The Expanding Ukraine War
The Expanding Ukraine War
Few wars are truly limited to the territory of the combatants alone; slowly but surely the rest of the world is being drawn in to Kyiv's fight for freedom.
With frigid temperatures gripping most of Ukraine over the past week, both sides are finding it tougher to fight - though Moscow more than Ukraine, as it keeps attempting to advance despite the awful conditions. And the fact that its attacks are mostly a waste of lives and energy.
So even a weather-induced reduction in operational tempo on the many active fronts doesn’t leave the average Ukrainian soldier much time to rest. Aside from losing the ability to dig in without excavation equipment, seeing drone flight times decline, and not being able to go outside bunkers for more than a few hours at a time, a hard freeze also makes it relatively easier to drive heavy equipment around than when the mud is thick - and hide mines under fresh snow.
While most fronts have witnessed an overall decline in the number and intensity of ruscist attacks, there are always exceptions, with tracked vehicles becoming even more important to have around. One rather epic fight north of the fortress of Avdiivka was caught on a Ukrainian drone feed.
For many weeks ruscist troops have been trying to break the Ukrainian defenses north of the town, leaving the frontline hamlet of Stepove on the Avdiivka front as the site of numerous violent struggles. Mostly ruined, basements still offer some shelter for ground troops in the same way they did Soviet and Nazi soldiers in the Great Patriotic War.
Ruscist tactics on the whole have degenerated into a simple rhythm: armored vehicles bring assault troops as close to targeted Ukrainian positions as possible, unload infantry, and retreat. Most are struck and smashed, with the surviving dismounts stuck under withering bombardment until Ukraine sends a response force in to get rid of them. If they can’t, the orcs try to reinforce potentially expanding their area of control.
There are variations, of course, with positional warfare often involving one side launching an attack on some grey zone outpost and the other quickly countering in a battle defined by probes and raids that can turn into quite a fight for those involved. The drone footage from Stepove featuring M2 Bradleys hunting down an orc tank is a perfect example.
Having trained to operate one almost twenty years ago, I can attest that driving through an intersection and encountering a T-90M, the most modern tank model Putin’s army fields (Armata still counts as a prototype in my book), is pretty much a Bradley crew’s worst nightmare. While the T-90’s ancestor, the T-72 that is still the tank model Ukrainian troops are likely to encounter, was destroyed by Bradleys in large numbers during the 1991 Gulf War, this was in a desert environment where they could sit back out of Iraqi tankers’ range and shoot TOW anti-tank missiles - among other advantages.
Looking through the gunner’s sight at a tank armed with a 125mm cannon parked less than a hundred meters away is not an experience anyone will relish when their primary weapon at this range is a 25mm autocannon, basically a large machine gun. Useful against infantry and light vehicles, despite boasting depleted uranium tipped bullets a Bushmaster is generally not able to punch through a T-90’s armor and blow off its turret like a shot from an Abrams, Leopard, or Challenger tank would - or Ariete and Leclerc models if Italy and France would send them over.
But does the IFV crew immediately go into reverse and seek cover? Nah, not Ukrainians! Though the 47th Mechanized Brigade had a tough June, the experience hasn’t broken its soldiers’ spirit. Gutsy beyond belief, the Bradley crew drives on down the road it originally came into town on, perpendicular to the street the tank controls, sending depleted uranium rounds downrange through every gap in the ruined homes. Many score hits that appear to set off the reactive armor blocks installed to mitigate the damage done by ATGMs like TOW, and whether because of damage to optics or a poor crew the tank’s return shots miss and the Bradley gets away clean.
You might expect the Ukrainians to count their blessings and withdraw - but the first Bradley simply hands the engagement off to another driving in from the other side of town. Covered by the smoke produced by a massive explosion inside the town during the handover - the cause is unclear, but it looks as some infantry in the town took a shot at the tank right before it fired back and hit a cache of explosives that was hopefully not near any Ukrainian troops - the second Bradley drives back down the route followed by the first then turns down the lane to pepper the T-90 with more 25mm autocannon shots.
