Moscow's Weakest Winter Campaign Yet
Slowly, shifts in technology and leadership are bringing Putin's last grand campaign to a halt. Despite ongoing advances on a few fronts, lack of critical equipment has transformed Moscow's military.
Underestimating the enemy is always a risk in war. Each side has an incentive to conceal vital information, and sometimes pulls it off.
But as I’ve spent a couple years insisting pretty much every week, war is a complex business. Internally, parts of an organization also often feel the need to hoard information. This is problematic, as a group that doesn’t know itself is probably incapable of understanding the enemy, to borrow from Sun Tzu - meaning defeat is more likely than victory.
Hence postmodern western society, in either its pseudo-traditionalist or liberal-progressive modes, making the very idea of victory in a fight all but taboo. Note how today’s macho American conservatives are all terrified of World War Three, and the whiny liberals insist that Putin is pure evil but also that he might wind up being less bad than a successor? Same Vichy argument, different wrapper.
A philosophy built on the delusion that the mind triumphs over the material will not last. At best, it’s a temporary self-destructive madness which burns itself out as soon as the power inequality that spawned it gets reset in a sufficiently epic collapse. Ecosystems work in much the same way when badly perturbed by an external source of interference.
Anyway - it’s always risky to believe that the enemy is running out of steam. In 2022 numerous prominent (mostly American) experts made exactly that case without taking into account Moscow’s full mobilization potential. This, along with unjustified fears of escalation, weakened military support for Ukraine at a crucial stage, preventing this war from ending in 2023 as it could and should have.
Thankfully, Putin’s supposedly invincible war machine is still, according to every variable that actually matters, badly under-performing expectations. A palpable disbelief that this level of dysfunction is actually possible is evident in too much coverage of the conflict, particularly among the historian and journalist set. But institutions are like this: leaders try to force reality to conform to their preferences time and again. The first to abandon this bad habit tend to be the ones who effectively adapt.
Obviously, if you’re fighting on one of the fronts in Ukraine, the situation is hell beyond description. But an essential truth of the moment is that the orcs are barely able to achieve the most minimal battlefield objectives. The cost to advance is too high for the same reason it was in World War One: density of effective fire demands a totally different approach to operations.
Some journalists do have a sense of how to effectively cover warfare - you usually find that they make regular trips to the front line. A great piece in Australia’s equivalent of BBC offers a stark portrait of what this war is now like.
Anyone who thinks that directly imitating idealized World War Two organization and doctrine will work out well really needs to spend a few weeks in the infantry. A key difference between the two sides is evident in the life expectancy of orc assault troops: 2-3 weeks. So anyone who takes up the challenge on the wrong side is unlikely to tell any tales. This is of course precisely why Putin’s assault troops are treated this way.
This week’s post, despite a lengthy intro, will actually be a bit short. It omits a dedicated science section due to some time restrictions this week. I’ll explain in the concluding remarks.
2025 Week Six Fronts Overview
With casualties still at record highs and armored vehicle availability now severely limited, the Muscovite military is simply not the beast it once was. While absolutely capable of mauling what it can reach, the steady degradation in battlefield effectiveness wrought by the destruction of key assets is having a cumulative impact.
Ukraine is now in the early stages of a campaign that intends to take apart the orc military machine piece by piece, top to bottom. Striking strategic assets with drones both spreads the enemy’s air defenses thin on and behind the fronts and renders individual units more vulnerable to attack. Damaging key Muscovite industries like oil and arms production to the point they are just 10%-20% less efficient is another incredibly useful channel for delivering pain. And the more Ukraine can hit essential battlefield services like headquarters and logistics closer to the front, the thinner the enemy’s combat power will ultimately be where it’s most needed.
Week after week, Moscow’s progress this winter is getting slower and more costly, especially as Ukraine falls back closer to important logistics nodes. Each regional command has a strong incentive to hide how weak it really is from Moscow, but also to prove it deserves more of the empire’s increasingly scarce reserves by taking ground. The net effect of this perverse incentive bundle is that Moscow’s fronts are competing with each other, further impacting efficiency. Classic metabolic crisis trending towards a deeper collapse.
