The Kharkiv Push: Putin's Last Big Punch?
In the wake of May 9th, when Moscow celebrates the end of the Great Patriotic War, a new offensive effort has been unleashed in Kharkiv. But is it the real deal, or a diversion?
In a move that Ukraine-based organizations like the Center for Defence Strategies and Frontelligence have seen coming for weeks, the orcs have opened a new front in Kharkiv. Around two divisions with 20,000 personnel appear to be involved, which says quite a bit about Moscow’s intentions.
This is not a simple feint or border raid. However, it is also not something that could in and of itself alter the course of the conflict. Moscow’s forces aren’t charging for the Dnipro west of Kharkiv, at least not yet.
In three days of heavy fighting the orcs have only managed to seize a string of border towns that were already in the grey zone separating each side. Some have criticized the lack of fortifications, but there’s no point in building barriers right up against the border where construction teams are vulnerable to artillery and drones. And if you’re following an area defense scheme, which Ukraine pretty switched to at the end of winter, enemy advances into the grey zone are expected.
A vital military concept that most pundits and even a lot of professionals misunderstand is initiative. Often a side will be described as having it because it is actively attacking the other. But what the idea is really getting at is something subtler - freedom of action.
The moment you send military resources into motion you have in fact lost the initiative to some degree. You’ve committed to actions that will take some amount of time to unwind or adapt if events go poorly. Defending is superior to attacking most of the time precisely because the attacker cedes the initiative - at least until their investment of resources pays off, forcing the opponent to take action that they otherwise wouldn’t.
That’s why deception and surprise are such powerful tools: if the enemy can be induced to commit to an operation that you’re prepared for, who truly has the initiative? You need high quality information to minimize the blunders that drive the course of battle and so often decide its fate.
For either side to prevail in this war it has to demolish the military capabilities of its enemy. To secure its freedom Ukraine has to literally destroy the reserves Moscow has been able to generate over the past year in order to create space for sustained counteroffensive efforts.
That’s why I see Moscow’s Kharkiv play as an opportunity more than a threat. In fact, unless these operations are a very sophisticated feint ahead of a sudden push west of Kharkiv towards the Dnipro, these attacks falling to the east of the city implies that Moscow has chosen a more limited option in keeping with its ongoing attrition campaign.
The orcs do aim to turn Ukraine’s flank, but only by extending the existing one. Another reason for this offensive is simply paying Ukraine back for the raids that Russian freedom fighters mounted against Belgorod from Kharkiv this spring.
Certain affronts compel Putin to respond in a particular way to preserve the illusion of power he depends on. The timing and pace of the recent bombardment of Ukrainian energy sites suggest that it is a revenge campaign for Ukraine’s attacks on ruscist oil infrastructure more than part of a coherent strategic plan to cripple Ukraine’s economy.
Putin, simply put, is winging it. He’s attacking now because the next four to six weeks mark a point of vulnerability while Ukraine waits for delayed aid to arrive. His forces appear to be making a naked effort to turn the flank of the Kupiansk front, fearful of the risk trying to cut off Kharkiv and reach Dnipro would entail. Good way to lose a field army if you screw that up, as the orcs have done with every other large-scale offensive for two straight years.
As I’ll lay out in the second section of this week’s post, Putin seems to be trying to replicate the part of the 2022 assault that actually worked. It probably won’t a second time, though.
This Week On The Fronts
Spring is in full bloom across Ukraine, the gray and brown of winter on the steppe replaced by brilliant greens. In the era of drones, that means it’s fighting season thanks to the return of vegetative cover.
Even thermal cameras get thrown off by vegetation: plants radiate on infrared wavelengths invisible to the human eye. I was looking at some Sentinel satellite footage the other day and was struck by how easy it is to trace the front in the south by looking at a false color NDVI map, where dark green corresponds to vegetation coverage.
Most of the lighter green in the above image corresponds to fields which have probably been recently planted, so there’s just shoots above soil. Darker greens on the image correspond to more natural vegetation, and there’s more of it in the grey zone and forested areas. Naturally there aren’t a lot of farmers who want to work in an area full of mines and where drones or artillery might land at any moment. Who wants to trust their life to a drone operator who might lack the training to know the difference between a tractor and tank? Or on the orc side, even cares…
Keeping the scale of this ongoing tragedy in mind is difficult. Hundreds of thousands of people are heading out into the grey zone to do their job every day. A thousand orcs and probably a couple hundred Ukrainians are killed or maimed in the process. All because Putin’s empire can’t sit comfortably behind its own borders.
