Will America Let Ukraine Win?
The future of US power and its position in the world are both at stake. An emerging Trump-Putin-Netanyahu alliance threatens to upend international affairs. Is Harris ready? Prove it, Kamala.
Zelensky’s latest trip to the United States isn’t over yet, but already dangerous warning signs have emerged. Ukraine has been sucked fully into the partisan doom loop, with potentially dire consequences.
For over a year I’ve been waging a private campaign to do what little a random blogger could to prevent this outcome. Up until this week, there appeared to be hope - remote for sure, but it was still something - that Ukraine aid could be separated from the American partisan machine and insulated from a Trump win in 2024.
Some writers like to call themselves wordsmiths, but I’ve never seen myself that way. Being as much a scientist as a writer, for me words are just tools for conveying ideas. I’m a wordtinker - I take data and ideas and assemble narratives. That helps transmit the scientific insights I’ve been trained to produce.
It’s also why I write long pieces - my assumption is that most readers skim, focusing on the parts that particularly interest them. The hardest part of the work is deciding how to phrase things so that the right info meets the right eyes.
From the very beginning of russia’s all-out invasion I’ve felt that the best use of my skillset was to identify gaps and failings in the public narrative about the war. Early on I identified an attempt to tell Ukraine’s story for it by the English-speaking press that routinely prevents deeper truths from emerging. I dissect rhetoric and compare it to what’s happening on the ground, centering analysis on the most unambiguous signals available - open source data chained to reality by georeferencing. It’s what in academia is called a mixed-methods approach, with systems theory linking everything together.
Some people write a dissertation and get a PhD. I’ve got this blog. The pay is the same, unless there’s a university, non-profit organization, or intelligence agency somewhere that actually pays for someone to do this kind of work from their home office. In that case, send me an email! More on that towards the end.
What impact I can hope this blog might have centers on revealing ideas and narratives that journalists and policymakers who care about Ukraine can make use of - or at least be warned about. In a world where the power players are investing tremendous amounts of time and money waging information wars, the most reliable ideas are bound to be grounded in data and science. Anyone can make claims, but relating different ones in a consistent way to reveal hidden context is tougher. But once you’ve built a good theory, the claims that really matter start to jump out from the noise.
The presumption that Trump hated Ukraine and was bound to sell the country out to Putin never matched up with the evidence - Javelin missiles first arrived under Trump, not Biden - and Trump’s silly effort to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden was just a pathetic political shenanigan, nothing plenty of presidents haven’t done before - or worse. The same is true of the misguided impeachment effort after.
I mean really, Pelosi and company - George W. Bush can lie his way into a war that kills thousands of American and allied military personnel (upwards of a million civilians too, if anyone is counting), and that’s what you’ll impeach a president for? Got it. Over and out, ma’am. I know who you are.
Might be an unpopular truth, but it’s hypocrisy like that which leads to partisan insanity taking over everything. During elections, politicians are normally forced to commit to public positions on issues in a way that becomes binding in the public eye. Once you stop demanding they do this, a critical chain in democratic accountability breaks - that’s why culture war politics are such a fatal addiction, doomed to divide a country in time.
Ever wonder how many Americans would actually vote to break up the country outright if given the chance? Brightlinewatch (not an extreme organization by any means) once asked that question in a 2021 study. Here’s the answer: 30-44%, depending on region, the Pacific coming in second at 39%. They’ve never asked the question again. Gee, I wonder why. Some people really can’t handle the truth.
In any case, up until this week Trump’s public position on Ukraine was a lot more ambiguous than pro-Ukraine Democrats were willing to admit. Despite catching flak, I stuck to my guns in arguing that Trump might not actually ditch Ukraine like the big name pundits all said. It seemed likely that his desire to look strong would force him to give Ukraine everything it asked for after Putin rebuffed a deal.
I have to assess my effort as a failure. I always figured it was doomed, but the attempt had to be made. Sorry, Ukraine.
Trump over the past couple weeks has taken a strong anti-Ukraine stance as part of a deliberate political strategy. I will always hold that the relentless effort by partisan Democrats to claim Ukraine as their pet foreign policy issue - at least until Israel was attacked by Hamas - has done untold harm to Ukraine’s war effort.
