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.

War Diary 7: Checkmate

A month into the war in Ukraine, former Russian president and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev said that Russian nuclear deterrence doctrine “clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons." He named four of them.  The first two involve nuclear attack on Russia or its allies. The third is any endangerment of Russia’s nuclear capability. “And the fourth case is when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardised the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”

 

That same day, March 26^th, Biden ended his speech in Warsaw with the famous ad lib, “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

 

One month after that, during an originally-secret visit to Ukraine by the US Secretaries of State and Defense, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, Austin said, ““We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. It had already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

 

The top officials in the U.S. government have directly jeopardized the existence of the Putin government of Russia, which is the same as the existence of their Russia.  I can’t tell if they’re keeping Russia’s nuclear option alive through intent--which can't be ruled out--or blundering stupidity. But the result is the same: Putin and his government thinking the West’s response to the Ukraine invasion is an existential threat to them.  The U.S. response to that has been further displays of contempt.

 

It’s contempt without a plan for de-escalation.  On his April 28^th episode of Background Briefing, Ian Masters spoke with a frequent guest, Robert Baer, the former CIA agent and author who’s best known for the material that led to the film Syriana, about brutal US policy in the Middle East.  Around 15’45”, an alarmed Masters starts to push Baer to produce a concrete answer about how Putin can stop from escalating in Ukraine and beyond it.

 

Masters: But his army’s a paper tiger. You were saying that earlier. So how the hell is he going beyond where he is right now?

 

Baer: He simply has to produce artillery shells. And run them through his artillery pieces. Until Ukraine simply no longer exists. And as of today that’s where he’s going.

 

Masters: And what can Biden do? Biden today announced a 33-billion-dollar package. They’ve been very slow getting stuff to the Ukrainian military, but what’s the 33 billion dollars going to do if this is the ultimate plan? Is there any way to stop Putin?

 

Baer: The 33 billion dollars is a down payment on World War III. 

 

Masters: meaning what?

 

Baer: Meaning an attack on a NATO country.  The Baltics. Go in, take them. He’s got to continue this war on the West and War on NATO. He cannot let it go at this- a piece of the Donbas. There’s so much he’s lost, he’s got to keep going. …. He can’t turn to the Russians and say hey, it was a mistake, we got a bigger piece of the Donbas, let’s declare victory and leave. People have been watching him for years—that’s not what he’s going to do. …We don’t really know what he’s going to do. He’s been listening to these mystics, you know, Russian superiority and the Russian soul and it’s the clash of civilisations. He believes this. We don’t know what he’s going to do.

 

Masters: Let’s just go back to the idea that he fires a nuke at Odessa. That’s a huge game-changer. What’s the West going to do then?

 

Baer: I have no idea. And I don’t think anyone in Washington does. They don’t know what’s going on. They never took him seriously.  When he went into Crimea in 2014 and all this blabbering on about how he’s going to take on NATO and take on the West—nobody believed it. And now all of the sudden you have to figure out what this guy’s going to do next. You can’t tell from pictures, but I’m beginning to wonder whether he’s completely lost his mind. And that means you can’t predict what he’s going to do. You can’t predict whether the Russian command and control will follow orders to launch nukes. That’s unknowable.  We don’t know.

 

Masters: Assuming he does fire a tactical nuclear weapon as a way to break the will of the Ukrainians and destroy Odessa—as much as there are international sanctions now, he’d become an international pariah, nobody would want to deal with him, not even the Chinese, would they?

 

Baer: Ian, right now it’s the Sampson option for him. He has to die and take down the temple. 

 

Masters: right but is there any way that you can let him have some kind of victory that he can dress up as a victory?

 

Baer: there’s nobody to give him that victory.  I  Zelensky turns to the Ukrainian military and says, “hey, we’re going to give up the Donbas to stop this,” Zelensky will be gone the same day.

 

Masters: so both sides are fighting to the death.

 

Bear: Yep. …they’re determined. They’re going for broke.

 

Masters: well they have every reason.  They’re being invaded, right?

 

Baer: yep, they’re being murdered. It’s genocide. What do you do when you’re up against genocide? You fight back.  And surrender does nothing for you, because they’ll keep going.  All these things, it doesn’t really matter what the plans are. It’s what people believe. 

 

Masters: well you’ve given us a lot to think about, Bob Baer, and I thank you very much for joining us here today.

 

Baer: yeah, well none of it is optimistic.

 

Masters: that’s an understatement. 20’15”

 

Two big things are happening here. The first is that a tactical nuclear strike is being discussed as a realistic possibility.

 

Second, Baer dismisses the two current standard "solutions." Arms flows to Ukraine won't stop the destruction of Ukraine. And the other, a diplomatic solution, is no longer possibly psychologically.  

 

We can state the diplomatic solution's starting points: Russia keeps Crimea, Ukraine keeps the Donbas with formal rights for ethnic Russians there, Ukraine pledges neutrality and permanent withdrawal of any bid to join NATO. Something like this was proposed yet again on the same day as the Masters-Baer exchange by the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven. But, as Baer would expect, this framework didn't survive even to the end of the show: Lieven later said that Russia needs all of the Donbas to justify its losses, but left out the next sentence as provided by Baer—that the Ukranian military, their country invaded and half destroyed, their existence denied by Putin, will fight to the death to prevent this.

 

Lievan also said,

Lloyd Austin’s comments, and those of the British government, as well, imply a war that will go on essentially forever, you know, an endless war against Russia. You know, we have to ask what that will do to Ukraine, what it will do to the world economy, and what it will do to Europe.

 

We actually don't need to ask because we already know: if the war isn't forever, it's nuclear.

 

Checkmate. See this war for what it is, in order to think past it.