A quick side note on those DU rounds - while not radioactive enough to pose a serious health risk, upon impact they combust, producing the bright flashes you see in many videos when Bradleys use the armor-piercing ammunition on their Bushmaster guns. This leaves behind toxic dust that is likely the cause of serious health problems noted in Iraq and Bosnia where large-scale fighting with DU took place. Unfortunately, activists who have tried to make people aware of the hazards of DU have latched on to fears of radioactive contamination instead of chemical, distracting from the real issue with this type of projectile.
Military personnel and civilians in areas where DU has been used should take extra precautions like wearing masks and decontaminating dirty clothing where possible. The toxic impacts of warfare are one of those things that doesn’t get a lot of press but inflict harm decades after the fighting stops. Like lead paint, exposure should be minimized to the degree possible - this is a war zone, after all.
In any case, back to Ukrainian daring - once the second Bradley has the T-90 in its sights, apparently catching it by surprise, the gunner simply does not relent. The IFV literally blasts the turret’s reactive armor panels apart, leading to fires breaking out in a public case study of how little and determined can win out over big and mean in a beautiful microcosm of Ukraine’s fight as a whole. The wounded tank tries to take cover but can’t get away, the driver seeming to panic, possibly wounded, with the massive cannon and turret swiveling out of control indicating that a minimum the vehicle’s controls are shot, the crew if alive unable to fight.
Soon the tank crashes into a tree and comes to a halt. One more kill for the books. Congrats to the soldiers of the 47th Mechanized Brigade and anyone else involved! Unlike wars past, now there are records of everyone’s achievements… and losses.
War always comes down to the people on the front line winning individual fights like these. Victory is an emergent process - every effort counts, no matter where in the system it is made.
It is the skill of Ukrainian soldiers at the local level, what many like to call the tactical, that are what enables it to pool disparate efforts into coherent operations that achieve its national strategy: liberation at the lowest possible cost in lives. Far from the fighting, Ukrainians who work and pay taxes create the foundation those at the front ultimately rely on to survive and win, their mutual local-level efforts creating the emergent system of the Ukrainian nation.
Moscow, on the other hand, aims only to destroy Ukraine, caring nothing for what its soldiers must endure. Those at the bottom of the pyramid in Putin’s empire are disposable in Putin’s mind - this is the main reason why Moscow’s armies have lost their ability to swiftly advance anywhere. Wagner was able to take Bakhmut at the cost of breaking itself as an organization only because its fighters believed they had no choice but to win, many being convicts with no prospects beyond playing the lottery of frontline combat in hopes of a pardon and a paycheck.
As a number of commentators have noted of late, the old saw about “General Winter” fighting for Moscow is another of those myths English-speakers are encouraged to hold about the Russian World. First off, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have as bad of winters as Muscovy, so the idea that russians are somehow immune to cold weather is ridiculous. Finland did quite well in the Winter War of 1939-1940 until summer came and massive Soviet reinforcements brought a turn in the tough Finns’ fortunes.
German troops in the winter of 1941-1942 were unprepared for the bitter cold less because nobody realized such gear was needed than the difficulty of getting supplies to the front lines as they extended towards Moscow. It was also one of the worst winters on record at the time, with soldiers on both sides during the fighting in early 1942 reduced to house-to-house battles just to find shelter. Hitler’s refusal to accept any form of retreat on the grounds that it would become a disorganized rout like the one that sent Napoleon’s Army packing was not only contradicted by later German experience fighting in winter but pointlessly killed off a huge proportion of Germany’s best troops in exchange for holding positions that were never able to march on Moscow again.
Right now, especially with Ukraine having been plunged into its first hard nationwide freeze of the season, any time orcs can be induced to climb out of their holes Kyiv wins. Provided, of course, that it is properly taking care of its own troops - many brigades will have to be well-rested ahead of the upcoming summer campaign.