You have to step back from the induced mania that an election season brings to the USA to perceive it, and naturally a lot of partisans won’t. But the hard truth is that by enabling the Biden-Harris Administration’s slow-roll, drip-feed approach to Ukraine aid instead of threatening to withhold support in 2022 and 2024, pro-Ukraine Democrats fed this monster. Failing to either deter Putin in the first place or fully repel his invasion after nearly three years of fighting has given Trump an opening that might win him the election outright.
Trump’s selection of Vance as his VP, Kennedy as a surrogate, and his decision to fully adopt Putin’s position on Ukraine are all part of a package. Just as he did in 2016 and almost pulled off again in 2020, Trump is appealing to a once-dormant part of the American electorate that doesn’t reliably respond to polls and only turns out when he’s on the ballot.
Biden’s narrow victory in 2020 masked a longer-term trend of Americans without a college degree shifting towards the Republicans. Gallup, one of America’s oldest polling outfits, published their latest comparison of recent election dynamics and found some key metrics shifting towards the Republicans.
There is a strong case to be made for viewing a Republican sweep of the federal government as the default planning scenario. Whatever the Democrats gained between 2016 and 2020, they appear to have lost since.
In mid-September, the press pretty much always pronounces the Democrat as a sure thing to win. At the same time, they’re financially bound to portray the election as a horse race that could go either way, even though in a statistical sense it’s always a tie with 90% of voters already committed to their team’s candidate. The other 10% is drawn from a much larger pool of people who don’t habitually vote, turning out when they’re motivated by a particular issue, especially economic anxiety.
By late October, though, enough data emerges to suggest that the Democrat’s polling lead isn’t as durable as pundits have been insisting. The tone shifts to panic, an October Surprise claimed to have upset the dynamics. In reality all that’s happening is those voters less attached to the ritual of the thing tuning in, but they tend not to be college educated types.
The hazard of most journalists being college grads in a country where education is the biggest predictor of partisan lean is that few have any incentive to upset their mostly partisan audience. In college, the people who get into politics are taught by their professors to treat it as part of their identity, which creates the perfect foundation for groupthink.
College grads are socialized to treat later life as if it’s an extension of a college campus, where protests are a mix of expressing identity and participating in civic society, things they’re told by their professors (who mostly hail from a distinct strata of society) are inherently good. Media-designated experts and politicians act as the lifetime professors of American life, a good educated citizen’s job being to absorb their lessons and behave accordingly.
Read The Atlantic or pretty much any other rag based in the Puritan Northeast and it ought to be pretty obvious how they simply made themselves into a replacement for churches - small wonder Southern Christian conservatives hate them. They’re mirror images split along the old Union-Confederate lines. Figures, coming from the West Coast, that I’m so alienated by it all. I spent a year east of the Rockies and have no desire to ever go back, unless it’s to parts of Canada.
The mere act of voting is held to constitute democracy in this strange system, even if political parties fight to make it nearly impossible for competition to rise. That this represents a degradation of the idea of Democracy little different than China’s Communist Party or Iran’s Mullahs deciding who is eligible to run for office remains taboo to admit. We’re special and better and just so civilized, didn’t you know?
The danger of this dynamic is that though college grads are trained to imagine that they constitute the whole electorate, they remain a minority in the USA. More than a third of the voting population doesn’t habitually turn out or pay attention to national political pundits - many were never in college or weren’t politically active. Engineering and science students don’t have as much free time as others.
A truth that remains apparently invisible to the vast majority of college educated Americans is that it doesn’t matter what motivates people to vote so long as they turn out for your side. The entire Trump political machine is devoted to finding people turned off by politics but also afraid for their future, then giving them a narrative to believe in.
Democrats attempt this, but they’ve lost the ability to communicate with people too unlike themselves. The identity politics schema they’ve adopted in recent years is itself inherently racist, misogynist, and all the other things they insist characterize the other side, but they won’t admit it. Virtually all of the stuff critics label “woke” and “DEI” is just performative nonsense that doesn’t improve material conditions for anyone. Harmless social justice cosplaying, but also a dead end that doesn’t threaten anyone’s “traditional” values - which I put in quotes because what’s called traditional changes an awful lot across history.
