Dec 21, 2021
America Was Never Going To Protect Ukraine
America and NATO have spent twenty years stringing Ukraine along knowing full well they would never intervene if Russia attacked.
The 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russian support for separatists in Donbas came at a moment when the United States and NATO were both in a dramatically better situation with respect to Russia than they are today.
But NATO, despite proclaiming Ukraine as a partner and ally, has done and will continue to do nothing meaningful to help the country. Ukraine stands effectively alone against Putin’s armies, a pawn in a larger game that threatens the lives of so many people who want nothing more than to live their lives in peace.
The situation is particularly disgusting because the crisis was, like so many American fight to pretend came out of nowhere, absolutely predictable.
Back in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were genuine fears in Europe that the chaos in the USSR would lead to a right-wing nationalist movement taking power in Moscow and working to put the USSR back together again. That has basically happened — it just took twenty years and the ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin being enabled by the manifold stupidities of American leaders.
Yet there is a key difference between the 1990s and today: America has ruled out actually defending Ukraine.
Oh sure, arms company shills in Congress and on TV want to pretend sending Javelin anti-tank missiles, some coastal patrol boats, and Turkish dronesmeans Ukraine is ready for the onslaught where it wasn’t when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 — that’s the evil game they always play.
In real military terms Ukraine is absolutely screwed unless Russia is utterly incompetent. The usual blather is being spewed across the media about Ukraine’s improved capabilities compared to 2014 and the potential for a drawn-out guerilla war. Across the “West” Ukrainian soldiers are expected to die in a futile fight to protect territory the balance of power dictates they can’t.
Russia outspends Ukraine ten to one. It has weapons capable of hitting Ukrainian forces from such a distance Ukraine can’t hope to strike back. Putin doesn’t need to launch an overt large-scale invasion to destroy Ukraine, he can paralyze its military and let separatists take districts one at a time after the defenders have been pummeled and cut off from support.
Sadly, there is nothing Ukraine’s military can do to stop this if Russia acts carefully and uses its advantages well. After a decade of intense combat operations in Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine, Russia’s military is experienced and has been reformed into a highly motivated professional force no longer reliant on conscripts.
Some American pundits are looking to the victory Finland won over the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939, but this is a terrible comparison. First off, after a spirited successful initial defense Finland was overwhelmed and defeated the next spring. The Soviet Army at the time had been decimated by Stalin’s purges and didn’t fully recover until 1943, after the Soviets had burned through a couple generations of soldiers working out how to win modern wars.
Finland had the distinct advantage of being filled with dense forests and wide lakes near the Russian border. Ukraine’s east is almost entirely open steppe, like the Great Plains of the America and Canada. That environment makes it very hard to hide, especially when there are drones constantly overhead with thermal sensors.
Ukraine can’t win a fight with Russia over the east. Its best hope is to conduct a fighting withdrawal that minimizes casualties and preserves its fighting forces while calling for international aid.
The alternative is the deaths of thousands of people, possibly tens of thousands, mostly Ukrainians. Russia’s military has strategic asymmetric advantages that allow it to control the pace of any limited operation in Donbas and win no matter what Ukraine does so long as it doesn’t try an all-out invasion on day one.
Putin’s objective is not the complete domination of Ukraine, but its effective neutralization. Simply demonstrating Ukraine can’t hope to defend the east is all he will need to do to trigger a massive crisis in Kyiv.
This will also demonstrate once and for all that NATO is incapable of protecting its allies. Putin has a chance to reveal three decades of American lies for what they’ve always been, demonstrating to the world that the power of America and NATO is a gigantic bluff.
The irony of this awful situation that Ukraine isn’t even the true focus of the fighting I expect to intensify in the coming weeks. What is happening right now is the early stages of a determined Russian effort to break NATO.
The steady shift in Russia’s rhetoric since April, when Putin first surged forces to the Russia-Ukraine border to trigger negotiations, has been marked. Russia has gone from making specific demands of Ukraine to broader ones affecting all of NATO that stand approximately zero chance of ever being accepted — which Russia surely knows.
In a different world, many of these security guarantees — like not stationing combat forces close to borders — make perfect sense. From the Russian perspective NATO does pose a threat in a material sense, even if in reality NATO lacks the ability or drive to start a major war. That’s why Putin is framing the crisis in terms of Russia’s ability to defend itself — an important smokescreen justifying the coming war to the Russian people.
