War is the Drift of the State

By now, everyone realizes that the war in Ukraine has become a war of attrition. As BobBaer put it weeks ago, Russia is running shells through artillery pieces and moving a kilometre or less a day through brute destruction. Ukraine demands arms in enough volume to allow them to retake their territory.  The West gives them a fraction of that, enough to control the pace of defeat, and to drag that out. There’s tacit agreement between Putin and the West that this war will go on for years, that war will rule the global economy and climate policy, and that warmaking and war preparation will stay “the health of the state.”

 

Yesterday, the analyst of land warfare Jack Watling described the extent to which Ukraine has been trapped into attritional warfare. Towards the end he writes, “The final process of attrition for Ukraine is economic, and in this realm there can be no doubt that it is running out of money, while Russia can withstand western sanctions. Soon it will be essential for economic relief to sustain the government in Kyiv. Alongside the military considerations outlined above, therefore, ending the attritional struggle in Ukraine is ultimately a question of how much Nato members are prepared to invest in Russia’s defeat.”

 

The answer about NATO investment is “as little as possible.” “Fighting to the last Ukranian” remains the strategy. Reversion to the mean is the default answer, meaning back to the cold war, famine, and global poverty.

 The visits of EU leaders--and the invitations to Ukraine to apply for membership--make it impossible for Putin to back down. 

 

The UK's Boris Johnson didn't want to be left out. Same message.

 

The Westerners insure a Cold War standoff slated to go on for years.

The war comes as a forty-year free-money period comes unglued. Day after day, the Financial Times headlines deepening business alarm.  Will Hutton summarized the dying paradigm in the first paragraph of his Observer column, which appeared on the same day as Watling’s.

This is not the 1970s all over again, notwithstanding the apparent similarities – oil shocks, recession, seasons of discontent, inflation. What we are living through is something more profound. It is the painful unwinding of the dysfunctional Thatcherite economic model, driven by credit, consumption and property prices, so careless of investment, productivity and good, high-performance workplaces. Its end started with the financial crisis, accelerated with Brexit and is now sealed by the economic fallout from Ukraine.

He goes on to point out that this government has no economic plan, and also, that such a plan is beyond the capabilities of this government.

 

I said to Andrea yesterday in Crux Easton that the Tories have spent 12 years making the majority of their people poorer. 

“That’s always been the Tory strategy.” 

“Going back to the 19^th century?” 

“Before that.” 

“Since the Civil War in the 17^th?” 

“Yes, exactly since the Civil War. Since the Roundheads rose up, the poverty of the people has been the Tory strategy.”  

 

More people now say this about the Tories--that their goal is the poverty of the British people. The other consensus is that Labour has no alternative.  Party leader Starmer couldn't see Zelenskyy, so had a photo op with British NATO troops talking about Labour's restored patriotism. Kier and Boris are in full agreement.

 

The policy in the “West” is drift, and drift is the foundation of war.

 

Anything better will depend on mass mobilization, aiming at a positive alternative system.  Hutton again:

But just as Thatcherism emerged out of the 1970s, a new philosophy right for our times must emerge now. Its building blocks are still hazy but already apparent. The trillions of ESG (environmental, social and governance) savings need to be mobilised in partnership with government to pursue great national missions – levelling up, rebasing our energy system and grid to achieve net zero, opening up space, transforming our cities, building in new resiliencies, backing our science.

 

Yes. And this will only happen if policy agency shifts from the current leadership pretty much everywhere to regular people, who've set themselves up in organizations now largely invisible.   This is kind of great.

"This is a different brand of activist — young, mostly female and mostly from Eastern Europe — who believes that the Ukraine war is a brutal manifestation of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. They have joined two causes — antiwar activism and climate change — to take full advantage of this moment when the world’s attention is focused on Ukraine. And to make their case, they confront Europe’s leaders face-to-face."   

They are great, and this needs to spread. It seems small, but only direct action is going to derail what's happening now.