To truly beat racism and sexism these must be transcended by a unifying narrative, not viewed as immortal prime evils, malevolent gods stalking society. People know that there’s only so much the government can possibly get done, so the moment you start splitting up the population into categories in your rhetoric you look dishonest whenever people who belong to more than one group compare what you’re promising each community.
The solution? Material policy applied on a universal basis, programs that people can see won’t be exploited, leaving them left holding the tab. Life in society is an ongoing collective action problem to which the only solution is flexible institutions.
The more pro-Ukraine Democrats have beat Trump over the head with the fact that he says nice things about Putin - note that if you say nice things about tyrants the US favors this season that gets a pass - the more they’ve handed him a golden opportunity. That the Ukraine War hasn’t ended despite the Biden Administration constantly talking up how much aid is being sent creates tremendous cognitive dissonance in a society where people are always told how magical American military equipment and techniques are.
Just as Trump did with the Covid-19 pandemic and Hillary Clinton’s emails, any hypocrisy on the Democratic side is used to advance the case that a great big conspiracy is responsible for keeping anyone down who isn’t happily living the American Dream. There isn’t, just rich people selling stuff, but that’s hard to accept. As is the fact that attacking Trump only makes him stronger, because it further solidifies the illusion that he’s this big tough guy who will look out for his buddies in a world where college educated types always seem to be trying to exploit you.
This is why I’ve been so critical of the reflexive tendency to bash Trump whenever the topic of Ukraine comes up. It doesn’t help Ukraine; it’s a bad habit that has fatally undermined what little chance there ever was of forcing Trump to commit to supporting Ukraine during the election in order to look strong, something that might have been used to bind his hands later. Instead, he’s attempting to accomplish that by demanding Ukraine’s surrender and falsely describing its situation as hopeless, an appeal bound work on some because clearly something is wrong with the situation.
Trump is actively embracing the same “big papa” paternalism that Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Modi, and a host of other autocratic types are using to pretend that they care about anyone other than themselves. Sorry, proponents of Western Civilization and the Western World, but you’re losing. First at home, then abroad. Why? Probably because precious few leaders ever had a drill sergeant repeatedly remind them to always choose the hard right over the easy wrong.
I’ve come to firmly believe that every college graduate should spend a year as an enlisted soldier. I know it’s the oldest trope in the book for a person as they get older to think everyone should face the same trials they did, but there’s something to be said for putting book learning to practical use before calling one’s self educated. You’d be surprised at what someone with a four year degree in social science perceives when they go through training exercises intended for high school grads in life and death situations.
Turning back to American politics and Ukraine, most of the time when Trump talks it’s best to ignore the blather. But the past few days have seen a concerted effort by the Republican Party leadership as a whole to play a sick little game with Zelensky.
Republicans are accusing Zelensky of getting involved in the election because he made some frank comments about Trump and Vance and went with some Democrats on a trip to an artillery factory in Pennsylvania. Frankly, I am absolutely certain that the Biden Administration has demanded that Zelensky publicly criticize Trump, because everything is about the election right now. The political hacks are calling in every favor and pulling every trick.
But the timing and intensity of Republican criticism implies a planned political hit job that was happening anyway. The party leadership is betting that it can turn out new voters by portraying Ukraine as another failed forever war. This doesn’t preordain the elimination of aid to Ukraine if Trump wins, but it sure does put the option on the table in a big way.
When you add this manufactured fandango to Trump’s comments this week and last, it’s clear that the Republican Party sees the old Reagan Republicans as less relevant to the future than the man-baby bro-set exemplified by Vance. I don’t know why all the new right wing heroes are dudes with scruffy beards who look perpetually upset about being constipated, but I guess Sean Hannity’s weak sauce brand appeals to some. Having been around a lot of diehard Marxist types, I can’t help but see the two as of a kind, ideological opponents though they might be. Both will adamantly misunderstand a text or idea and distort it beyond recognition.
It might seem like a stark contrast with Trump’s antics to see Biden finally use the word “win” when talking about Ukraine in a major speech, and it is nice to see him shuffle that way with his administration’s dying gasps. Unfortunately, this is the oldest story in America’s partisan nightmare: abject incompetence looks better than rank malevolence. But the outcome winds up being much the same - the politicians and pundits enjoy a growth industry and lifetime employment, but the rest of us have to watch the country we live in decay around us.