Putin’s bombardment campaign against Ukraine continues, its strategy much the same as before, trying to hit Ukrainian factories and military sites, possibly ones it thinks will support the F-16s Moscow seems frightened of. It does appear that the orcs are conserving weapons by avoiding areas where Ukraine has Patriot or SAMP/T systems deployed, which ought to create an added incentive for Ukraine receiving half a dozen more as soon as possible.
Interestingly, Ukraine has recently claimed success using electromagnetic warfare to make ruscist missiles not intercepted miss their targets, which if true and replicable on a broad scale would be excellent. The most accurate forms of guidance, like GPS, depend on the missile getting signals from satellites. Jamming can disrupt this, and though there are many other ways to improve a missile’s accuracy most depend on some kind of external signal. Image recognition is making it into modern missiles, but the fancier the weapon, the more it costs.
And speaking of signals, over the weekend Ukraine scored another major win in the sky, shooting down one of Moscow’s precious A-50 AWACS aircraft over the Azov Sea. There hasn’t been confirmation yet of what Ukraine used to accomplish this feat, but the Azov Coast is just about 160km from Orihiv, which is far enough from the front lines that a Patriot launcher might have taken a road trip and survived.
The thing about an AWACS is that pumps out a huge amount of radar energy. This makes locating it using passive detection systems possible, meaning that a Patriot missile could theoretically have been launched towards the general area in the hopes its own active seeker would pick up the A-50 one close enough. Alternatively, the interceptor might have been modified with a seeker that homes in on emissions just like a HARM air-to-ground missile does. I’d suggest sabotage, but another important aircraft, an IL-22 communications jet, was damaged as well, images released showing shrapnel in its tail that would indicate a missile near-miss.
An alternative (less likely) possibility includes the arrival of F-16s, which could dash into range and fire AIM-120D AMRAAMs from over the Dnipro then run before ruscist jets could respond. Another is the development of at least a rudimentary fighter drone capable of getting close enough to unleash an AMRAAM before being shot down by Sukhois or MiGs. Whatever happened, the story will be another for the books - while one A-50 was damaged on the ground by a drone in Belarus, shooting one out of the sky with its highly trained crew is a feat rivaling any other Ukraine’s Air Force has achieved. Moscow has fewer than ten available, some sources suggest only six, meaning it struggles to keep even two on routine aerial patrol as it is.
Bit by bit, domain by domain, Ukraine is eroding Moscow’s technological edge and in some areas, like naval drones, threatening to blow well past. If unable to protect its Black Sea coast, Moscow’s war on Ukraine becomes even more of a disaster than it already is. Crimea is vulnerable, and it’s the key to this war - a point I’ll return to often in the coming weeks.
If only the courage of Ukraine’s defenders were matched by the leaders of its partner countries! Ukraine has received fewer than 200 M2 Bradleys while literally thousands sit in US depots, leaving most Ukrainian soldiers still riding brutally vulnerable BMPs and BTRs to the fight and suffering needless casualties as a result.
The irony is that Bradleys and Abrams and most other U.S. Army gear was designed and built almost solely for a fight in Europe against Moscow’s forces, having little value in any confrontation with China or North Korea given South Korea’s strength and Taiwan’s fate being decided by whether or not its allies are willing to break a Chinese blockade, a required prerequisite to any ground invasion.
As for the Middle East, military involvement there has overall been a disastrous strategic mistake for American and European leaders. Europe is the only place you could ever need thousands of armored vehicles to defend a democracy under threat, and the ones currently used will be totally obsolete in less than five years thanks to rapid developments in drones, which can soon be expected to start appearing in the form of miniature multirole aircraft firing small anti-tank and anti-personnel weapons across the battlefield.
