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We're sitting on a > 48 hour interval with no top level posts which might be some kind of record. It's been awhile since we talked about Ukraine, so here we go..
It would seem that Ukraine is still slowly losing a war of attrition. Of course, the big news is Ukraine's incursion into Kursk, in which they managed to capture some Russian territory after catching the Russians with their pants down. Coupled with that, Ukraine has also been mounting more long-range attacks against Russian oil infrastructure. Neither of these actions is really what Ukraine's western allies want to see, but what can they do? Ukraine's best bet may to escalate in order to draw in more Western support without which they will collapse. But it's looking quite grim. Germany has vowed to stop new aid.
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-halt-new-ukraine-military-aid-report-war-russia/
In response to Kursk and the oil infrastructure attacks, Russia has attacked Ukraine's energy grid.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-strikes-ukraines-power-grid-in-most-massive-attack-of-war/ar-AA1pt39P
What many people don't realize is that the Ukraine/Russia conflict has been in many ways quite limited. Life goes on in the cities. Casualties have largely been limited to combatants. The longer things go on, the more this might change. People in Kiev are now facing the real possibility of a winter without heat and electricity.
Here in the West, people's enthusiasm for the war seems to be waning as the news cycle covers newer, shinier topics. But the war grinds on and every day men die at the front.
Edit: As usual, the cure to a stale front page is to post about Ukraine which inspires another post on a different topic moments later.
So, anyone have a read on what a realistic ceasefire deal looks like? Does one exist? Is anyone serious mooting one around in the world of think tanks?
Ukraine's winning scenarios have run out at this point. The abortive and telegraphed offensive ate up too much time and material for them to win in any conventional sense. Prigozhin might have been the Black Swan they needed, but he pussied out. The Russian economy is showing no signs of collapse. Some point to a Wunderwaffen or to some chart that shows NATO production coming online at a faster pace from 2025 onward, but I doubt that will make a material difference. Ukraine is basically hoping for a Russian collapse as a result of some as-yet-unknown cause, which is not impossible, but not much of a strategy.
Russia's odds of winning much more than what they have so far seem longer still. They're hoping Ukraine just gives up, but that might be longer odds than a Russian collapse, as Ukrainian psychopathic nationalism seems more systemic rather than oriented around a single individual.
Neither side is going to win the kind of victory that will make good their losses. So how is a ceasefire outlined that will deliver a lasting peace?
I still haven't come up with a better idea than putting Harry and Meghhan on the throne in Kiev.
Have western elites ever been able to formulate a war plan?
Afghanistan was a war without a goal after the first few months. There wasn't much more than slogans as war aims and no real negotiations could be made. Taliban are pure evil, are motivated by nothing but evil, have no legitimate concerns or demands. Those who fight the taliban may rape children and sell drugs but they are still the good guys.
Iraq was mission accomplished without a real plan.
The plan in Ukraine seems to be built entirely on slogans, an extreme sense of moralism in which the western elites are seen as a self evident good and Putin as a completely illegitimate evil.
The people running the west are effectively campaign staff addicted to social media. There is no serious group of people to negotiate with. There is no plan. There is just slogans and polling data on what will yield the most traction as well as whatever the donors are pushing for. Nobody is going to have a serious conversation about eastern Europe's security architecture. Nobody is going to have a sensible discussion about what can be achieved. There will just be virtue signalling on twitter.
Politicians will be allowed to say all sorts of crazy slogans such as "we need to bring down Putin!" and no journalist will ask follow up questions.
We have another forever war with no plan, budget, war aims or leaders that will be held responsible. A war lead by people who will never go any where near the front themselves and who are more interested in the perception of the war than the war itself.
Wars like that don't tend to end with nice treaties.
I can definitely think of a few wars won by Western powers. Unless your claim is that those wars weren't run by elites?
People die and are replaced by other people.
What's the most recent you can think of that actually resulted in a strategic victory? Especially ones that involved another GP.
