Posted on 04/04/2022 9:21:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
As we reach a month of the Ukrainian war amid talks of possible peace, a strategic appraisal is in order. It appears the Russians thought the war would be easy and fast, the Ukrainians would simply roll over and surrender, and the common people would rise up to greet Russians as liberators. Russian strategic decision-making, worsened by ideological bubbles, turned out to be as haunting as British and American misadventures in Iraq and Libya.
The Russian officer attrition in this war is on a level rarely observed in any recent conflict, partially because this level of high-intensity, state versus state, multi-domain total war hasn’t occurred in the last few decades. Russia did not foresee that its old-fashioned special operations tactics are obsolete satellites and drones track their movements.
The fact that Moscow did not calculate this in their battle plans is a sign of decline, a far cry from its prestigious officer corps training during the Soviet era. The bulk of the Russian navy and air force are still bafflingly underused and functionally unavailable given the intensity of the conflict, giving rise to the suspicion that the Russians are preserving their top-tier weaponry and platforms in case the war spirals to a continental conflict.
But, somehow, they are still grinding on. If their objective was to stop Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), they have achieved it already. They have also managed to cut off the entire east and south of Ukraine. Russia might still win the war and achieve Ukrainian zonal neutrality, given Russia’s sheer weight.
The Russian rhetorical “denazification” was also recently dropped quietly from the rhetoric. But the demand for Ukrainian neutrality remains and will remain. It was the single major Russian demand. All the other demands were maximalist and malleable, aimed towards negotiation.
Ukraine should have taken the opportunity to do a Cold War-era, Austrian-style “neutralitätserklärung,” which would have resulted in the country constitutionally turning neutral, in order to get funding from the European Union and NATO and flourish. Ukrainians have also swallowed their non-achievable EU and NATO membership dream and are currently just as ideologically inflexible and rigid about compromise as Russia.
Unfortunately, the long-term ramifications of this war, for the west, are also bleak. Every single conservative restraint and realist gain from the last few years risks being reversed if realists continue to play defense on the rhetorical field of “values” instead of focusing on a narrow, populist interest.
The absolutely mindless idea of a no-fly zone in an active warzone with a nuclear great power was narrowly avoided by 78 experts writing an open letter against it. Incidentally, support for a no-fly zone declines among Americans the moment it is explained.
But the war hysteria in the first few weeks of the campaign, aided by the usual suspects, demonstrated just how close to power and catastrophe these ideologues were. When a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former supreme allied commander of NATO argue for a no-fly zone, one needs to remember they are one step away from real advisory power and might be so again in the future.
A conservative realist grand strategy that focuses on America’s southern borders and argues for Europeans to pay for European defense first needs a realist rhetoric and public relations strategy. It must discuss the public interest, in a language common people will understand and appreciate.
Pursuing such a strategy would require a total clean-up of the administrative state and Obama-era holdovers next time Republicans are in power. The hold-outs of liberal internationalism are deeply embedded within the ever-expansive national security bureaucracy.
Rampant war hysteria has resulted in limited diplomatic maneuverability, a realization that is slowly emerging. As the Financial Times noted, “since Feb 24, the west has been galvanised into more unity than it has shown in years. Yet most of the world is on the side lines waiting to see which way it goes. Not for the first time, the west risks mistaking itself for global consensus.”
No matter how many times fanatical liberal internationalists cry about this war suddenly rejuvenating liberalism, the reality cannot be further from truth. The war proves great powers can deter other great powers and are the only actors that matter, that nationalism is the strongest social force, that interests trump values, norms, and laws. Thus, the war is quite clearly not saving “liberal internationalism” but burying it.
Two of the largest non-western powers are either neutral or tacitly supporting Russia, simply because of the idea that great powers should have their own spheres of influence. The balancing powers in Europe also argued against NATO being a co-belligerent.
Anglo-American foreign policy realists are not pacifists or isolationists. They simply prioritize a greater strategic threat in China. Wars have their own momentum. The chance of a great power being dragged into war due to foolish or overzealous mistakes of smaller peripheral allies is a far bigger threat, as the current world is functionally similar to a multipolar system prior to the First World War than a relatively binary and Manichean conflict of the Second.
Russia, bogged down in Ukraine already, is not a hegemonic threat comparable to Nazi Germany. The EU’s total population is around 450 million, more than the United States (339 million) and much more than Russia (144 million). The EU’s gross domestic product also dwarfs Russia’s, and just the top four European defense budgets combined are larger than Russia’s. Yet, instead of an actual material pivot to Asia, the United States currently has more than 100,000 troops deployed in Europe.