As the Middle East inches ever closer to a state of general war with the US/UK strikes on the Houthis - a cathartic act but so far totally indecisive, much like Israel’s assault on Gaza - it’s essential to recognize that the world really is sliding towards a global conflict. But like World War Two, weapons of mass destruction are unlikely to play a major role.
Then, despite having warehouses loaded to the brim with chemical shells, the only use of these horrific weapons was against people lacking the ability to strike back - Chinese forces by Japan, death camp victims by the Nazis. Contrary to so many pre-war predictions by the experts of the day, World War Two did not begin and end with bombers launching mass chemical strikes against enemy cities. Instead, the escalation towards total war was gradual, halting, each side initially restricting tactics and even in Nazi Germany’s case its full military potential until after Stalingrad, more than three years after Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
Instead of going all-in and risking their own lives, leaders send other people to die in ever greater numbers, believing until their last hole is dug up that they’ll be able to turn things around. The plus side of egomania of the sort that drives a mind like Putin’s is that it makes all apocalyptic threats pathetic bluffs. Unfortunately, leaders like Biden will always find it convenient to act as if they’re holding back the End of Days by giving in to this sort of blackmail.
The personal incentives of world leaders rarely align with their those of their people. That’s why democratic checks and balances are so important, the foundation of all stable alliances within and between countries.
A slide to world conflict doesn’t happen by accident - people responsible for making decisions take actions that worsen the situation, usually because they can get away with convincing folks they had no other choice. This is why it is so absolutely essential that Ukraine defeat Putin’s invasion as quickly as the world can make this a reality.
The Middle East, West Pacific, and Eastern Europe are all on fire, blazes already merging thanks to the limits of the global military-industrial base. Facing the prospect of long, grinding, conventional wars instead of quick and devastating nuclear ones, every country and coalition around the world is looking at their rivals’ ability to sustain a long fight and making calculations about how far they can press their interests. So while the individual battles and victories in Ukraine might not seem novel anymore, they represent some of the world’s best hopes of averting an even bigger and more monstrous war to come.
Since its epic failure on the road to Kyiv, Putin’s military has been struggling to source enough weapons amid a major expansion effort. First Moscow began re-importing hardware it had long ago sold abroad. Then cheap one-way attack drones from Iran joined the fight. This summer supplies of artillery ammunition started coming from North Korea; these have of late been joined by ballistic missiles. Rumor continue to emerge that Iran will sell some of its missile arsenal too, not just one-way attack drones.
Conflicts around the globe are merging, but contrary to all the propaganda about the “democratic world” facing a united “authoritarian axis” what’s really happening is the formation something infinitely more dangerous. Putin’s Axis, an alliance of tyrant would-be god-kings, is dedicated to exploiting the pervasive hypocrisy of the self-described “West” to destroy it, NATO, and the EU.
That’s what separates it from China, which experiences the same grassroots democratic pressures that countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and even Japan did before they developed multi-party democratic regimes and stable economies. First run by military dictatorships - US-led, in Japan’s case after the Second World War - each country democratized in fits and starts as it grew wealthy.
China is on the same general path, but democratic pressures are constantly suppressed by China’s memory of being brutalized by the European colonial powers - including the Russian Empire and Soviet Union - before Imperial Japan’s long assault starting in the 1930s. The regime in Beijing adeptly uses the traumatic memory of past humiliation to present a strong and uncompromising foreign policy as China’s only option in the face of a West determined to contain its return to the status of an equal on the global stage. Even so, unlike Moscow, Tehran, or Pyongyang, Beijing aims to take the place envisioned back in the UN’s early days, when China got a permanent Security Council seat along with France, Britain, the USA, and USSR.
Mao’s victory in the Chinese Civil War and the retreat of the defeated Nationalist forces to Taiwan under Chiang Kai-Shek altered how China was perceived by the USA. Presented as part of a global communist movement run from Moscow, the truth was always more complex, their alliance one of convenience and not global revolution. Serious ideological differences separated Stalinism-Leninism and Maoism; like the Christian faith that spawned Marxism in its various forms exhibits an identical tendency towards schism.