But in the real world, what is happening right now is something I’ve been predicting since that inept fool Joe Biden took office: Russia and China, watching America’s self-inflicted democratic collapse, know the time to push for a change in the world order is now.
Trump destabilized America’s alliances and his rise revealed the USA to be the sick man of the democratic world. Then Biden came along to re-establish America’s old bluff, doubling down on the pathetic belief that America can simply market itself out of its predictable decline.
Vladimir Putin and to a lesser extent Xi Jinping know full well they have a unique opportunity. Because America is over-stretched and its leaders lack any real sense strategic direction or even self-awareness, it is in their mutual best interests to deliberately shred the illusion that America is the world’s sole superpower once and for all.
America is vulnerable to this play because its foreign policy expert caste is full of buffoons who believe in delusional fantasies. Americans “thought leaders” can get PhDs that allow them to portray their personal beliefs as scientific facts in the compliant media. They build personal brands spouting whatever horse manure the arms manufacturers they get paid by (or hope to) want the general public to believe.
For decades these craven cowards have pretended to supposed ally or partner after another that America would never leave them in the lurch.
Of course, this happens all the freaking time.
The list of American betrayals I’ve personally witnessed in my four decades of life runs long. Just off the top of my head there has been:
- Abandoning Afghanistan’s NATO-backed elected government to the Taliban under Biden
- Ditching the longstanding close relationship with the Kurds in Syria and Northern Iraq under Trump
- Ignoring previously set red lines on Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its own people — mainly civilians — under Obama
- Leaving Georgia to Russia’s wrath though it was promised NATO membership and had its best troops fighting in Iraq under Bush Jr.
- Running away from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down fiasco in Mogadishu under Clinton
- Letting Saddam Hussein crush a major Shia rebellion in Southern Iraq that had been promised assistance under Bush Sr.
Frankly, it’s a damn miracle anyone ever trusts the United States at this point.
America’s self-absorbed foreign policy wonks are determined to pretend the world is heading into another Cold War between two distinct sides. They are willing to sacrifice pretty much anyone who doesn’t speak English the “national interest” they demand the right to define for the rest of Americans.
The Postwar order has collapsed, and the world is split into four spheres: the Anglo-Saxon Empire, Sino-Russian Alliance, European Union, and Global Independents.
The Anglo-Saxon Empire is more or less any place the United Kingdom colonized and indigenous genocide was carried to near completion. The USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are the primaries, known as the Five Eyes who share vital intelligence. Bound by language and a common heritage, these English-speaking nations are moving slowly towards a trade and defense union thanks to Brexit, AUKUS, and other similar developments.
The Sino-Russian Alliance is led by China, with Russia now bound to it as closely as the UK is the USA these days. The over-arching objective is to create a pan-Eurasia trade and security system with close ties to the developing world. Iran, North Korea, Syria, Belarus, Venezuela and much of Central Asia are client countries, with Russia hoping to one day be the key player in the global fossil fuel economy which ain’t going anywhere soon, sad to say. China is focused on its own internal stability which requires access to export markets and raw materials, hence its operations in Africa and South America.
The European Union is a loose federation where each country has substantial autonomy, but after spending most of its early years first divided between NATO and the Soviet Union is slowly becoming more coherent and developing a common defense system. It is the weakest of the three major blocs in a purely military sense and faces significant internal divisions between north and south, east and west. But powered by the German economy and French military, the EU appears likely to relegate NATO — now more or less a creature of the Anglo-Saxon Empire — to obsolescence in the near future.
Finally, there is the diverse group comprising most of the countries of the world that I call the Global Independents. They lack unity and mostly focus on local problems, so these countries are actively courted by the three big blocs, but all remain driven by a collective desire for as much autonomy as they can secure. Bigger countries like India, Turkey, Japan, Brazil, Israel, and Indonesia try to maintain connections with two of the major blocs to avoid falling under the control of any one party, while smaller ones form regional pacts like ASEAN or Mercosur.
Ukraine is a pawn caught in the middle of a major geopolitical rearrangement where the Sino-Russian Alliance is actively pushing back against the power of the Anglo-Saxon Empire. Vladimir Putin knows that triggering a crisis of sufficient magnitude could split and then end NATO, which has always been a fragile alliance that incorporates two countries that absolutely hate each other, Turkey and Greece.
It’s worth stating baldly to give a clear sense of how world leaders see America in the 2020s: after vowing to support Afghanistan’s government, Biden walked away from Kabul. After nearly a year of Putin rattling sabers on Ukraine’s border with America declaring full-throated support for Kyiv, Biden has ruled out sending American military forces to defend it.
