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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.
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).
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 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.
Well, yes. Willfully ignoring the effects of the western powers on the first non-western great power war of the last quarter century while making a lack of effecting great power wars in the last quarter century a basis of criticism would be blinders.
And we also all know that it didn't end due to the nature of the 01 invasion, but on two decades of nation-building failure after the military delivered initial effects, which are different types of issues that shouldn't be conflated (and do not disqualify 01 from meeting your requirements of strategic effect).
Unless you intend to argue that the nature of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan inevitably, inherently led to the 2021 withdrawal dynamic, and that the intervening 20-odd years had no opportunities / ability / responsibility to matter, appealing to 2021 would be an anachronistic way to dismissing 2001 regardless of whether 2001 was done well or wisely or not.
You think the US strategic position would be better if the Islamic State was still straddling the Syria-Iraq Border, the Korean Peninsula was either ablaze or rebuilding from a catastrophic war that leveled Seoul and saw the Chinese the only power able to invest in the reconstruction at scale, the Iranians annexing much of Iraq and gain significantly more control and leverage over Gulf oil flows, and the Chinese were attempting direct military coercion of one of the main economic thoroughfares of the world?
Okay. Truly only tactical effects.
That would be a very stupid pick, given there was no western alliance to fight China over Taiwan, that multiple European leading states including both France and Germany were not-subtly signaling their disinterested in supporting Taiwan over China, that the Europeans were even more militarily incapable of contributing useful military aid to Taiwan even if they wanted to, and that the European Union was far more vulnerable to Russia-PRC economic lobbies and coercion that would be pressuring them to neutrality vis-a-vis participation with the US.
But okay. You are the Protagoras here.
I'll bite.
When was the Afghanistan war lost? I stand to be corrected, but it seems to me that across twenty years and four presidents, there is no obvious answer better than 2001, when we committed ourselves to invading, occupying and democratizing the country. I do not think you can point to a time past that point when we stood a better chance of securing a better outcome, in terms of costs and benefits, than before the war began. Everything that followed really does seem to have flown downhill from that point, from the sort of people who were in charge, the ideological commitments that defined them, the nature of our country and our military, and the realities of the nation we chose to invade.
If I'm wrong, it seems to me that the way to demonstrate it would be to point to some inflection point post-invasion, a before and after where things took a turn for the worse. But from what I can see, there is no such inflection point. From the moment American boots hit Afghan soil till the moment they left, America had the ability to utterly dominate Afghanistan militarily, at a significant cost in blood and treasure and human misery, and for zero tangible benefit. I have never seen evidence that it was ever going to get better, or that it ever was going to end any other way but how it did. We were always going to pay far too much for far too little until we eventually decided to stop paying. The only way to improve that calculus would have been to stop paying sooner, or ideally not pay at all.
You seem to be arguing that the nation-building was poorly executed, with the implication that it could have been done successfully. That may be true in some theoretical sense, but I see no plausible scenario where America actually does a better job of occupying and nation-building than we saw in reality. I don't think Gore, Kerry, Romney, McCain, Hillary or indeed Trump would have done any better than their respective opponents actually did. I don't think shuffling pentagon or state department officials around would have changed anything. I don't think you can actually argue that better outcomes were at hand if only the right people were in charge. I'm pretty confident that, in fact, the "right people" don't exist, then or now.
The best possible outcome I can imagine would be to have conducted the war as a punitive raid, bombed our way in, shot anyone who looked at us funny while hunting Bin Laden, and then rolled back out again once it became clear he was gone. No nation-building, no occupation, no two decades of graft and incompetence and pointless bloodshed so that washington and pentagon apparatchiks could play social studies phd through heavily-armed proxies.
Am I wrong? What am I missing here?
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