But then as today American politicians found it convenient to act as if the world was split into two irreconcilable halves - another legacy of Christian philosophy shared by Moscow and D.C. Until Nixon’s famous outreach campaign in the 1970s, capitalizing on tensions between Beijing and Moscow that had led to serious border clashes, and now again, American leaders blurred the distinctions between countries they found troublesome to aggrandize America’s role as global protector.
That’s one of two key reasons why US support for Ukraine has been so painfully slow and still limited compared to what Kyiv had a right to expect after it agreed to relinquish its nuclear arsenal after the breakup of the USSR in exchange for security guarantees that have turned out to be less ironclad than originally thought. D.C. is always looking over its shoulder at Beijing these days even while taking care to not do the one thing that would undercut any hope Xi might harbor of putting together a global anti-democratic alliance: breaking Putin by kicking him out of Ukraine.
The other reason for American hesitation when it comes to Kyiv’s deserved victory is a natural fear of the Postwar Order’s inexorable unraveling. This, unfortunately for America, is entirely self-destructive because change is always inevitable - resistance instead of adaptation brings wasted effort and impoverished the future. At the global level, power relations tend to shift very rapidly once the collapse phase begins. To a great extent all claims of power are a bluff with no one knowing for sure how much they’ve got or how effectively they can put it to use until tested - and then, adaptation has to come fast to avert disaster no matter how thorough pre-conflict preparations.
Both expectations about how much power different players have and raw military inventories rapidly shift early into a descent towards broader, ultimately global conflict. America’s failure to equip Ukraine or directly defend it to swiftly force Putin’s forces out is the kind of strategic disaster that shatters all prior expectations about its power.
With two essential parts of the system that upheld the Postwar Order gone, players across the globe are making new bets. There are and cannot be two sides because the world is more complex than that - the best that can be done is to define two ideal poles and organize loose associations based on where partners generally fall along the spectrum.
China is hardly a benign power: it absolutely does pose a direct and mortal threat to democratic Taiwan’s autonomy. If given the chance, Beijing will swallow up Taiwan and is determined to build the military capabilities it needs to absorb the island by force if bluff and intimidation won’t serve. This is what makes the conflicts between Kyiv/Moscow and Taipei/Beijing alike but Israel/Palestine and India/China extremely different and dangerous to conflate.
But the lessons of the Ukraine War so far and China’s ongoing lack of sealift capabilities needed to sustain an invasion of Taiwan mean that a Putin-style all-out attack is extremely unlikely. The risk of Taiwan’s people resisting is too high, as is the danger of China facing an international alliance committed to Taiwan’s defense if it goes in big.
For Taiwan and other democracies facing threats from their neighbors, the greater danger by far is a slowly rising pressure campaign designed to exhaust key military capabilities followed by a blockade. The Ukraine War has once again demonstrated that logistics rule all warfare, and as an island within range of major elements of China’s arsenal Taiwan is inherently vulnerable to being surrounded by air and sea.
The USA’s failure to defend shipping exiting Ukraine through the western Black Sea despite the main route to the Bosporus Straits through Turkey passing right by several NATO allies is a sign of how limited American commitments to freedom of navigation will be if it fears a confrontation with a nuclear power. And having demonstrated that it has the forces to erect a maritime cordon around Taiwan, nuclear-armed Beijing is almost certain to test America’s resolve by trying a naval blockade of some sort before it commits to any direct invasion.
It is the rising pressure on globally scarce military industrial assets that mainly the impact of the Ukraine War on world affairs right now. Anything that China, Iran, the Houthis, Venezuela, or any other country with ties to Putin can do to help exhaust military stockpiles abroad is good for all of them.