Each one is its own tale - tragic or heroic, it’s still a life snuffed out forever. And in this war, for the very first time, all the horror is visible for anyone to witness thanks to the internet. The last moments of a forlorn orc whose team has been wiped out by drones can be broadcast across the globe for millions or billions of people to watch as he pulls the pin from a grenade and tucks it into his vest - with predictably horrific results, plural intended.
Never before has the grim and awful truth of warfare been so possible for so many to see. War makes the rational mad and madness rational. The one good thing that might come out of this miserable, needless conflict is that people have to choose not to understand what war is and means. Why it should be avoided at nearly any cost, but also waged with unrelenting fury to end the nightmare as swiftly and as permanently as possible once a fight becomes inevitable, as it has in Ukraine.
Moscow’s efforts on the new Kharkiv front are making the headlines this week, but having failed to break through beyond a tactical level anywhere since Avdiivka fell three months ago Moscow is visibly committed to a naked strategy of attrition. Putin can’t win the war, so he has to hope his enemies cede the field after becoming discouraged by the costs of continuing the fight.
On the Dnipro front, ruscist troops have tried to retake Nestryha, an island at the mouth of the Dnipro, as well as Krynky (still). All efforts have failed. The orcs are having practically zero luck in this sector, aside from containing Ukraine’s bridgeheads. Both sides have to rely on boats for logistics here, and with drones getting better night vision gear all the time that’s not easy to sustain. Increased artillery supplies should give Ukraine a serious edge soon.
Along the Zaporizhzhia front the seemingly endless orc push on Robotyne has managed to turn the ruins of the town into a permanent gray zone. Orcs go in and get wiped out, but Ukraine can’t keep a lot of people on the ground for long because there aren’t a lot of decent positions left. So Moscow keeps slowly consolidating ground one tree line at a time on the outskirts. Ukraine appears to keep just two or three brigades in this area these days, mostly fighting for the region at all because the cost for Moscow is so high.
In the Mokri Yali river area the enemy has reached the outskirts of Urozhaine and Staromaiorske, both liberated in 2023. Efforts here probably need to be seen as paired with attacks towards Kurakhove, forming two pincers that aim to displace Ukraine from an area that could serve as a staging ground for an absolutely lethal counteroffensive towards Mariupol in the fall. The ruscist effort to take Krasnohorivka a bit further north is necessary to cover the northern flank of the Vuhledar-Kurakhove front as well as the southern flank of the stalled push west from Avdiivka.
The Avdiivka front has been busy but mostly stable, the arrival of the 100th and 110th Mechanized Brigades blocking any further movement towards Novooleksandrivka. This has allowed the 115th or any brigade that replaces it to consolidate a narrower front at Kalynove where it can fire downhill into Arkanhelske and Keramik.
It’s too early to be sure whether Moscow’s attack here has been contained; it’s likely that fresh forces will rotate in to regain momentum if they are able. Over the past few days the only notable progress the orcs have made has come on the southern edge of the battlefield again, where forces are apparently build up across the Durna to try and take the ridge to the northwest. There is still a danger of Ukraine launching a localized counterattack against the division that seized Ocheretyne so long as Ukrainian forces hold positions on the Umanske-Novopokrovske-Sokil axis, so the local orc commander will want that area cleared.
I continue to see the Avdiivka and Chasiv Yar fronts as also bound together, one of the few areas of the contact zone where Moscow can bring two operations together on a scale big enough to break Ukraine’s defenses open across a wide enough area to exploit, Deep Battle style. Going straight through Toretsk is not ideal because the area is on a relative height and dotted with tall mounds from past mining operations, what Ukrainians refer to as ‘terikons’ like the one that was a center of fighting during the battle for Avdiivka.
Moscow would deeply like to repeat the Avdiivka success at Toretsk, opening the door to a siege of the crossroads of Kostiantynivka and a further push to Kramatorsk. These two fronts together themselves comprise the southern pincer of an attempt to reach and surround Kramatorsk and Sloviansk involving forces striking towards the Siverski Donets river at Terny. A supporting effort seeks to collapse the Siversk bulge, the southern edge long held by the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade coming under sustained attack over the past few weeks. Having been deployed here continuously for almost two years the unit must know the terrain well, but also be very tired - as I expect is 81st Airmobile up in Bilohorivka to the north.