You don’t have to run out of resources to reach a point where shortages start breaking important stuff. Finally, more than two years after committing to mobilization, Moscow’s military machine is running out of juice. That doesn’t mean it is bound to fall apart soon, or totally, but the days of realistically threatening to breach Ukraine’s defense on a broad scale are done - unless Moscow gets a breather and a whole lot more overt Chinese support.
With that as a backdrop, it has been intriguing watching Zelensky’s rhetoric shift to look more conciliatory than Ukraine’s position truly is. Talk of reclaiming the occupied territories through diplomacy instead of force is only admitting common sense - however, peace negotiations will only be real when Putin’s military is broken. To demonstrate this point has been reached in no uncertain terms, Ukraine will still have to conduct a large-scale counteroffensive effort at the right place and time - probably the middle of 2025. But that’s a politically impolitic truth, so for now, the dance to keep Trump happy contines.
In the meantime, Ukraine has to accelerate its ongoing military reboot and acquire more arms from partners that minimize risk to personnel. I go on a lot about armored vehicles despite their vulnerability to drones because, as important as drones are, every really successful offensive operation involves traditional combined arms techniques using the full spectrum of kit. Warfare is like cooking - lack just one ingredient, and failure is probable. Moscow’s strategy for almost two years now has been to just keep churning out gruel. Ukraine is adapting, and in a manner that Moscow is unlikely able to cope with.
Around the middle of 2025, for the first time in this war it stands to be Ukraine that has systematic advantages the enemy can’t counter. Moscow will reduced to holding ground against escalating attacks designed to tear apart its formations, isolating them to ease their ultimate annihilation through force or surrender. But until then, the attrition of Muscovite combat power must continue. Despite Ukraine’s successes, they still carry a terrible cost.
Northern Theater
Ukrainian operations in Kursk likely offer a preview of what the future holds. This past week Ukrainian forces launched another limited surprise counterattack on the eastern flank of the perimeter around Sudzha, throwing the orcs back up to six kilometers in just a couple days.
A few weeks ago, Ukraine launched a smaller attack of this sort near Berdin, northeast of Sudzha. As it began, I suggested that Ukrainian troops might be hoping to push the eastern perimeter of Free Kursk out a few kilometers to give some added breathing room as the orc onslaught to the west threatened Malaya Loknya, an important node in Ukraine’s defense. However, the enemy reacted quickly enough to prevent a bigger breakthrough, and as further evidence emerged it became clear that while a collapse of the orc lines might have prompted a larger push to the east, in that moment the Ukrainians were primarily striking at the flank of enemy attacks coming down from the north in support operations further west.
This latest Ukrainian operation is larger and more intensive, so could potentially turn into an effort to push the eastern perimeter out several kilometers on a broad front. But, so far it looks as if Ukrainian troops are content to take up positions on the outskirts of Ulanok, where they now occupy a nice stretch of defenses built by Moscow to guard the frontier. Cherkasskaya Konopelka (the smaller the town, the bigger the name, seems to be a rule in Ukraine) sits between the Psel river and a highway that the orcs can use to rapidly come at Sudzha along its northern bank.
If Ukraine can establish solid positions here, that ought to negate the slow ruscist push towards the southern fringes of Sudzha that threatens Ukraine’s supply lines coming across the international border. The Kurilovka-Plekhovo area sits behind a bend in the Psel that shelters the orcs from direct attack. Being able to hit them with drones from three flanks ought to make this area a death trap the enemy might well have to abandon.
Ukraine took losses during the operation, but they don’t appear to have been severe. Supposedly - it’s always hard to be sure from orc propaganda videos - several dozen Ukrainian vehicles were involved. Maybe ten percent were lost, most of them abandoned and recoverable - fewer casualties proportionally, it seems, than in the earlier operation near Berdin.
This sort of move falls between what NATO officers would a tactical counterattack and a counteroffensive operation. It represents a Ukrainian leadership team that won’t give the enemy a break when they pause to regroup. In order to disrupt their plans, short, sharp jabs at weak points are attempted. The risk is lower than in something grander, yet the enemy is unable to attack every flank of the Sudzha perimeter in a synchronized way. Ukraine can allocate resources to deal with crises in sequence, which is much easier than coping with several at once.