Ukraine can’t win this fight alone, unless Russia makes a lot of mistakes. And as a former soldier I know you never count on the other side making a mistake.
I’m on the side of the democratic countries among the Global Independents first and foremost, with the European Union coming in a distant second. Though I’m quite literally about as Anglo-Saxon as a guy can get, I reject the foreign policy presumptions and ambitions of hacks in D.C. and London who misread history to glorify their dismal past.
I feel absolutely awful for the brave women and men stuck in the freezing trenches of Donbas right now. Hundreds, if not thousands, are likely to die in the coming months not because this blood sacrifice is necessary, but because leaders in faraway capitols are playing games with their lives.
It is now too late to actually defend Ukraine as it stands. Putin’s plot to shatter the country is already in motion and will only accelerate if NATO does what it should do, if Ukraine were truly an ally and partner, and dispatch a whole lot of firepower to the Baltic States and Poland. Doing that now is likely to escalate into a broader war NATO is ill-equipped to fight.
Putin has what is known as a dominant strategy given the correlation of forces in Donbas. He needs only to provoke Ukrainian forces along the line of contact to fight back against some degree of separatist territorial encroachment too small to call a Russian invasion but too overt to ignore.
A benefit of Russia openly preparing for a major war is that anything less than a massive invasion will come as a relief to people in Europe and America. Right now, Russian-backed forces shell Ukrainian positions daily. This is done partly to harass but mostly to force them to move around which reveals where they are dug in.
Drones are watching every inch of the battlefield in Donbas, and Ukraine lacks the air defense assets to shoot Russia’s down, while the reverse is true for their opponent. Ukrainian formations near the front lines are being mapped out in precise detail right now, which is intended to allow artillery and air strikes to decimate forward forces in the first hours of any flare-up.
From there, separatist forces can press forward in a few sectors to test the defenders’ ability to resist. Every fight they start reveals more Ukrainian positions that can be blasted from the air. Ukraine starts using artillery to support their troops, it gets spotted and attacked too.
Russian casualties can kept low by making sure the pace of advance is sporadic and unpredictable, inflicting severe local casualties on Ukraine and making it incredibly hard to send reinforcements and supplies. Putin can grind down Ukraine’s outnumbered forces while still maintaining the fiction that Russian soldiers aren’t in direct combat on the ground.
Putin’s aim is not a massive invasion and occupation, he wants to trigger a deep political crisis that collapses Ukraine’s government. Proving it can’t defend itself but that Russia isn’t after total conquest puts a wedge between the government and the Ukrainian people, most of whom just want to be left in peace.
In the worst case for Russia under this scenario, separatists are able to expand their control of the Donetsk and Lukhansk provinces and probably connect Crimea. NATO intervenes more strongly than expected and Russia’s frontier becomes permanently militarized, but its position in Crimea is secured, the sea of Azov falling behind a wall guarding the Black Sea and the Russian heartland in its south.
In the best case for Putin, Ukraine’s military is forced to pull back with heavy losses and the government in Kyiv collapses. Separatist uprisings across the south and east create the conditions for major portions of Ukraine to reject the central government and demand to be part of Russia, allowing troops from the borders to walk in. The remnants of Ukraine are forced into neutrality or, better yet, dominated like Belarus.
Either way, Putin can demonstrate at minimal cost in Russian blood that Russia is a force to reckon with and cast severe doubt on whether NATO — read America — will back its treaty obligations to defend Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.
The world should defend Ukraine. The country has serious problems with corruption and borders that don’t work, but it’s still a democracy. Ukraine should be immediately incorporated into the European Union — or better yet, supported militarily by other Independents so they can all actually defend themselves without relying on craven, distracted America.
The real driver of the impending disaster in Ukraine is America’s own internal collapse. American leaders make promises they can’t keep and leave others to suffer the consequences time and again. If you look back far enough, this was the pattern of Britain too, going back centuries.
The Anglo-Saxon Empire looks after itself. Allies, not so much.
It’s time to replace NATO and the deluded dream of any sort of pax-Americana. Only once we have a global democracy can the world tackle the dangers posed by the Sino-Russian alliance — and the Anglo-Saxon Empire.
One is willing to upset the last vestiges of global peace for national advantage. The other is willing to burn the environment to get a little richer.
Neither option can be tolerated.