The good news coming out the Biden Administration, aside from actually - maybe - understanding that “as long as it takes” just means forever war, is that it’s managed to ensure all the Ukraine aid presently budgeted will get there before he leaves office. $8 billion is a nice chunk of change, though it amounts to less than 1% of the annual Pentagon budget. At least there’s a full accounting of what goes to Ukraine - you can’t say the same for the rest of the money taxpayers shovel into the Pentagon’s greedy maw.
I also have to point out the uncomfortable fact of most packages sent since aid flows resumed in late spring being smaller than they once were. It almost gives the impression that Team Biden hoarded funds in order to produce some nice headlines right about now.
Trump is, of course, totally misrepresenting how much aid Ukraine has received and naturally doesn’t admit that every dollar sent is an investment ensuring that the USA has to spend less to cope with russia in the future. And his opposition to more aid is probably genuine, given how central he’s making Ukraine to his pitch this week.
Details remain thin on exactly what from US stocks will be sent in the weeks ahead. One more Patriot battery promised is nice, though the US has still sent just a fraction of all that it owns while even Germany has given about a third of its capabilities. An additional eighteen F-16 training slots might more than double what the US was committing to train, but even if it gets the total trained by the US in the next year to 30 that’s less than a single squadron, with the French and Romanian training centers apparently set to turn out as many.
Ukraine needs at least a dozen squadrons to reach parity with the orcs, though. And so far there has been no word about F-16s receiving the best variant of AMRAAM, which can match the range of weapons carried by ruscist jets. They’re set to get JSOW glide bombs and possibly JASSM cruise missiles, but without a license to fire the latter far into russia the impact will be limited. Still no word on that front, though the first word really should be explosions.
And no word yet on whether the US will start sending the hundreds of armored vehicles that Ukraine desperately needs to fill out at least ten new brigades. It actually should get double even the largest number the US might deign to provide, the Pentagon still pretending the USA will ever again have the political will to tolerate the major casualties inevitable in a sizable ground war. But ten brigades would be a nice start, the boost possibly matched by Europe if NATO finally accepts that it doesn’t need many tanks while the orcs are stuck in Ukraine.
Returning to the topic of long-range missiles - not a week after Trump returned to bleating about World War Three, Putin decided to make a big deal out of russia’s nuclear policy now suggesting there “could” be nuclear retaliation in the event of a conventional strike. Sounds frightening, but is just a classic case of a lawyer rattling his saber, leaving himself an easy out while trusting to certain useful idiots to have a fit whenever they hear the word “nuclear” leave Putin’s lying lips.
What, you think that if the US launched a couple thousand cruise missiles with conventional warheads in a bid to wipe out Putin’s nuclear arsenal that his military would hold back from launching them off before they could be destroyed? If anything, this technical revision to doctrine is a response to certain US generals with connections to the Biden Administration insisting in 2022 that if Putin used tactical nukes the US would bomb the launchers and intervene across occupied Ukraine.
As I argued at the time, Moscow would have no way to distinguish this from the start of a disarming strike against its nuclear deterrent, so the US bluff was painfully hollow. It’s one of the few scenarios that might actually trigger a major nuclear exchange. Just wasn’t happening in Jake Sullivan’s world.
All Putin has really done is state the obvious: if I think my regime is about to get functionally decapitated and left helpless, I’ll shoot back before going down. But that isn’t at all what Ukraine is planning to attempt with the missiles it receives - something Putin knows. It’s another threat made for American expert consumption, fodder for dozens of online articles.
Nuclear threats mean nothing. They’ll only be real if a bomb actually goes off, and then the magnitude of the attack and identity of the attacker pretty much preordains the response. This is why hundreds of tests were conducted during the Cold War, yet the world kept on turning - even if slightly more irradiated. A test is a reminder of what could happen - and with nukes, that’s enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if Moscow conducts one. Putin might also try to trigger a meltdown at a Ukrainian nuclear plant by blowing up its power supply.