Notably, Ukraine preceded this operation with a high number of attacks on enemy headquarters in the Kursk area. It also appears that drones are ranging deep into enemy territory - while Moscow has started to field some drone interceptors, it’s lagging Ukraine. This is allowing Ukrainian forces to finally blind the enemy where they aim to advance.
Moscow is likely preparing a new wave of attacks, this time with the North Koreans properly reinforced with their own artillery and drone assets. In fact, the latest signs from the weekend suggest the next phase may have already begun northwest of Sudzha. But to this point, the Ukrainian leadership in Kursk has been pretty savvy. With the attack disrupted, it should be easier to crush.
On the Kharkiv front there is little new to report. The resources Moscow would need to apply in Vovchansk to threaten a breakthrough are stuck in Kursk.
Eastern Theater
Good thing, too, because otherwise the ongoing development of the ruscist bridgehead at Dvorichna could, in conjunction with a successful push through Vovchansk, put Ukraine into a really unpleasant situation. Fortunately Moscow’s river-crossing effort is presently more like an intensive infiltration. Small teams of infantry take rubber boats over the Oskil and hide in the forests beyond. When enough accumulate, they expand their area of control.
Ukraine hasn’t moved quickly to squash the problem, I suspect because the enemy pace remains glacial. Most successful river crossing operations that seriously upset the target’s plans are much more rapid than this. These operations are inherently vulnerable. If you can’t bring over heavy equipment, digging in deep enough to cope with a serious effort to eliminate or contain the bridgehead becomes exceptionally difficult. And drones make digging in mandatory. Even if Moscow puts up a bridge or secures a dam, crossing it will be extremely dangerous.
Ukraine seems to have dispatched at least part of the newer 151st Mechanized Brigade - a member of the 150 series that appears to have turned out fine - to work next to a detachment from the experienced 10th Mountain Assault. Given the situation, I have to wonder if the Ukrainian leadership in this area doesn’t see Moscow’s attempt to get across the Oskil as a convenient self-inflicted trap.
South of Kupiansk, the Lyman-Borova-Siversk arc remains largely unchanged. Substantial fighting has been reported in some areas, but Moscow hasn’t made any notable advances. Most of this sector as well as the Kupiansk front is supposedly the turf of the semi-legendary First Guards Tank Army. As far as overrated, under-performing, often comically inept military formations go, its combat record in this war renders it a case study in hype. Thanks to American pseudo-expert scholar-grifter Michael Kofman for spending half his professional career building up the myth of the invincible reformed ruscist army. But keep on citing his opinions as fact, journalists.
Moving south to the Kostyantynivka front, Moscow is still fighting to secure the last unoccupied portions of both Toretsk and Chasiv Yar. Ukrainian troops still control a series of mine spoil heaps and densely forested areas on the outskirts of the former, and a block of high rises backing into a forest are helping make the occupation of the latter a bloody mess for Moscow.
Moscow has reportedly been suffering a 1:10 loss ratio at times on this front, and though the orcs now have most of the two fortress towns under control, the annihilation of so many structures means that it’s difficult to build up a major presence and continue the advance. On the Kostyantynivka front, orc attacks should continue to degenerate into bitter battle of inches even as Ukrainian lines begin to consolidate. Without a flanking effort, that’s probably doomed to stall out before getting to the suburbs. However, Ukraine-based Centre for Defence Strategies has lately suggested that Moscow may shift attention from Pokrovsk to Kostyantynivka, making it the new epicenter of the fight for Donbas. Developments should soon tell whether this is the case.
Enemy progress on the Pokrovsk front has dropped to almost zero, likely a sign of the orcs reinforcing ahead of the next wave. However, wherever these reinforcements are drawn from, that front will be less able to carry out effective attacks, and possibly even defend itself if the notable escalation in Ukrainian local-level counterattacks registered by open source monitors lately is a prelude to more. Putin could really use those eighty thousand soldiers stuck getting eaten up in Kursk down in Pokrovsk about now.
You could say the same about Ukrainian forces, of course, but the effective political and military impact of creeping closer to a city your troops can’t quite surround and therefore are unable to take while you can’t even clear your home turf of hostile forces is… well, severe. If Putin’s mighty military truly had the resources to finally turn the tide in Ukraine, seems awfully strange that they never seem to show up even when foreign observers are insisting that Ukraine’s lines are crumbling.