And that brings the overview of the fronts to the Kupiansk area, where Kyslivka and Kotliarivka recently fell to the orcs. Here Moscow has long concentrated one of its supposedly premier formations, 1st Guards Tank Army, but made very little progress towards Kupiansk. Ukraine has been using the area as a kind of training ground for newer brigades, with analysts warning that the region could come under intensive assault at any time yet none of Moscow’s moves ever going very far, leading to a widespread belief that this area is mostly meant to draw Ukraine’s attention away from Donbas.
The initiation of new offensive operations closer to Kharkiv city may indicate a sustained expansion of this strategic feint - though the situation could evolve into something a lot more dangerous. The hazard Ukraine faces is that if Moscow commits enough of its strategic reserves it can potentially threaten to reinvigorate the northern wing of the effort to get behind Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
In a strange way, it’s back to basics for Moscow. This is almost exactly where I anticipated in February of 2022 that Putin would launch an attack in very much the way he later did.
Putin’s Kharkiv Offensive Of 2024
Battles around Kharkiv often went catastrophically wrong for the Soviets in the Second World War. After losing the region to the Germans in October of 1941, during the winter and spring of 1942 Moscow counterattacked. By May of 1942 the Red Army had pushed over the Siverski Donets at Izium, aiming to encircle Kharkiv from the south and reach the Dnipro, cutting German forces operating in southern Ukraine off from those closer to Moscow. The operation was a miserable failure.
In the winter of 1943, the Soviet counteroffensives after Stalingrad managed to bring Kharkiv back under Soviet control. Pushing south of the city and again from Izium along the Siverski Donets, the Red Army intended to kick the Germans and their allies out of southern Ukraine. But German forces under von Manstein launched one of his famous backhand blows, striking Soviet forces when their offensive pushed past its natural culminating point and pushing all the way through Kharkiv to Belgorod. It was only in August of 1943 that Kharkiv was liberated again, with Moscow amassing a 5:1 advantage in troops and better than 10:1 in tanks after Germany’s devastating losses at Kursk.
When Putin began his buildup along Ukraine’s borders in 2021 I evaluated that his aim in any war would be to distract Ukraine with threats to Kyiv while his troops secured a land bridge to Crimea and pushed into eastern Kharkiv. The next step would be to close the jaws of the trap around Ukrainian forces if they held the line in Donbas and did not retreat.
This is what Ukraine expected, and broadly speaking what Moscow actually did, at least in the south. It’s the reason that Ukraine only had a couple artillery and one national guard brigade plus some local garrisons of regulars to fight for Hostomel on day one of the assault. It made sense that Moscow’s forces in Belarus were part of a bluff because they were too few to take and hold a city the size of Kyiv.
In the end, thanks to Ukraine’s military preparations - scattering vital stuff like aircraft and air defense systems, for example - and the fierce response of ordinary Ukrainians, Kyiv recovered from the initial surprise and Moscow’s gambit utterly failed. A consequence was that it lacked the forces required to close the jaws of the trap around Donbas even though Ukrainian troops were forced to retreat from the northern and southern wings of the line of contact.
Putin struck here because in the south his forces actually followed sound military logic, with the exception of that doomed flying column they sent from Mykolaiv to Voznesensk to try and get across the Bug river and reach Odesa. Within days the vital city of Melitopol had fallen, Mariupol was encircled, and the orcs had a bridgehead across the Siverski Donets at Izium.
Why was Putin’s plan in southern and eastern Ukraine so broadly predictable using nothing but history and what little open source information was available? Geography, mostly. To run an offensive you have to have sufficient logistics to keep troops supplied. You tend to avoid places where the enemy has an easy time of defending themselves. Roads and especially railways through rural areas are your friend, and a nice route runs right down the Oskil river at Kupiansk then heads south to Sloviansk through Izium. In the south Melitopol was always essential, and from there the obvious move is to head north if you can.