The moment you start to behave as if you have actual control over an adversary’s actions, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. The essence of deterrence is not the ability to wipe out the other side, but to be able to hurt them so badly that victory is the same as defeat in political terms.
That Putin is making more nuclear threats at the same time Trump chose to amplify them and Israel is escalating the war in Lebanon in a big way is no accident. They’re coordinating: Putin plays all sides and so does Netanyahu. A joint effort is underway to damage Harris by selling a compelling story of a world in chaos. I fully expect North Korea to test a nuke any day now. Even China is getting in on the act, testing a long-range ICBM over the Pacific for the first time in decades.
And yes, Israel is part of the club - another inconvenient truth that few want to admit because it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Millions of Israelis have likewise been silenced by their media and the segment of the population that actively seeks to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank. Fear of losing any voters drives Harris to avoid the topic like the plague even though that makes her look feckless. And so a tragedy of monumental proportions is allowed to continue.
Israel’s predictable move to attack Lebanon without first settling affairs with Hamas is part of a clear pattern. Netanyahu is bound to escalate all the way to Tehran if no one stops him, and despite Trump’s talk about loving peace, note how whenever Iran comes up he’s all for war?
Soon Israel will be demanding that the Biden Administration ship more bombs, allies in the USA insisting that Biden can’t say no without sinking Harris’ chances. Biden is in a trap of his own making on this one, his bear hug of Netanyahu like his big fakeout at being the next FDR both geared towards one, now thwarted, end: his second term.
Look, Hezbollah bombarding northern Israel to show solidarity with Gaza was always an opportunistic sham - there’s no defending Hezbollah’s actions. Really, if anyone cared about Palestine in the Muslim world as much as they insist, Turkey would already have started bombing Israel along with Iran, Egypt, and the Saudis. Of course, when Israel struck back, Turkey could invoke NATO Article Five, putting the USA in the absolute weirdest position ever… but that’s a fascinating thought experiment for another time.
Hezbollah isn’t the good guy in this tale by any means, but Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon is in no way proportional nor is it likely to prove effective. What’s astounding is that Israel is openly employing an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy. This is a term long associated with Putin’s russia, referring to using nuclear weapons to signal that it’s really, really serious about the threat of an all-out nuclear exchange in a bid to force negotiations.
It’s an unproven theory, as dubious as the idea of bombing a population so intensively that this turns them against the armed groups in their midst. While English-speaking media is busy revealing its bias by telling the story from an Israeli perspective, celebrating the disgusting pager attacks that began this phase of the war, ignored is the fact that only a small proportion of Hezbollah fighters were impacted. Israel hit a portion of Hezbollah’s leadership with airstrikes in the following days, but field commanders use secure land lines because these can’t be easily intercepted.
In the meantime hundreds of Lebanese civilians have been killed, Netanyahu pretending that if anyone died it was because a Hezbollah rocket was in their house, and it appears that only half the pagers that exploded even hit active Hezbollah members - many of these were more or less government employees, not fighters. There is little hard evidence of Hezbollah’s core capabilities being permanently degraded, and the limited rocket fire into Israel so far suggests both continued command and control and that Nasrallah is playing a longer game, letting Israel provoke outrage and goading it into a costly ground incursion.
If you want to stop the rocket fire and let displaced Israelis return home, this isn’t the right strategy. Long-range Hezbollah weapons will probably come intermittently for months, just like the Houthis now strike a passing vessel often enough deter shipping but not unduly expose their operations to major air strikes or run down their stocks. The question is how long Hezbollah will be content play the game like this. For now, Israel is victimizing so many Lebanese that Hezbollah’s influence looks certain to expand indefinitely. But if Nasrallah truly feels an existential threat, eventually mass bombardments of Israel pretty much have to commence, likely in conjunction with Iran - unless sucking up to Putin is letting Tehran sell out its old allies.
If I’m sitting in Tehran, the risk of a Trump-backed attack on my nuclear facilities in 2025 makes me think now might be the best and even last chance to set Israel back while making a nuclear breakout bid under Putin’s protection. An Israeli strike now might slow progress, but also use up enough Israeli capabilities that a more complete attack has to wait for late 2025 or early 2026. As it appears Israel rested its air force and imported plenty of American bombs before switching from Hamas to Hezbollah, the same pattern could play out with Iran at the same time Trump is abandoning the Pacific side of the “Indo-Pacific” to fight Tehran.