Now, the assault on Pokrovsk isn’t over, and may resume in full force soon, but every bit of breathing space matters. It’s more time to create defensive positions, lay mines, and resupply. And I am increasingly confident that the assault on Pokrovsk was a push too far for Moscow’s battered military machine. The simplest Ukrainian counteroffensive strategy in 2025 might actually be to punch back hard, even reclaiming Avdiivka, Kurakhove, and Vuhledar.
That’s not where I’d choose to mount a major operation this summer, but open-source data and scientific theory can only take an analysis so far. And an opportunistic approach is likely warranted.
The situation on the South Donbas front, southwest of Pokrovsk, remains much the same as last week, save that the deterioration of Ukraine’s defenses around the Ulakly-Andriivka-Kostyantynopil triangle is proceeding slower than anticipated. That zoomed-in map I drew a few weeks ago to illustrate hypothetical Ukrainian company-level tactical dispositions south of Kostyantynopil has, funny enough, remained entirely valid, as if the orcs are studiously avoiding that area. Amusing coincidence.
However, with orcs now entrenched along roads leading into Andriivka, the triangle of settlements in this area is at risk of turning into another pocket. Dachne has slowly been evacuated, but the Ukrainian brigades in this area still have enemy forces approaching from three directions.
That Ukrainian troops haven’t moved to wipe out the enemy troops in Andriivka already may suggest that they don’t plan to hold out here for long. Ukrainian positions on the high ground north of Andriivka have already been compromised by Moscow’s advance in the Sribne area. There the newer 153rd Mechanized Brigade has been getting shoved back, and barring a joint counterattack by the adjacent 59th Assault and 37th Marine, with Magyar’s Birds contributing a whole lot of drones, I have to expect that the line will continue to creep west towards Novopavlivka through March.
This will make any stand by Ukrainian forces to the south along the line of the Vovcha complicated. Whether the enemy can muster up enough force to close the southern jaw of the movement by pressing north from Velyka Novosilka remains unclear. The enemy’s efforts to build up a presence in the town are much hampered by Ukrainian control of uplands across the Mokri Yali river. Inability to push Ukraine further north on the west bank will mean that the town itself can be constantly bombarded, threatening the logistics of any effort to reach Bahatyr.
I get the strong sense that Ukraine has chosen to build a strong defense where the Mokri Yali and Solena rivers converge with the Vovcha, but this doesn’t mean that Ukrainian troops will withdraw behind this frontier. It has been the Ukrainian habit so far to hold onto bridgeheads until forced to abandon them, in large part because these can be held by relatively few people while tying down lots of enemy troops. This much simplifies evacuation. Eventually, it is to be hoped that drones and remote weapons stations can handle this sort of work.
Southern Theater
Aside from boat raids in the Dnipro delta, orc drone operators hunting civilians in Kherson, and Ukrainian drone operators targeting air defense and logistics assets in the occupied territories, the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia fronts are unchanged. A surprise attack by Ukraine somewhere is always a possibility, however even the long campaign by Ukrainian special forces operators landing to launch direct attacks on Crimea appears to be on pause. Probably wise, because casualties were starting to mount.
Drones are handling most of the fighting, with Crimea rumored to be seeing an exodus of air defense systems needed to protect targets elsewhere in the empire. Crimea continues to be a net drain on Muscovite resources, with the forces required to hold it and the approaches to it badly needed elsewhere.
Air, Sea, & Strike
Ukraine continues to wage a determined campaign to strike ruscist targets up to two thousand kilometers behind the front, though its character shifts and the intensity waxes and wanes. This week Ukrainian drones have been going after targets in smaller numbers, inflicting limited but at times still quite critical damage. Drones allow the attacker to inexpensively micro-target enemy systems, something as valuable as their ability overwhelm through sheer numbers. The chaos produced will have an outsized impact on an empire like Putin’s.
Moscow’s drones continue to fall across Ukraine, these days more often than not hitting purely civilian targets when they aren’t shot down or jammed - the fate of most. As for major missile strikes, it seems that Putin is either building up a reserve to hedge against NATO - fear of even a single missile hitting a NATO country being one of his few effective weapons - or perhaps to bluff Trump into thinking that Putin is serious about doing a deal. Never ends well when individual egos play such a major role in international relations.