Globally, the biggest future rival is China. China is almost incomparable in size and power next to previous rivals such as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and even the USSR. There is nothing they would prefer more than the United States being dragged back to Europe.
Ultimately, the U.S. objective should be not to prolong the war, but to focus on China as a rising threat. Ukrainian neutrality would have sorted the issue for good. But Russia has already been pushed into the arms of the Chinese due to the war.
By not allowing an amoral balance of power, wherein we let Russia have a small sphere of influence as a grand bargain instead of being over-committed to Europe, Washington risks undercutting its long-term strategic interests by unknowingly accelerating China’s. In a twist of fate, President Joe Biden is now mirroring former President Donald Trump.
Biden’s old Cold War equilibrium instinct is under siege by his own activist administration, determined to defeat Russian “reactionary imperial patriarchy” and defend foreign borders, statues, and churches — instincts they would never allow at home. The almost theological focus on being a part of a conflict in the far corners of Eastern Europe to ensure the continuation of a liberal democratic revolution is fundamentally undercutting American grand strategy, which historically tried to split Russia and China.
Ultimately, pushing Russia to be a Chinese satellite might turn out to be our greatest historic blunder.
Pro-Putin shill! /s
Focusing on the country that’s spent several months making nuclear threats at us is quite appropriate, thank you.
Yep, queue the traitorous Pooty puffers crying ‘Fake News’
NATO is NOT a “defensive alliance,” and its constant push towards the borders of Russia and non-stop hybrid/political warfare have brought us to the place we are at now.
A long-term, wicked neocon/MIC globalist experiment, both at home and abroad, is now blowing-up, and Americans are the ones being injured.
So far this President has only exceeded the expectations of those who that he would fail, by failing even harder.
The Federalist does not know how to form the Possessive of "United States?"
Regards,
resident Poopy-Pants has been a foreign policy mistake/failure for the past 45+ years. With a track record like that, why would anyone with a single functioning brain cell expect he be any different now??
Did the analysis of these long term ramifications include the demographic trends for Russia and China and how that will affect their military spending and hard power projection capacity over the next two to three decades?
I'm sure the Chicoms would love to see the US & Russia get into a shooting war! But "there's a sucker born every minute", and most of 'em seem to be here on FR screaming "Let's Go To War With Russia!!!" or "If We Don't Stop Putin-Hitler We're All Gonna Die!!!" And it's all over a third world country that most of them couldn't find on a map of the earth, if it wasn't labeled for 'em...
;>)
China will not move until the USA is stuck in a land war with Russia. Its coming folks—the set up is there for a WW III battle between US and Russia—BUT NATO will stay out (or most of it in any case) The war will be fought on Russian Territory but cyber war and space war will be international. Cuban crisis will be replayed. This will save the Democratic Party and give them a chance to jail Trump, his family, and Fox News changed into MSNBC Light. Mail in ballots will rule the day and Biden gets a second term. If Americans had any guts they wouldn’t have permitted the Election steal in 2020. Let your chains be light and that you enjoy your two minute hates! Putin Must Die! All Russians must die! In the end Russia and America will both lose. Its like what happened when Parthia and Byzantium battled it out and the Arabs stepped in and won the day.
Biggest ever, until later in the week when Biden makes yet another, and bigger, foreign policy blunder.
There are two types who want to focus on Russia:
— On the right, those who believe that Putin is a closet communist who is seeking to restore the old USSR. Could be true, but unbiased analysis is lacking.
— On the left, one worlders who want the USA to become like China and fear that Russia will ally itself with Americans who don’t.
Together, these two types are able to dominate the news and turn Putin into a real monster.
Let the Ukraine Take Russia so we can focus on China
It remains unanswered, the question of what our vital national interest is in Ukraine. When Russia took Crimea in 2014 we did little or nothing, and frankly nobody in the media gave a dam. There were no tear-jerking human interest stories about the children of Crimea.
So now, when two foreign nations clash, with neither of which do we have any treaty obligations, the entire establishment goes hysterical and sends billions of our dollars to fuel the conflict. That alone makes me suspicious of what is really going on there. I mean, sure, send them some stingers and javelins and whatnot. Fine. Give Russia a bloody nose. OK by me. But why are we as a nation obsessed with this fight, which is in reality a border dispute and land grab, as if it were the armageddon borning.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.