In my book you get the First Gulf War, a successful limited defensive operation, and that's about it. Then you have to go back almost a century to WW2.
The Cold War?
Obviously, that’s not total industrial war, either. The planet hasn’t seen such a conflict since the development of nuclear weapons. War has changed, and “limited defensive operations” are always preferable to all-in ideological struggles for the fate of continents. That’s why Russia is chipping away at Ukraine rather than lunging for the Fulda Gap.
I don't think the West won the Cold War so much as the Soviets elites just committed suicide for unrelated reasons that surprised even the CIA.
You can make a good argument it was a propaganda or economic win I suppose.
Though probably the former since the West completely fumbled the Russian economy right after being given control. Lest the 90s were intentional destruction which I don't believe.
Soviet elites saw that grocery stores for average Americans were better and gave more choice than even shops for Soviet nomenklatura. No, seriously this. USSR economics and life expectancy were stangating for about since early 1960ths
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I was about to say the Ukraine War, but then you said it had to involve another Great Power.
Cheek aside, this is just categorical gerrymandering. It's a subjective answer which hinges on the conception of a great power is (it would be definitionally impossible for western elites to win a great strategic victory against great powers if all the great powers are on the same team), what a strategic victory entails, and then adding a qualifier of power disparities that basically applies to no one (the Russians / Chinese haven't been in a war against a great power since WW2 either) but is treated as a mark of failure to only some (the lack of a victory over a GP is evidence of western elite failure) even though the same metric could be used as evidence of competence / succession (western elites successfully accomplished goals without needing a direct GP war).
Technically, the USA, the USSR and the PRC have all been in a war against a great power since WWII - the Korean War, in which the USA directly fought the USSR and PRC (the USSR's combat forces pretended to be Chinese, but they still fought). Of course, nobody really won that one, and it's only slightly more recent.
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If there is something I hate it's people who try to avoid answering real questions by showing how it's possible to game the answer.
I don't care if you're clever enough to make untrue things appear true Protagoras, what I care about is if Western Elites can produce strategic results when genuinely challenged.
Then stop trying to make true things appear untrue by introducing weasel words or dismissing challenges as genuine, Antigoras.
In the answer you hate on grounds of avoiding answering a real question, you had a real answer in Ukraine- a country with no right to be able to resist what a few years ago was believed to be a top-3-in-the world army. This was a war which started in the context of a Russian attempt to push back NATO and deepen Germany energy dependence... which has seen NATO expand and close a previously competitive theater, seen the Europeans execute real and expensive energy transition, and maintain a multi-national coalition of backers by parties that half a decade ago were actively selling arms to the Russians.
Is this to be dismissed because the Americans or Europeans aren't directly involved? Because Russia is not a great power? Because, three years after a three day special military operation, there may be some less-than-maximally-desirable ceasefire conditions for a country that demonstrated the military advantage of American aid against far stronger parties?
Strategic challenges aren't necessarily military threats either, so tying one to the other is begging the conclusion. You may take it for granted that ISIS's caliphate was crushed / the Korean DMZ is boring / that Iran limits itself to asymmetric and proxy groups rather than direct expansion / that the South China Sea remains a place of coast guard disputes rather than gunboat diplomacy, but these are all strategic challenges well beyond the capacity of most states, and these are all places where the status quo is an example of strategic results being achieved. In some of our lives, Iran in living memory had a very real expansionist potential of directly annexing parts of Iraq on co-religionist grounds- and now it's 'just' competing with the US for influence over local politicians.
I don't know how you can complain about weasel words and deliver this whopper in the same post... Less than maximally desirable ceasefire conditions? Has the war situation developed not necessarily to Ukraine's advantage? I recall you saying things like 'oh the April '22 ceasefire talks were a dead end since the Ukrainians couldn't accept the demilitarization/no NATO terms'.