As far as the air war goes, the big news this week is that updated French Mirage 2000 fighters are now in the fight - at least three, perhaps six. The total should reach nine to twelve by summer. More Dutch F-16s were also transferred, suggesting that Ukraine now operates at least a single full squadron of twenty Vipers - more likely two smaller ones. Their numbers will keep climbing, barring ruscist forces finally hunting some down. Spies have been caught trying to help. Regardless, air defense efficiency in Ukraine is climbing, in part thanks to the Vipers.
The exact updates that the French Mirage 2000s -a contemporary of the Viper and in many respects slightly superior - received is unclear, but it is likely that their radar systems at least are comparable to anything on a ruscist Sukhoi. Though their weapons lack the range of orc weapons - unless somehow someone integrated Swedish Meteor long-range air-to-air missiles - the threat of being ambushed by a Ukrainian fighter appears to be limiting orc glide bomb attacks. Oh, and another Su-25 close air support jet was brought down on the Kostyantynivka front. Seems to happen a lot there. Some excellent handheld SAM operators working in the sector.
Rumors continue to suggest that Ukraine will eventually get some Gripens, which can natively use the Meteor, perhaps even as soon as this summer. That of course depends on the Swedes having privately been getting some Ukrainian pilots trained, perhaps with assistance from Gripen users abroad. Doable, but how sneaky are the Swedes? This I do not know. My stereotypes of the Swedes stem solely from the web comic Scandinavia and the World. But I’ll say this much - the Czechs use Gripens, are surrounded by NATO countries that can probably handle policing their airspace, and they’ve been pretty big on developing international military aid sources for Ukraine.
In any case, once Ukraine can maintain an airborne radar and control aircraft and fighters equipped with missiles of the appropriate range in the sky 24/7, seizing control of the airspace over a single front for a substantial period of time becomes possible. Especially if enemy air defenses are suppressed with ATACMS and other long-range strike systems. That’s a massive difference from 2023.
Also, supposedly Ukrainian engineers have developed an indigenous counter to glide bombs. If true, and replicable at scale, another piece of the orc military machine will soon cease to reliably function.
At sea the situation remains unchanged. Moscow’s ships are careful and rarely used even to launch cruise missiles any more. Apparently an oil tanker sank in port elsewhere in the empire, causes unknown. Here’s hoping the Ukrainians have started playing with submarine drones, perhaps launched from ships that look civilian. But good old fashioned sabotage works too.
Leadership & Personnel
Every now and again a piece of news comes out of Ukraine that suggests my scientific approach to understanding the conflict and how it can be ended for good is onto something. Early this past week news broke of Ukraine formally adopting a corps-brigade structure to mitigate issues that undermined the 2023 counteroffensive.
Militaryland.net does an excellent job monitoring changes in the structure of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, and offers some interesting details about how Syrskyi and Drapatyi are handling Ukraine’s military reboot as the new corps-based structure is rolled out. To be frank, it’s a bit eerie to see Ukraine adopt more or less the exact policy I’d have advised give the limits on making radical changes that won’t disrupt the ongoing fight.
Ukraine plans to set up about 20 corps, each with around 5 combat brigades assigned, and probably as many support brigades, too. Each will be assigned a specific stretch of front to cover and be built around proven brigades. In theory, this structure should substantially improve combat effectiveness across the board. The devil is always in execution, of course. Good ideas are cheap - implementation is where hidden costs out.
It is unclear what role the existing brigades will play - my standing theory is that they are already primarily administrative pseudo-divisions, actual units in the field organized into battlegroup-sized combined arms elements, an infantry battalion backed by support companies. Many of the most effective separate Ukrainian battalions have lately been expanded into regiments by adding a separate support echelon, and this practice might be widely employed to create a functional corps-regiment system. This would entail the corps commander coordinating up to 15 or so separate regiments, with a third of them perpetually in reserve to guarantee proper rotations.
If these battlegroups/regiments are, as I’ve previously estimated, able to cover a five kilometer stretch of front against an even larger enemy force, each corps will likely handle a solid fifty kilometer stretch, on average. More in less dangerous sectors, and less where Ukraine aims to launch an attack.