Though Putin’s horde initially violated every rule of real war, thinking they could play Budapest or Prague with Kyiv, within a few days most efforts had reverted to something saner in the south. Moscow spending a month trying to surround Kyiv left it unable to push Ukrainian forces in the east back fast enough to cause a total collapse. Ukraine was able to catch the ruscist advance along the line of the Siverski Donets, contain Moscow’s one bridgehead, and in autumn of 2022 counterattack north of Izium, reaching Kupiansk and forcing Moscow to retreat.
This moment marked the point where Putin could no longer pretend that victory in the “special military operation” was inevitable. It was a humiliation that he apparently never got over. This makes it even more possible that the Kharkiv offensive is more than a simple feint or attempt to buffer Belgorod from Ukrainian shelling.
Three trajectories seem likely:
A. Moscow could be activating this sector, and probably others like Sumy, to the northwest of Kharkiv, to stretch out Ukrainian forces by presenting a credible threat. This could ease efforts elsewhere.
B. It could instead be fixing Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv area ahead of a surprise offensive west of the city.
C. The aim could be to outflank Ukraine’s defenses north of Kupiansk in a bid to restore the drive on Sloviansk from the north, repeating the success of early 2022.
The level of force that Moscow is applying does make whatever is going on look like more than a feint. A video emerged showing a ruscist Iskander ballistic missile taking out a Ukrainian Vampire multiple rocket launcher after it returned to a hide. But that’s a bit like using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito. The Vampire is a Ukrainian variant of the standard Grad rocket launcher used by almost every Soviet customer since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s not a target worth using a precision guided ballistic missile on unless you absolutely must - or want to make a point.
Moscow either really cares about this operation or wants Ukraine to think it does. The best feints are ones that you can’t ignore, after all. However, Ukraine has a plan for this sort of thing and fortifications prepared well enough back from the border that Moscow couldn’t interrupt construction with routine shelling.
The question is how much firepower Moscow eventually throws in. If it does indeed have a 120,000 strong strategic reserve prepared, that amounts to about a dozen of the Soviet style divisions appearing on the battlefield today. Abandoned is the battalion tactical group concept, which Moscow’s military machine was never professional enough to make work. Now we’re dealing with triangular divisions with three core regiments of infantry each with several separate battalions and at least a company of disposable assault troops in each.
Division and brigade become confusing terms when comparing NATO and Soviet systems. In general, what the Soviets called a division has the approximate combat strength of a similarly equipped NATO brigade. Moscow has apparently sent the 18th Motor Rifle Division at Kharkiv and 72nd Motor Rifle towards Kupiansk, and Ukraine has reacted by moving about a brigade into the path of each, the 42nd blocking 18th Motor Rifle and a detachment or more of Ukraine’s 92nd Assault in the way of the 72nd Motor Rifle.
The biggest unknown about the state of the conflict right now is the status of each side’s reserves. A quick accounting of the publicly known positions of Ukrainian units reveals at least twelve major brigades that haven’t had a public location update in at least a month. Assuming that Syrskyi’s new policies started taking effect in March, Ukraine could easily have pulled 12-15 brigades back to begin forming a viable strategic reserve.
Ukraine has expanded its armed forces by a factor of 4-5 since 2022, implying that between it and willing partners it has been able to put upwards of 30,000 bodies in uniform each month. That is almost identical to the 30,000 that Moscow is able to train, but probably represents a substantial overestimate because many of Ukraine’s personnel serve in rear areas and likely weren’t put through rigorous combat training as a result. There’s only so much training throughput, after all.
Still, an ability to simultaneously train four brigades with up to 20,000 fresh personnel seems within reason. I expect that Ukraine has 3-6 in a position to deploy to handle an emergency at any given time. Two ought to be sufficient to stop the push that Moscow has initiated. If it intensifies and Moscow throws in another corps or three, that still shouldn’t push Ukraine anywhere near a crisis, assuming fortifications and training are up to the task.
For Moscow, the main attraction in initiating offensive operations in this region, aside from potentially Ukrainian reserves away from intervening on other fronts, is that Ukraine is unable to strike deep into its logistics network. Every ruscist operational push is halted before it gets more than ten kilometers in part because of the inefficiency of the distributed supply system Moscow had to adopt.
All things being equal, centralization offers efficiency while decentralization provides resilience. It’s easier to run trucks to artillery from a big depot set up to handle a lot of throughput than it is to have them shuttle between smaller ones. The latter is doable with smart planning, but invariably costs more resources to sustain its own weight.