If I’m going to get hit no matter what, I might as well choose the timing and maximize the damage I’m able to inflict. Iran might hold back in hopes of not getting Trump re-elected, but in that case it’s likely also committing fully to the alliance with russia and content to expend Hezbollah to set Israel back as long as possible. If Hezbollah uses up its arsenal, that’ll be enough pain that Iran need not get involved. That’s how you use a proxy. I dislike how many switches appear to be toggled to escalate right now in the Middle East.
Israel’s best strategic option was to accept a ceasefire for hostages deal in Gaza months ago. Then it could have struck a relaxing Hezbollah by surprise if it’s bound and determined to have it out with the group. Instead, Netanyahu is visibly thumbing his nose at Biden, aware that the Democrats are caught in a bind and daring America to hold him back. A ceasefire gives his domestic opposition a chance to depose him - why would he let that happen unless there’s no other choice?
So people get to die all around the world because a few powerful jerks have ambitions and others are cowards. Great. History as usual, then.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, sources are already panning Zelensky’s Victory Plan, accusing it of “not having a strategy,” just more requests for weapons and the freedom to use them as Ukraine sees fit. Aside from the fact that most Americans wouldn’t know a strategy if it kicked them in the teeth - real strategy is applied theory, something American scholars aggressively dislike - this is one of those trap criticisms American analysts and pundits love to deploy.
You can’t counter it, because they’ll always tell you that you fail to understand some bureaucratic aspect of what their profession sees as strategy. Everything definition in American public life comes with a little asterisk next to it that means when in doubt whoever with more power decides.
American bureaucrats love imposing no-win situations. If Ukraine is winning on the ground, it clearly doesn’t need more armored vehicles, right? And if it’s falling back, obviously more armored vehicles won’t do any good because there are more pressing demands, like air defense.
But folks, if almost three years into a war you haven’t fully updated your ally’s gear, something is very wrong. American leaders continue to demonstrate weakness, drawing the bear on. The paradox of their fear of escalation is that it’s exactly what they’re set to get - and with a dose of domestic discontent to boot.
I don’t write this with much of an expectation that there’s enough time for anyone to change course now. But as depressing as the evaluation might seem, applying ecosystems thinking suggests cause for hope. If the world order is bound to crash and burn, lessons learned from the last time around the loop can help identify ways to make the next cycle less harsh. After winter comes a new spring.
What’s going on in Ukraine is one piece, albeit probably the most critical one, of a much larger puzzle. And since I’m still not aware of any other writer out there with the quite the same bundle of knowledge and skills, I’ll keep on publishing analysis. Hopefully some good comes of it!
As far as mitigating the damage done to Ukraine’s cause by American partisanship in the short run goes, the best option now is to lean hard on the Harris campaign - and be ruthless. Having been more right than the vast majority of paid forecasters and pundits at calling presidential elections over the past few cycles, I can’t help but fixate on how similar 2024 looks to 2016 and 2020.
Trump continues to bring new voters into his camp at the same rate he’s losing traditional conservatives. But not all of these are flowing to the Democrats, while the Democrats aren’t doing quite as well as they should in some of their traditional centers of strength. Trump appears to be once again min-maxing, to use a video game strategy term, relentlessly selling himself to infrequent voters in swing states at the cost of appealing to traditional conservatives in states he know he won’t win. This inflates Harris’ national level polling lead; she’ll win the popular vote, but remains at serious risk in the Electoral College.
Considering the real risk of pro-Trump forces managing to get the Supreme Court and Congress involved after the election, to secure her chances of actually taking office even if she wins Harris has to do more than eke out victory in the Electoral College. She badly needs a win large enough to make inevitable Trump-Vance attempts to overturn the result as laughable as the shenanigans in 2020.
Harris has limited time and space to maneuver; one of the big reasons I thought it so important that Biden resign from office, not just stand aside in the election, was that Harris lacks any ability to use the power and visibility of the office to advance her case for election. Biden’s main concern appears to be taking his final bows at the UN and insisting everyone tell him how great a job he did as president.