What kind of ceasefire terms are they looking at now, compared to then? How much more lost land are they looking at? How much of the country has left, never to return?
The military advantage of American aid is that you lose hundreds of thousands of men in a meatgrinder, get your whole country intensively bombed and depopulated and finally lose more land than you would've without it? And the biggest gamechanger, the most important weapon in Ukraine's arsenal is the DJI Mavic and other Chinese drones/electronic parts?
The sanctions on Russia have had no significant impact on military capacity or state stability. In fact Russia, Iran and North Korea have somehow managed to outproduce the West in munitions while China has both a qualitative and quantitative lead in drones. US ISR has been pretty effective but that's about it.
The US goal has been clear, to restore Ukraine's pre-2014 borders and prop up the old world order by bringing Ukraine into NATO. This clearly hasn't worked. Ukraine's borders and territorial control are looking pretty patchy. The mirage of NATO membership is as distant as ever. The war situation is not reassuring for not-quite-treaty allies of the US. Reframing the goal to 'at least things haven't yet gotten catastrophically worse' is not sufficient, especially since the disasters are nearly all self-inflicted.
The DMZ was fairly calm before the whole Axis of Evil/pre-emptive strike idea which was rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. Iran's influence was limited and there were opportunities to work with them before the US started hacking away at MENA, rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. Now there are a host of Iraqi militias fighting for Iran, they've achieved something close to Sun Tzu's ideal of perfection in turning a major enemy into an ally without fighting. We did that for them, at great expense.
How could ISIS have emerged if Saddam wasn't dethroned and Syria wasn't destabilized?
Russia's military threat was minimal before the 'all of Russia's neighbours should be brought into NATO' policy, rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. There was a moment where Russia was cooperating with us on anti-terrorism and energy but that was thrown away.
China would be vastly easier to deal with if it weren't for all the other crises and about 15 years where naval modernization was on the backburner compared to fooling around in MENA and now Europe. And it's still happening. China may well orchestrate some disaster in the Middle East before they move, knowing the US will pull carrier groups away to defend their highest priority, Israel.
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I don't like using ongoing conflicts to judge the competence of leaders because the consequences of actions can take a while to play out. And people always seem to blinders on about the present.
You could have held the same triumph for Afghanistan in the 00s for instance. Some did, and we all know how that ended.
The only question that matter strategically speaking is whether or not the West is in a better position than before this war. Your listings of tactical victories are irrelevant.
I find success difficult to argue in terms of stockpiles, economic stability, political stability and diplomatic standing. If I had to pick between the western alliance before or after this war to fight China over Taiwan, I pick before every time.
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Indeed, but western elites die and are replaced by other western elites. So, the question "have western elites ever" clearly isn't limited to current year plus nine.
Calling the Gulf war a defensive war is kind of funny once you realize it required sending troops to the other side of the planet and ended with coalition forces stomping the Iraqi military and rolling up to 150 miles away from Baghdad. Doubly so in the context of discussing another "limited defensive operation".
It's a logistical achievement for sure, and Schwarzkopf was no moron. But it's not exactly a total war. My point is that it's not a great example of a genuine strategic challenge because:
If the coalition toppled Saddam and replaced him with a regime loyal to the West we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead I'd be praising the continued skill of the West at building friends out of enemies in the continuity of what happened in Japan.
But that's not what happened. The Americans had to come mop it up years later and fucked that up really bad.
I don't think you can really say that the coalition consisted of GPs. Britain and France were hardly GPs in the 90s, to say nothing of Saudi and Egypt. Iraq also had a huge military and actually outnumbered coalition forces in terms of troops, tanks, etc.
I'll just dispute that. 1991 Britain and France were still some of the best equipped and trained militaries in the world. And we're only talking military power.
Iraq had a large conscript army with decent Soviet equipment. But they were no North Korea.
It's no shame, but It was not a fair fight. The main difficulty was force projection. Which is something that I'll gladly concede the West has gotten scarily good at.
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