That’s why the restriction on Ukraine using ATACMS and other fancy precision weapons with a range out to several hundred kilometers is so asinine. Early in the conflict there was reason to fear that Moscow might see ballistic or cruise missile launches from Ukraine as the start of a broader NATO intervention - or worse, a disarming nuclear strike.
But as everyone has had time to observe everyone else’s behavior, it’s blatantly obvious that nobody is using this war as a pretext to launch a disarming or decapitating strike, nuclear or otherwise. At this stage in the game Moscow is simply not going to believe that the few dozen missiles that might land in its territory at any given time from Ukraine constitutes a threat to the survival of the regime.
Putin has apparently finally realized that if he’s going to open a new front, Kharkiv is his best bet - until, of course, ruscist troops move far enough away from the border that their supplies have to be cached on the Ukrainian side. Then it’s HIMARS and ATACMS o’clock. This is part of why I don’t expect his forces to replicate their successes of early 2022.
Now, some will no doubt insist that Moscow is making a mistake by not concentrating all available forces on a truly decisive front. However, a lot of times people talk about logistics without realizing that effective throughput will vary.
By that I mean that it is very possible to saturate the logistical potential of an area to such a degree that adding more troops does more harm than good. It’s why you can’t really talk about Ukraine holding interior lines.
Thanks to drones, you have to spread forces out a lot more. Concentrating them for a decisive strike is likely now a matter of attacking intensively along a broader front than was standard in Cold War tactics when even a few dozen armored vehicles could effectively hide in gaps between enemy radar and satellite scans. To break an enemy front now demands operating across a wider area while somehow building up enough momentum to prevent a new defensive line from forming a short distance behind the one you seized.
Your basic options are to overwhelm an entire front that is or can be isolated or push everywhere, wearing the enemy out until a weak spot forms. The latter is an approach best suited for decentralized, highly autonomous teams, not the intensive mechanized assaults Moscow relies on. Thanks to the lack of major terrain obstacles in the steppe except water channels, lakes, and settlements, the former option is also not ideal for Moscow - hence its persistent efforts to create a cauldron, trapping Ukrainian forces inside.
My expectation over the next two months is that Moscow commits a substantial portion of its reserves to offensives across the entire line of contact. Training about 10,000 more orcs than it has lost each month for the past year, cobbling together units by using motorcycles, ATVs, and golf carts along with MT-LBs from the 1950s and tanks (poorly) protected by metal screens, the army Moscow has on paper is as big as the one it started out with in 2022. But that obscures a tremendous degree of irreversible degradation thanks to the callous way Moscow treats its front line troops.
The most sensible approach would be to apply all its remaining firepower to an area where it stands a chance at surprising Ukraine with how fast it can actually move. As I’ve written in the past, that’s a risky play that probably wouldn’t work but is likely Putin’s only hope.
Being a coward unwilling to roll the dice and accept the outcome, he is set to take a middle approach: threaten Kharkiv and perhaps try to repeat the initial success of the eastern wing of this axis of advance and try to get behind Sloviansk. Couple that with collapsing the Siversk bulge on the other side and laying siege to Kostiantynivka, and Moscow would go into summer with a propaganda win.
Ukraine might even be induced to deploy so much of its reserve that, if aid from abroad comes more slowly than expected or isn’t sufficient to let Ukraine counterattack this fall, Putin is able to cling on into 2025. Like Netanyahu in Israel, he will be hoping that chaos in D.C. around the election will give him a window of opportunity to wriggle out of the trap both are presently in.
I get the sense that Ukraine saw this coming all the way back in January. So it took the wise option of rebooting then, while there was time, preparing to catch and defeat Putin’s offensive then follow it with a sharp and violent counterattack when inventory stocks are restored.
Strategic Factors
The supply of artillery shells is proving to be the single most important factor in determining which side has the upper hand at any given moment along any of the active fronts. Even more than the loss of the limited number of modern armored vehicles Ukraine has so far received from its partners, the lack of sufficient artillery supplies forced the summer campaign of 2023 to scale back early. Right when Ukraine was on the cusp of an operational breakthrough in October shells started running low, with projections I didn’t take seriously enough at the time suggesting a full year before USA and European production ramped up.