Over-extended and lacking anything resembling a scientific strategy for handling a potential decade of global chaos, US leaders are making the exact mistakes the British Empire did after World War Two. Failure to understand that the key geopolitical knot that must be unraveled right now is Putin’s occupation of Ukraine leads American leaders to repeat the tragic errors that led to the Second World War.
Thanks to a total refusal to make it clear to Israel that it is on the road to ruin, the entire Middle East is burning, the US and UK bombing Yemen to protect the flee flow of trade when they won’t even send warships to the Black Sea to escort grain bound for international markets from Odesa. At the same time Ukraine is still waiting to learn whether Congress will deign to give it a paltry 7% of the 2024 U.S. military budget, around $60 billion.
Never mind that this is an incredible bargain: the $46 billion in military aid sent so far has been the best investment made in recent U.S. military history. It has helped to literally destroy the entire pre-2022 ruscist army as well as about half of the Soviet Union’s stockpiled production from the Cold War presently in Muscovite hands. Anything Ukraine destroys can no longer threaten another NATO member. Right now, Moscow poses almost zero real threat on the ground beyond Ukraine, meaning that most of Europe doesn’t even need standing armies since there’s no other viable threat to Europe’s freedom.
So it’s pretty pathetic that Ukrainian soldiers are still stuck using 50-year old T-64 tanks that burn as bright as any ruscist model when hit in the wrong spot by a drone. And that Ukraine doesn’t already have enough Patriot batteries to cover all its major cities or modern jets two years into an all-out war to patrol the skies.
Now, Moscow’s army has not proven as brittle as many including myself hoped. It’s not going to simply collapse this year without being pushed to the brink.
However, even setting aside it rapidly burning through stocks of Soviet gear it can’t easily replace, Moscow being able to replace the 20,000-30,000 soldiers it loses in Ukraine every month is also an illusory strength. The ratio of experienced to green soldiers matters a great deal, even in the kind of warfare Moscow prefers. If Putin’s army is training 20-30,000 soldiers every month, as most estimates agree is likely, that lets it keep a steady-state force presence in Ukraine at around 450,000 personnel.
But how many casualties are among more as opposed to less experienced troops? Green troops will make more mistakes and be punished accordingly. If Moscow wants to mount an effective attack it needs soldiers trained and equipped for the added rigors of having to close with the enemy through drone and artillery bombardments before being able to engage and take their dugouts from them.
Particularly on the Dnipro front, where Ukraine’s footholds can only be eliminated by direct attack, this creates an ideal scenario for making Moscow to lose proportionally more experienced soldiers than Ukraine day after day, week after week. Even if Putin’s army stays numerically superior, it will become increasingly rigid and brittle. One of Ukraine’s key tasks over this winter and spring is to preserve and rest as many of its own veterans as possible while training more to serve with them.
The question of how to do this effectively and equitably is at the heart of the ongoing debate in Ukraine about mobilization. It is always wise to harshly question military leaders who have faced difficulties then insist that they only need more troops and tanks to win. There are plenty of cases throughout military history where awareness of how scarce resources were led to innovative solutions that wound up scoring massive victories. However, there are limits to what you can expect people to do, and fighting for two years straight can break all but a few.
Generally speaking, Ukraine needs more bodies not to send into assaults but to relieve more experienced and physically fit troops on the front line for a few months, allowing them rest and train ahead of summer. It’s also why Ukraine should build fortifications at naturally defensible points along the line of contact and conduct an elastic defense that trades territory for boosting casualty rates among the orcs now in anticipation of setting them up for shocking counterattacks when the weather improves.
Ukraine is almost certainly doing that while resetting and rebuilding its striking forces. This summer demonstrated that assault formations must have enough physically fit, motivated, and trained personnel to carry out effective attacks. Conscripts and mobilized troops are great at holding the line, and there are plenty of cases of sixty-somethings fighting as hard and well as someone forty years their junior. But the physical pressures of going on the attack for days on end adds another level of stress that you generally need more youthful bodies to tolerate.