The specific composition of each corps would depend on the mission. A few handling quieter fronts would probably have mostly Territorial and National Guard brigades, with a single newer Mechanized. All of Ukraine’s established Marine Brigades will probably be placed under the corps that was already set up to handle their logistics. Two Air Assault corps are being formed by splitting the one that does the same for that much larger community (the air part is essentially an honorific). 12th and 13th National Guard are each supposed form the nucleus of their own new corps, as will Third Assault and 92nd Mechanized.
These and other core brigade staffs will have a real challenge getting all the organizational structure required in place over the coming months. And the clock is ticking, because the moment of maximum vulnerability approaches thanks to Putin’s choice of strategy. I’ll write more extensively on this in the near future when I have a little more time to break it all down into digestible chunks.
Reports continue to suggest that Moscow’s armored vehicle inventories have already passed a critical threshold restricting availability on the front line. Ukraine has effective parity in fire support on most fronts and outright superiority on a few thanks to increased ammunition and drone supplies compared to a year or even six months ago. The orc military is now divided into two castes; expendables with minimal training sent to literally soak up Ukrainian firepower, and specialists with some level of acquired skill. You only promote to the latter by being one of the small fraction who survives their experience as the former - or having connections. This system means that casualties among the specialists won’t be replaced by experienced subordinates, because too few who see the front line live to tell the tale.
Ukraine is having its own staffing challenges to deal with, of course. And having to pull fifty thousand people from other branches and rear services to help cover losses suffered over the past three years is not guaranteed to produce effective soldiers. There is no getting past the fact that, in addition to trained and motivated people armed with modern gear and led well, drones have to take the lead in all operations from here on out.
There will always be wars, but at the very least humanity should be able to look back on what happened in Ukraine and understand that flesh always loses to enough machines. Every would-be dictator down the line should carry with them a genetic fear of triggering a national awakening like the one that happened in Ukraine. Instead of playing war like a game where there’s some referee scoring points, Ukrainians take nothing for granted and innovate. Pretty sure tens of thousands would keep on fighting if Kyiv was somehow forced to sign a bad peace deal by D.C.
As I’ve argued many times before, the pain Moscow is feeling is only going to intensify. Developments are starting to run away from the orcs, the adaptations they’ve made to keep fighting this way a dead-end road. Ukraine is not so low on combat power that it actually feels a need to negotiate. When the time is right, a maximum effort can be expected before that moment will arrive. Probably this summer.
Geopolitical Brief
North America
The ongoing Trump show is playing out in a more or less predictable fashion. With Congress almost evenly divided, his margin of victory in the last election equally narrow, the USA’s national debt at dangerous levels, inflation still elevated and likely to accelerate again thanks to the imposition of self-destructive tariffs, a highly concerning influenza strain jumping species with concerning speed, and core allies more angry at America than I’ve ever seen, is it any wonder his antics are increasingly outlandish?
The anti-hero in a professional wrestling match obeys one law: keep the audience engaged at all costs. His job is to draw fire while everyone else does what they please. The ability of Trump’s team to actually accomplish anything constructive is profoundly uncertain. Their best allies are their partisan opponents, who can be relied on to keep acting as if politics is a church where moral scorn somehow matters. That’s preventing the sane majority of Americans from rolling their eyes at the part of the show that doesn’t matter and get down to the business of imposing real reform on a broken federal government that isn’t going to magically self-repair after being gutted and colonized.
Trump is shaking loose whatever he can for the pure sake of doing so, trusting his opponents to keep playing the game as they have for over eight years, achieving nothing while he keeps hoovering up attention and cash. He wins, and in the end, they also win, because they get what they desire far more than victory, at home or in Ukraine: to feel better than those other Americans. That’s the silent agreement between Trump and the establishment now.
Now, Trump absolutely does pose a threat to the Constitution, as he doesn’t respect or understand it. But this isn’t about the person now - it’s the office that’s fundamentally flawed, intersecting dangerously with America’s partisan death trap. A president can claim whatever power they like, but that doesn’t make it so. Numerous checks and balances exist that can restrain Trump. The question is whether leaders in the USA’s partisan institutions actually invoke them, or pretend to while going along with Trump’s shenanigans in hopes of launching some of their own in a few years.