Last I saw, projections showed total production in NATO countries reaching around 60,000 shells as of May. The orcs fire off up to 10,000 a day of all calibers, probably around 2/3 of that heavy rocket and artillery ammunition. During winter Ukraine was down to using 1,000 heavy shells a day or even less; total allied production can still only sustain a rate of 2,000 or so. Fortunately, Ukraine’s accuracy advantage means that its 155mm rounds are worth about two orc shots, meaning that it can effectively draw even with an allotment of 3,000 rounds a day. At 90,000/month, that’s over a million shells a year, but by the end of summer factories will be churning them out.
Twice that, or rough parity, is necessary for offensive operations. While the US and Europe won’t reach that level of production until the fourth quarter of 2024, the recent Czech initiative is promising hundreds of thousands of shells starting in June. This should mean that after another three to four weeks of tough times Ukraine’s situation will markedly improve. Ukraine should also be able to set aside enough shells to support offensive operations on a limited front, like Kherson. By fall the rest of the Czech-sourced shells plus production in the USA, EU, and Ukraine should be sufficient to power offensive operations on multiple fronts.
It seems highly unlikely at this point that the rate of shell production isn’t a driving factor in Putin’s military calculations. He badly needs something he can call a victory before July, when his skies will notably darken - and not only because F-16s will start to appear. At broad strokes, the war’s phases have each lasted about a year. First Ukraine was on the back foot, just holding its own. Then it spent a year counterattacking, eventually running out of resources after Moscow belatedly mobilized. Now, though partially crippled for six months thanks to US partisan nonsense, Ukraine is bracing for the toughest part of the long storm before it finally breaks.
Assuming that Putin does throw his reserves into the meat grinder over the next few months, the drain on gear will be so severe that major offensive operations are almost out of the question for years to come. It’s why my general feeling about the latest orc offensive is that this is a campaign waged out of desperation, not sound military sense.
Moscow has to maintain the illusion that it cannot be defeated at any cost. It has to reply in kind to any political provocation. Waving its nuclear arsenal around, as it has started to do again with the latest exercises, is meant to flip that switch in the educated American mind that hears nuclear and reverts to infantile babbling about apocalypse.
When geopolitical fault lines come alive, leaders double down on national myths and misinterpretations of history to justify taking actions they always wanted to anyway. Putin wanted this war not only because he’s after Ukraine, but because his system is a dead end for russia just like Nazism was Germany. It’s a conflict rooted in delusion and bluff - for all the ruscist talk about realism in international affairs, Putin’s empire is a mirror image of the neoliberal and neoconservative cult they call “Western Civilization,” despite most of it being well east of where I sit.
Putin’s russia is a gigantic con, his government a fig leaf for oligarchs and cronies who are sucking the lifeblood from their country. It’s a slow-motion continuation of the Soviet collapse, urban russia eating its rural poor before turning on itself. Without constant expansion, the imperialist virus dies as people inside come to realize that their leaders are preying on them and won’t stop until removed.
The trouble with russia is that Muscovite elites keep trying to stitch together a country with no real geographic foundation and boundaries defined by how well the last war went. All the hostility to the supposedly decadent and immoral west is a reflection of how unstable and temporary Putin’s empire is. Historically, whatever depravity you prefer is tolerated in russia as long as you obey the Tsar. Elites in the country, like those at the top of any pyramid scheme, go along with the insanity because things could always be worse - note how children of rich people in russia don’t sign up to fight in Ukraine?
But russia is not alone in having leaders who distort national myths to their own ends. The real reason that the US is so fervently on Israel’s side despite Tel Aviv’s endlessly self-defeating actions has little to do with geopolitics, as surprising as that might sound.
Every country is built on a story of itself and why it exists as much as raw material interests. To coordinate a complex human organization all but requires a narrative - that’s why companies try so hard to advertise at people, spending millions on ad spots near major sporting events. It’s not about selling products directly, but creating a public narrative about the company that make people unconsciously gravitate towards it. As someone who avoids ads wherever possible I don’t understand why this works, but it manifestly does… at least for certain populations.
National myths are important and meaningful but also constantly manipulated. Putin gets more Soviet as the war in Ukraine drags on in large part because his country is full of old people who long for the Soviet promise of secure pensions and an orderly society respected by the outside world. Beijing harps on China’s century of humiliation to substitute pride in recent national achievements for deserved civil freedoms. The USA’s national story has been through a few iterations, reborn most recently after WW2.