Ruscist war bloggers are apparently reporting key Ukrainian formations like the 82nd Air Assault resting away from the front - though this unit did purportedly release footage from the Orihiv front recently, so it’s hard to be sure what the experienced brigade is up to. American sources are talking about Ukraine shifting modern gear between units. Changes are underway, and Ukraine may well come out swinging this summer with substantially more of an immediate impact than was the case in 2023.
While Ukraine absolutely does need to become much more self-sufficient in terms of equipping its forces, this is going to take time. Gear from partners has got to come in larger quantities and quicker than last year. NATO countries are either holding back any portion of their inventory that could conceivably be needed to meet alliance obligations in a war with Moscow or the cupboards truly are bare, implying that a huge amount of military production over the past half century has been nothing more than a brutal scam on European taxpayers. If NATO is already out of materiel, then the alliance has always been a bluff.
With Moscow’s army fully occupied in Ukraine, its existential struggle with the West depends entirely on threats of retaliation at sea or from the air in any fight. Part of the reason Putin husbands his air force and reacts so swiftly to Ukraine inflicting losses on it is that the ability to potentially overwhelm NATO air power with missile strikes on key bases is all he’s got left by way of conventional deterrence. Sure, Moscow could dispatch nuclear-powered submarines to attack shipping, but this is a play that would soon be met with a dramatic deployment of US and allied naval power and fail.
Putin’s ongoing difficulties in his war of annihilation are mainly functions of Ukraine’s skill and the essential bluff that his conventional military might has always been. While Moscow can certainly launch strikes deep into NATO territory as it does Ukraine, sustaining them is another matter. Though Western sanctions have not impeded his ability to keep building precision weapons and drones, the fact that Putin has to beg for North Korean ammunition is a sign of the real trouble he’s in.
Unless given a year or two of lower-intensity positional fighting to rebuild inventories and develop new production lines, Putin’s empire - and by extension the other members of his New Axis - will become nothing more than a giant North Korea totally subservient to China. Unfortunately, that’s apparently exactly what insiders with Biden’s ear are afraid of.
Xi would love nothing better than to make Putin the permanent Blair to his Bush, a loyal lapdog incapable of acting alone and facing a veto over any future adventures, which is part of why China hasn’t objected more to US support for Ukraine. But this would also bind Beijing’s fortunes to maintaining stability in postrussia, making the prospect of fighting a war over Taiwan much less attractive.
China and Europe coming to an understanding over a neutered postrussia is the greatest fear of a certain kind of Beltway mind. Having largely adopted the old British Empire concept of balancing emerging threats to maintain the status quo, the Transatlantic set is more terrified of a world with several power poles than they are a new Great War.
The basic, fundamental question at stake in Ukraine is this: can one country decide to tell another country that it has no right to be secure within its own borders?
If so, then power relations will rule the future in the international anarchy so-called “realists” presume is all that can ever exist. The idealist view that the USA has to play the role of world police is equally doomed, whether in it’s War on Terror mode or the new fantasy of the USA leading a so-called “democratic world,” a category somehow taken to include Israel and India. Both are countries where a great many people in them are asking hard questions about the character of their supposedly democratic regimes.
A pragmatic, systems-focused view perceives this moment to represent one of great danger - but also opportunity. Ukraine’s allies have got to recognize that 2024 represents a narrow window to halt or at least slow the slide into another world conflict that could last a decade or more. In the next six months a lot needs to happen to avoid this unique chance slipping away.
In an interconnected world, all major conflicts eventually merge in some dimension. Though Japan and Nazi Germany were merely allies of convenience and their affiliation likely did both more harm than good, Tojo and Hitler didn’t know that. Had they cooperated against the Soviet Union in 1941 they might have eventually won control over all of Eurasia, producing a 1984-style scenario with the US absorbing the Commonwealth and using one to balance the power of the other.