While he’s standing for his participation trophy, Harris needs to step on his toes. Elder Democrats will whine, but they’ll cry more if Trump is elected again. It is on Ukraine where Harris must take a visible and public stand over the next few weeks, using Ukraine’s fight as a symbol of the global struggle for democracy that her entire campaign is implicitly predicated on.
Trump is throwing a potentially lethal punch by presenting himself as the only force preventing apocalypse. Harris can counteract him and demonstrate her capability to fight for Americans on a whole host of other issues by going full Thatcher, so to speak: she must demonstrate that she’ll stop at nothing to secure justice for a vulnerable group by demanding that Biden do more for Ukraine now and promising that she’ll ensure Ukraine swiftly wins if elected. She must publicly shrug off Putin’s nuclear blackmail and throw down a gauntlet. If you’re taking endorsements from Dick Cheney, you might as well evoke Reagan.
Yes, the standard-grade political advisers that infest the Harris-Walz camp would have a conniption if Harris tried this. But they’re already running their candidate over a cliff, checking career boxes on their way to their next gig even though they have to know how delicate a situation the Democrats are in. The more confident Democrats sound in public, the worse their internal polls really look - this pattern was proven during the whole can Biden actually run again? saga after his flubbed debate.
People who were looking at Ukraine’s fight in 2022 and feeling as if light was actually triumphing over the fall of night have been deeply let down by Biden, and unlike most issues it was not originally partisan: apolitical people cared. Hell, the guy who runs the hunting preserve I took my dad to last year, a veteran with Reagan paraphernalia all over his home office, upon learning that I’m a Ukraine War blogger immediately insisted that Biden erred in not going big from the start. Didn’t old liberals always dream of winning the Reagan conservatives over? Here’s your chance! But words won’t sway them, only action.
Resurrect the righteous energy from 2022 and the tide can still turn, you damn fools. I’m not a Democrat or a partisan, but it’s simply painful to see people make the same mistakes time and again. Elections are not supposed to be situation comedies.
If you take a close look at the polling dynamics, contrary to the media bubble’s preferred take on the data, Harris is not gaining momentum where it matters, but stalling out - even sliding back. This is a function of her being effectively defined in the broader public eye as just another Democrat over the past two months. At some point, she’s got to do some major public addresses where she lays out exactly what she’ll do for people not sold on the Democratic Party’s vision.
The only way to counteract a movement like Trump’s is to out-compete it on material grounds. You have to construct a new and compelling narrative that’s truly inclusive if you want to adopt slogans like “we’re not going back,” otherwise all you’re telling half your audience is shut up about higher prices and wars that are never won. You don’t matter.
Good way to lose an election, that. Democracy too, in the long run. You’ve been warned, Democrats.
It goes against the grain of the entire party, but the time has come to put up or shut up on Ukraine. It’s the North Star issue that you might not always see through the fog, but still hangs over the entire 2024 campaign. If the Democrats lose, it will be because they deserved to. Soldiers on the front line in Ukraine are dying because of pure neglect, and yes, they are dying in place of North Americans and Europeans.
If Harris doesn’t have what it takes to stand up in front of the American people, embrace Zelensky’s Victory Plan, and demand Biden take the necessary steps to make it happen, she doesn’t have what it takes to sit in the Oval Office.
The only way to make the Democrats behave is to hold their future hostage. Might even save the fools from themselves.
Concluding Thoughts
Having finally finished a series of major revisions to my independently published fiction series, both Bringing Ragnarok and Bivrost Nine, I now find myself in the position of having rather too much choice in what I focus on next.
I started blogging about the Ukraine War and international affairs more broadly on Medium back in 2021, when the pandemic had put an end to my nascent research consulting business. Enjoying a pandemic-era financial bailout and looking to expand my publishing work beyond science fiction, my work wound up reaching tens of thousands of readers, which was pretty cool.
When the site began to shift its branding in late 2022, I decided to move my blog to Substack. It’s been astonishing to have over 1,700 people want to get an email whenever I publish an update, with the site getting 30,000 hits a month. The New Voice of Ukraine even translates some parts into Ukrainian, which is a huge honor. It appears to be a large enough audience that I stand a real chance of working with a publisher to develop a book project from the blog.