Until the 1940s the federal government had never been so powerful, touching on the lives of ordinary Americans to an unprecedented degree. Eisenhower had an inkling of what was happening and that the Founders would be rightly terrified. But it is what it is.
The parents of the people running the USA today were terrified back then that millions of returning veterans would use their skills to upend the status quo at a fragile moment. America’s stereotypical hyper-consumerist, flag-waving swagger was constructed in the 1940s and 1950s then presented as an eternal fact of life to the generations that followed. Americans were encouraged to see the country as a unified whole, the newly-adopted Pledge of Allegiance emphasizing one nation, indivisible for an explicit rhetorical purpose.
Back in the 1970s Israel managed to become bound up with America’s Postwar mythos as it evolved in the wake of the turmoil of the 1960s. After Vietnam the USA went from seeing the Second World War as a tragic but necessary fight against fascism to part of a global crusade to spread liberal democracy - with US leaders choosing the meaning and implementation of both liberal and democracy. The Holocaust was now centered in America’s story about why it fought the Second World War, despite most Americans in the thirties and early forties being opposed to getting involved or taking Jewish refugees.
World War Two became a foundation myth for an American-led version of Western Civilization bound by a supposed code of universal ethics. The problem with this was that the USA fought savagely in World War Two, wiping out whole cities with little real impact on the battlefield. Even the atomic bombings of Japan were less of a cause for its ultimate conditional surrender than the Imperial Army’s collapse in Manchuria under the weight of a massive Soviet offensive.
This is all justified by arguing that the USA was stopping the Holocaust, opposing evil incarnate. But this elides deeper truths - and has set the stage for the US being incapable of meaningfully restraining Israel even when it is harming its own interests. To criticize Israel’s conduct is akin to saying that the USA should have negotiated with the Nazis to end the war without Hitler’s unconditional surrender.
Why Ukraine isn’t treated the same way, constantly encouraged to negotiate with and even cede territory to Putin, speaks volumes about America today and reveals the hollow nature of the American Postwar myth in the 2020s. Biden has offered Netanyahu arms and political cover every step of the way as Israel has obliterated Gaza. Never mind that all it has accomplished is ensure that Hamas returns more virulent than ever, killing more than twenty thousand civilians but fewer than half of Hamas’ fighters in the process. As the Israeli government has abandoned the hostages, so has Biden abandoned any real effort at holding Israel back.
Halting one shipment of bombs after six months is a bit rich - as if Israel didn’t see this coming and stockpile ahead of time. And the wordplay Biden, ever the lawyer, engages in! Israel will be in serious trouble this time, he wants the world to believe, if Israel launches a major assault on Rafah. But there’s always that wiggle room his comments leave, the lawyer’s convenient out: in this case the distinction between a major and minor attack.
This charade is all just a way for him to look less powerless in front of the American public and shame progressives into turning out in November. So long as Gaza is out of the headlines by the Democratic Convention in August, Netanyahu can do as he pleases.
Israel’s plan for Gaza has been apparent since at least the start of the year. Gaza is to be permanently shrunk, its land connection with Egypt severed, a strip along the coast plus parts of ruined Khan Younis and Rafah becoming the new mini-Gaza. A pier controlled by Israel will be its only lifeline to the wider world; military bases will surround it. Most of Gaza will be a wasteland inhabited by stragglers allowed no international support, presumed to be supporters of Hamas, until Israel feels that it has a handle on the tunnel situation. Then settlers can flow into the ruins of Gaza City, satisfying the hardliners that Netanyahu needs to keep his government intact.
Once the time has come, Israel will move on to southern Lebanon, Netanyahu still having no option now but more war if he wants to keep his job. He, like Putin, is committed to fomenting instability until he finds a way out of the trap.
Yet Ukraine is the country that’s supposed to negotiate, according to the wise minds the Biden Administration is encouraging to head out in public to assert. All wars end in negotiation, they say. Kyiv is still free, they remind us - all thanks to the good old USA.
Hardly - but delusions have power. They also lead to a chronic failure to adapt before it’s too late. This will serve as a nice epitaph for the “western world” when the tired concept is relegated to the dustbin of history at long last.