In terms of actual material consequences of Trump’s actions so far, the main domestic impact has been to destabilize the federal bureaucracy. This should trigger paralysis that only deepens as lawsuits inevitably commence. Of course, lack of real progress on the myriad domestic issues Trump latches onto to build his appeal with micro-audiences will prompt a need for ever more outlandish claims and promises.
Abroad, Trump has proven himself to be so baldly transactional, threatening tariffs to get his way in even petty diplomatic disputes, that a full ninety percent of Canadians favor economic decoupling from the USA - and security may follow, destroying an old and historically successful partnership. Whatever tariff threats may have done for the USA eight years ago, now all they are is further to establish alternative logistics chains that bypass the US.
I know that a lot of Americans think that the country has been abused by foreign trading partners, but that’s only because most of the tremendous benefits of freer trade wound up in the hands of a few billionaire oligarchs who consolidated a huge chunk of the economy under the control of corporate boards filled with their flunkies. Reform that mess, and wealth actually would trickle down. Then fewer people would want to murder billionaires. Seems like a win-win, but humans are odd.
It’ll take a couple years for the full impacts of Trump’s antics to be felt, but a tipping point will be reached where international confidence in the US craters to the point that capital flows away. When intellectual property and finance rule your economy, there’s no way to magically re-industrialize without extreme pain. If that happens, an explosion of social unrest should be expected.
Worse, the inherent tension of spending an election year calling Trump supporters fascist, only to have that rhetoric totally disappear even as he’s doing things that understandably alarm people who care about the integrity of the Constitution, will out somehow. This is the sort of cycle that can trigger a civil war. Breaking up the federal government is the best medicine.
As far as Ukraine policy goes, honestly, nothing said in the US is remotely connected to reality anymore. Supposedly Trump’s team was to unveil his “peace plan” in the coming week - but then that was put off. Possibly. Who really knows They don’t feel much of a need to be accountable to anyone on such matters. Whenever anything does emerge, I doubt very much that it will be remotely serious.
Annexing Canada is far more likely - and for the record, that’s not gonna happen. America would fight an all-out Civil War first - as it did after annexing a bunch of territory from Mexico. And sorry Red States, but Blue States + Canada wins, because guess what side the rest of the English-speaking world chooses to support? You do not want this fight to go global.
Back in the real world, presume dysfunction in D.C., and you’ll rarely go wrong. But expect the U.S. to lash out somewhere on some pretext eventually. We’re more than twenty years out from the start of the Iraq War. That’s long enough for American institutions to forget every lesson learned.
Europe
In Europe, a grim determination appears to have set in as the Postwar Order dissolves. Everyone seems to have the full measure of Trump, even the ones who suck up to him, and also knows that he’ll actively try to turn European leaders and countries against each other. Just how he operates. Putin’s own behavior is equally predictable - con Trump by any means necessary into believing that he’ll be lauded for bringing peace if he forces Ukraine to surrender to Putin. As if a Nobel Peace Prize meant a thing after Obama got one merely for being elected.
With the integrity of NATO on the line now, and therefore Europe’s own security, natural forces are taking over. Europe, a region historically torn apart by bloody wars every few generations, now maintains as a core part of its identity the certainty that a return to the old ways benefits no one. And that’s what both Moscow and D.C. represent now - to the tremendous advantage of China. Everything Trump and Vance aim to do is only going to make the USA weaker because they lack the science needed to understand what the patient can tolerate.
Systems thinking is more prevalent in Europe and Asia, and that commonality will likely pull Europe and China closer together over time. To prevent this, leaders in the USA would have to understand the world system a whole lot better than they apparently can.
It’s a testament to the increasing reliability of otherwise fractious Europe that France delivered the promised Mirage 2000 jets ahead of schedule. Now, if France and the rest of Europe can only stop feeling like they can only arm a Ukrainian brigade that trains on their home turf. This is part of why the saga with 155th Mechanized Brigade seems so much more disastrous than it actually was. The claim of over a thousand soldiers deserting together appears to stem from a battalion attached to it that didn’t want to be and demanded to go back to whichever parent brigade they had come from.