My ambition is to produce a kind of open source history of the conflict’s first three years, using that to elaborate a theory of why and how Ukraine will win. Instead of relying on interviews and other fieldwork that others can and will do much better than myself in the future, I’ll rely on open source footage, connecting it to tell the story of key moments you wouldn’t otherwise get but can now thanks to all the drones. If journalists have historically written the first draft of history, this would represent a more fleshed-out second.
A lot remains up in the air, and though I’ve had an editor express interest (not bad, after contacting only one), it’s a long road to an actual contract. But the potential is only there because of my readers, so thanks much to all! If things pan out, this will let me do more to actively support open-source georeferencing work as well as donate to Ukrainian brigades that are going to need help until this thing ends.
I’ve got some other project ideas in the works, most revolving in some way around the challenge of training more effective leaders through digital simulation. Not only military, but the skills are highly transferable, as war is the ultimate laboratory of social science, a unique natural experiment impossible to ethically or morally replicate.
It might seem grim or even objectionable to reduce the victims of the thing to data, but this is necessary to help inoculate the future against bad policy. As horrible as it is to watch a conflict like this play out in real time, there is good news about the world buried in all the ruin. History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes, with each iteration hopefully less terrible until the cycle evolves into farce.
The Ukraine War has seen no shortage of atrocities, but it is different from the last time Europe went through one of these geopolitical crash and reboot cycles in one essential respect: enough people stepped up to fight back before Ukraine fell and have held the line ever since. Appeasement didn’t go as far this time. Even if Putin’s wildest hopes come true and the USA turns full-on isolationist or winds up stuck in a forever war with Iran like Israel is Hamas and Hezbollah, a big chunk of NATO will stand with Ukraine - probably most of Europe in the final reckoning, as the shock caused by America’s withdrawal from world affairs would be severe.
Thanks to Ukrainians punching back and the aid that has come so far, the world was spared a repeat of Czechoslovakia and Poland falling to Hitler before the war broadened further, their economic potential dramatically amplifying the might of his war machine. No matter what happens next, it’s not going to look like World War Two, ending with sieges of Moscow and Beijing or D.C. and Berlin. No power has the capability to fully defeat and occupy another anymore. The cost of resistance has been fundamentally reduced by automatic weapons, networks, and drones.
Studying global systems during my doctoral program was a real eye-opener, let me tell you. Taking a holistic, value-neutral look at how humans actually behave is valuable in almost any situation.
For clarity, when I say value-neutral I mean that the analysis doesn’t focus on whether an actor is good or bad, only why their own internal logic generated a given action and what its ripple effects will be. Many, especially Americans, mistake this for moral relativism, their Puritan-inflected social order needing to convert anything disliked into a tool of the devil.
That’s why some claim to be offended when you make direct comparisons between Israel’s government and Hamas or Hezbollah or even Iran. It’s a perverse power move, an attempt to claim victim status because in American culture that is accorded certain privileges in public debates. It’s a damaging habit of Israel fans, because it plays into all the tired old antisemitic tropes about Jewish conspiracies.
All of my writing is linked at a fundamental level by a common theme: improving public understanding of war. Both of my sci-fi series are to a large extend scientific experiments in using narrative to train leaders. Bivrost Nine is about diplomacy and leadership. Bringing Ragnarok is a retelling of the Ragnarok drama from the Norse Eddas, featuring a group of twenty-somethings drafted into a metaphysical war adventure that unfolds across three separate centuries and the literal end of time.
I’ll write more about each separately in the future - a hazard of less editing work on my plate is that I have more time for fresh writing. Though as I really ought to start generating an income commensurate with my skillset in case the world gets really bad, I’ve got to start looking into the logistics of consulting again.
I’m incredibly fortunate to have a family that’s so supportive of my creative work, but after six years of operating solo I’m reaching the limits of what I can accomplish. With a foundation of a whole lot of written content now available, it’s time to expand into drafting funding proposals for simulations and other forms of applied systems research.
More on that to come. Nice thing about a blog is that it easily doubles as a professional portfolio. And if anyone get tired of receiving more content, they can always unsubscribe.