As is true today, leaders like Chamberlain mainly refrained from going to war even when it was clear that Hitler wasn’t going to stop because of the fear of what happened if weapons of mass destruction were used. In the end, cities were simply plastered with regular bombs and later doused in incendiaries before the development of a new weapon of mass destruction made chemical weapons seem almost quaint.
Internationalization of the Ukraine War in terms of its impact on the world’s military industrial capacity has been underway since the beginning, but has accelerated as ammunition stocks ran dry. Quietly, though legal restrictions limit what they can do, the governments of both Japan and South Korea have been playing a key role in supporting Ukraine’s resistance. They can send ammunition and supplies to refill Pentagon warehouses emptied by shipments to Ukraine without violating their rules about supplying a party to an active conflict.
Other technology is likely to follow, as both Japan and South Korea have strong domestic defense industries that face high labor and energy costs, so naturally seek opportunities to move resource-intensive activities abroad. With North Korea shipping missiles, shells, and perhaps eventually tanks to Moscow, Japan and South Korea face a future of lower conventional but increased nuclear saber rattling from Pyongyang. Breaking Putin in Ukraine is now in their interests, too, in order to avoid North Korea gaining too much out of whatever unholy bargain has been made.
The limited military production capacity around the world makes it impossible for any major conflict to remain isolated for long. Once Kyiv didn’t fall as the experts in Moscow and D.C. predicted, the world system moved into a new phase. Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine makes it impossible for him to unwind the war - aware that Crimea can’t be secure without control over Donbas and Donbas is vulnerable until ruscist troops control all of eastern Ukraine up to the Dnipro, the attacks will keep coming. Similarly aware that Kaliningrad will never be secure until the Baltic States are, if given the opportunity Putin will absolutely occupy a sliver of Estona or Latvia or Lithuania to “protect russians” and dare NATO to do a thing about it.
The best, most humane option is for all democratic countries to call Putin’s nuclear bluff and commit to massive support for Ukraine. Kyiv’s victory will protect them all, making it virtually impossible for a new conflict to break out in Europe big enough to distract from a Chinese assault on Taiwan.
It doesn’t require an international conspiracy of evil-doers to bring about chaos. The anarchy of the international system was always there, only rising now because powerful people have come to the natural conclusion that the Postwar Order is dead and gone. Putin’s empire has descended into totalitarian madness while the USA has become a completely unreliable security guarantor thanks to domestic partisanship.
The best chance the world has of halting a slide into violent disorder on every continent is to end the war in Ukraine by demonstrating, as repelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait did in 1991, that aggression doesn’t pay. A demonstration of the will to do whatever it takes to free a democratic country under attack is necessary to stop the next war from breaking out.
This is a truth that I suspect leaders across most of Europe are finally coming to terms with. As the U.S. Congress remains predictably stuck, individual European countries - namely Britain and Germany - are beginning to pull the rest of the continent down the path of greater geopolitical autonomy. South Korea and Japan will be drawn in too, with Australia and Canada hopefully also jumping on board, recognizing the need for more aggressively backing Ukraine than they have to date.
Throwing Putin’s forces out of Ukraine is the fundamental prerequisite for any sustainable global peace. It’s within the power of the world’s real democracies to make that happen. While the American political machine will almost certainly pass funding for Ukraine at some point this year, I wouldn’t count on any more in the future whoever wins in 2024 because this election is set to be as close as the last, meaning that Congress will be no less paralyzed in 2025 and 2026 than today.
If Ukraine is forced into a frozen conflict, Beijing will know that Taiwan’s autonomy is negotiable whatever any future American presidents say. And that will set the stage for someone to miscalculate in the near future, pulling everyone into the abyss.
As brilliant as the performance by those Bradley crews in Stepove was, it’s still a shame that any of it is necessary. To avert worse, defeat Putin now. All it takes is courage - and firepower. Ukraine has plenty of the first.