Which is a very different animal than them all just taking off their uniforms and going home. Their concerns were conflated in the media with the fifty or so Ukrainians who tried to escape in France. Which, having been in U.S. Army basic training, looks a whole lot like the rate of new soldiers running away. One of your first assignments as a soldier is guarding the door so your fellow trainees don’t escape.
In any case, European NATO needs to get off it’s rear and start pushing every armored vehicle presently in stock to Ukraine. Yes, even at the cost of weakening the alliance’s standing deterrent. Then Ukraine won’t have to set up fancy brigades that a foreign country can host and only half-train just so it looks neat to hand them a piloe of equipment that will be split up and allocated more rationally when in the fight anyway.
If Putin suddenly moves a couple hundred thousand combat troops to the border with Finland, Poland, or the Baltic States, Ukraine will be happy to send a proportional amount of its drone operators to teach NATO troops how to wipe out meat waves. And in its weakened state, Moscow’s air power is no match for even the European component of NATO.
Middle East
Trump has managed to destabilize relations in the Middle East with as much aplomb as he has North American. Suggesting that America will take over management of Gaza and potentially resettle its people - even temporarily - is a brilliant play if your sole aim is to be laughed at by everyone. Now, considering the media frenzy Trump triggered, it’s probably mission accomplished in his mind.
But aside from the image issues and the potential for undoing the shaky ceasefires in the region, the totally contradictory promises Trump makes his supporters are on full display. On the one hand, the USA needs to focus on its own people first, a doctrine that Vance twit was just spouting off about the other day using some Latin phrase meaningful to the Evangelical American Catholics who now totally ignore their own religious traditions in pursuit of profit and other forms of power. Then Trump yanks the other hand out of his pocket, and suddenly the US is going to rebuild Gaza for some reason?
What bugs me the most about the Trump show at this point is how tedious it has become. He promises some odd thing, the usual suspects scream about it, then it doesn’t even come close to happening - yet we’re on to the next round. At the moment, ceasefires in the Middle East are holding. All anyone can hope for the present is that they last.
Pacific
China was quick to respond to Trump’s tariffs with countervailing ones. The science of trade wars is pretty clear: both sides lose. They’re just a way for politicians to score domestic points. You want to be competitive? Build better stuff. You want more engineers? Maybe actually train comprehensive critical thinking early on in school instead of wasting students’ time reading “classic” texts because that’s what their parents did back in the day.
Yeah, I’m a writer and author, and I didn’t get along with my English teachers. Sorry to violate what’s apparently now a rigid American norm. And the reason so many people who could create interesting stuff don’t, but that’s a systems analysis for another time and possibly blog.
Rolling back to geopolitics, the Pacific is very much in a holding pattern as everyone games out what Trump is actually going to do and how to take advantage. The bigoted Orientalism that blinds westerners to the boring reality of Asian cultures (they’re no different than Europeans, deep down) offers leaders in the region some tremendous strategic advantages. With Trump, all you have to do is make him feel like a king and all of a sudden he’s your best friend.
This only works with foreigners, though. California’s governor and wannabe president since long before I was once in a room with the guy when he was just a mayor, Gavin Newsom, is reportedly trying this with Trump. The fact that he’s all but certain to be replaced by none other than Kamala Harris in a couple years is another reason Pacific America needs its own federal government.
Autonomy under the Constitution would let us reform the damned two-party nightmare that leaves all Americans effectively colonized. When all your state’s leaders care about is their future job in D.C., things will fall apart at home. Both Team Red and Team Blue residents of America’s natural regions have this much in common: wherever they live, they are inadequately represented. And when you’re thousands of miles away from D.C., living in a place where the ground sometimes likes to come alive, the ocean will now and again rise up to swallow the coast, and the mountains periodically explode, this is a real and pressing national security threat.
Concluding Comments
A brief note to conclude (and explain my extra-testy attitude this week): in part because of the wretched governance now standard in the rural parts of even a rich Blue state like California, over the next few months I’ll be helping my family move up to Oregon. While weekly posts will continue, but might not always publish on Monday, depending on the scheduling of things. Just a heads-up, since I’ve been pretty consistent over the past two years.
As far as the fighting in Ukraine goes, expect more of the same for some time yet. But as spring arrives and the false hope of a negotiated settlement dies, the battlefield will begin to shift. This war is too big and the stakes too high to end another way.