in people's minds. And fortunately, with prudence and a few concessions to the Russians, the great NATO will just about manage to avert a nuclear war. And so we are all glad to have escaped the apocalypse and emerged from the conflict as moral winners.
I suspect the West is caught in the same type of ideological straitjacket that prevented the Soviet Union from making the required changes necessary for long term survival. So while strict communist ideology undermined the Soviet Union, for the US strict neo-liberal and neo-con ideology is undermining our long term survival.
So why is it that the US had to engage in the Ukraine proxy war with Russia to begin with? The Soviet Union was gone. The Warsaw Pact was gone. Communism had been abandoned. Yet thanks to the neo-con Wolfowitz doctrine and the need for neo-liberal militarized Keynesianism the US now requires constant warfare. The trouble is the US is not very good at it as the last fifty years of US military engagements have demonstrated. In addition, our Military-Industrial-Complex is built for profit, not built for purpose, so the US needs to spend ten times what Russia spends to stay even competitive with Russia, or China for that matter. Thanks to dollar hegemony the US has been able to finance the gross overfunding of the military for decades but now with a $34 trillion national debt, an annual $1 trillion dollar military budget, rising interests payments on that debt are now exceeding the military budget. Due to the financial overhead in the US economy it now takes $2.50 in debt to create $1 in economic growth. This is unsustainable.
So as the US prepares to walk away from its disaster in Ukraine in order to gear up for a proxy war with China over Taiwan we are caught in the same ideological straitjacket as those aging Soviet bureaucrats. Fortunately, the Soviet people were much better conditioned for hardship, so they could weather the storm without the violent upheaval that would affect most societies undergoing such stress. The US will not be so lucky.
WONDERFULLY PUT. Thank you! This is really what we have now….”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. […] 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.”
If Macron or NATO puts boots on the ground in Ukraine for deterrence of Russia they will be attacked.
That is a guarantee.
First, even if Russia does not intend to move on these territories, one of the main objectives of the SMO is to prevent NATO troops from being stationed in Ukraine. Therefore, they will be attacked.
Second, the problem with what your expectation of how Russia will react by ignoring them while not guaranteeing their safety is it is ambiguous enough to encourage NATO to put even more troops. That would be a strategic mistake on the part of Russia.
As you said, Russia has been trying to avoid a direct fight with NATO but is prepared to fight it. In fact, they have been preparing for this possibility since June 2022 when it became clear that NATO will not stop. NATO putting boots on the ground in Ukraine is exactly such a reason to risk and fight that war.
Very well written! My one *potential* disagreement would be with this: "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"
Structural corruption has, over time, led to a situation where US taxpayers bear the brunt, if not the entirety, of the cost overruns in defense contracts. This issue is exemplified by programs such as the F-35, which, despite its initial promise, has seen its costs balloon, largely due to various complexities and inefficiencies, yet the taxpayer seems to have, often through the backdoor, ate these overruns, not the producer. And companies involved in such contracts frequently derive greater profits from maintenance, replacement parts, and technical services than from the serial production of the equipment itself. These profit areas are often greatly boosted by the very complexities that contribute to the initial cost overruns, creating a cycle that further burdens the taxpayer while benefiting the producers involved.
Are the "tea leaves" starting to become decipherable?
Is this one possible sign: Victoria Nuland "retired" a few days ago. She was passed over for the permanent #2 spot at DOS (she had been "acting"). Biden picked the NSC specialist on Asia to fill that spot. The NY Times speculated that this meant the U.S. was going to concentrate more on Asia in the future.
She was the biggest force behind "tightening the noose around Putin" (as she was recently quoted as saying). Has the music stopped for her fellow neocons, and will they follow her out the door?
Is this a sign that the U.S. will opt to slink away from Ukraine (rather than continue escalating? Is this a sign that magical thinking is dissipating in the Biden Administration? Fear for one's political survival does tend to concentrate the mind....
* Invade Afghanistan# and upgrade the Taliban##.
* Laundry loads of money and do some drug business
* Afghanistan becomes a drain on all the surrounding* economies, making them further enslaved to IMF (edit: or Brown Brothers Harriman, etc.).
#subsitute Vietnam, Korea, Haiti, and their relevant ##. This is century plus old technique.
I think you are generally right about where things are going, but I think the Russians generally take things like Macrons statements, the taurus threat, and the launching of drones the last days from either Finland or estonia on saint petersburg a bit more seriously than you do.
And I think that they have responded, in a very measured but serious manner. The destruction of a cia-bunker was one such answer, the global “failure” of social media yesterday an other, and Lavrovs official display of a possible future rumpUkraine a third.
Will the leaders of the colonial countries get the message? In the end yes, because as you say they don’t have much of an option, but it may take time and the possibility of a catastrophic mistake along the way is clearly still open.
I enjoy your writing, but think this one is a classic. So a rambling response from me.
Whereas it is easy to see western leaders as bereft of strategic insight - and it is not readily discernable to me - I think it possibly a mistake to discount the probability that there is method behind the madness. Personally I put this down to a failure to understand realities. That is, I think that many people look at the situation and the same facts and draw an entirely different picture and set of conclusions. This tends to get reinforced by careerist types who filter information. How many people got promoted because they contradicted the boss? [Actually one of Fredrick the Great's generals is supposed to have said during some battle or other that "His majesty may take my head after the battle, but in the meantime would he please allow me to use it...".
Scott Adams was famously right about Trump in 2016 and has been wrong about most things since. However his two screens image works here. We look at the same thing and the same facts and see different things.
What people who take a different view of the Ukraine War to the MSM/Western narrative see is so fundamentally at odds as to invite censorship. Now in my view, as someone who has been proud to live in the West, and has admired its liberalism (small l), I am dismayed by the mistakes being made wrt Russia and this war, but more so to ourselves. The narrative needs to be controlled apparently, in case "wrongthink" enters into the conversation.
Well my view strongly aligns with that expressed in this piece. Russia will largely decide the terms of the peace, unless WW3 is unleashed. And I suspect peace may come earlier than many imagine.
Looking at the West, the November US election won't be accepted by whichever side that loses, and the tension will ramp up. This has the feeling of 1860 about it, but I might be really off beam here. However if RUSSIA [big bad boogyman] did not previously interfere with elections, now is the perfect moment. And the EU is involved in suicidal navel gazing at present, and NATO divided and weak, and its MIC unfit for purpose. It cannot recruit enough soldiers and has run out of money, and shipped its factories to China. The "west's" global standing has never been lower since WW2 ended.
The author covers what he terms the PMC an awful lot. Well as a paid up member I understand his frustrations. There will not be a reckoning. The real world will move on, and the PMC will convince themselves that they really did come out on top. Cognitive dissonence is a wonderful thing.
As usual, pure gold!
Regarding the following statement:
"Invade Afghanistan and defeat the Taliban.
Stuff happens.
Afghanistan becomes a liberal democratic market economy.",
in the face of such cartoonish incompetence, it is hard not to presume that there is in fact another agenda in play, where the supposedly desired end result is not actually of any real significance, and is merely a rhetorical bone tossed to infantile ideologues to pacify them.
Since the USA military will not be able to enforce our rulers will onto the outside world, I expect that their "doubling down" will be aimed INWARD. And all the wonderful new mechanisms for social control will be turned up to 11, along with deploying the time tested ones such as re education camps- "Drying up the sea the guerillas swim in" via rural depopulation/relocation to "secure hamlets" or other euphemistically named large open air prisons. Recent political statements beginning the dehumanization of rural & conservative white people as "hateful", "racist" and "anti semitic" are telegraphing who the next enemy is likely to be.
And after Dept. of Homeland Security carries out a new world rerun of the British/Scotts "enclosures", Cargill, Black Rock, Goldman-Sachs et alia will have a consolation prize of all the farm lands taken from USA small holders to make up for all that land in a Ukraine they paid for but now will never earn a dime from...
I can guess how those descendants of previously displaced borderers, Scotts-Irish & etc. will react.
If there IS really a method to the latest PMC madness, the breakup & balkanization of the USA must be a primary aim?
Satisfying as far as it goes but wish you'd address differences between the US and Europe. While Nuland etc have failed to achieve maximal objectives from making Russia an enemy, they can at least claim to have separated it from Europe, fulfilling a Mackinderite agenda and tying Europe more to the US. Europeans have no such consolation. They can even imagine themselves to have been manipulated by Washington.
You wrote: “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. “
Kosovo is not a country nor will ever be.
Kosovo is a living reminder of how “Rules Based Order” works.
Everything that the West accuses Russia for, NATO did in 1999 against Yugoslavia.
Nice to see the West defined more clearly. As the Western State of Mind distinct from its populace who are undefinable truly.
To say WE when mentioning the West discredits the courageous voices speaking out in opposition to an elites
agenda.
The operational aspect as you describe is what is fascinating as it also includes aspects without military weapons such as sanctions. Sabotage EU’s energy supply with its destruction of its industrious culture.
Without the weaponary this wouldn’t happen as it forced into this violent confrontation.
Thanks for structuring our insights into understanding what the hell is happening.
Thank you Aurelien🙏