The Nuclear Option And Putin's Winter Campaign
Victory in Ukraine depends on a proper scientific understanding of nuclear arms. Putin's nuclear threats have more power over the public imagination than they should.
It’s been another busy week in Ukraine and the broader world. Without further ado, straight to the weekly overview - after that some nuclear science, followed by a brief on geopolitics. Apologies if there are more typos than usual, but in trying to make this readable I ran a bit low on time. Have a good week!
Weekly Overview1
Putin’s strategy for the winter of 2024-2025 is falling into place. Despite casualties hitting record levels again, the orc generals are in a race to secure a viable defense line before Ukraine can muster enough combat power to force Moscow permanently onto the defensive.
Syrskyi faces the dilemma of choosing how much ground to give up now in order to spare lives and resources needed to power the 2025 Liberation Campaign. Thanks to limited quantities of modern equipment and effective leaders, Ukraine still has to carefully husband its strength. In 2025 I expect that a much riskier approach will be warranted, but for now Moscow is burning through its combat power at an exorbitant rate, setting the orc machine up for a nasty shock next summer.
In another excellent piece of analysis, Tatarigami did a great job of dissecting the claim that Moscow will be unable to sustain the war by 2026. It’s important to keep in mind that Putin won’t be out of resources by any means. But the depletion of tanks, troop carriers, and artillery from stocks will lead to more and more frontline units being poorly equipped and increasingly vulnerable.
Though the progress is hard to make out in real time, Ukraine has been steadily climbing up the power curve, so to speak, knife in teeth. Ukrainian operations in Kursk since August have been substantially more effective than most during the fight to breach the Surovikin Line in 2023. Ukrainian soldiers can now call in close air support to a degree unheard of then. Though it was at first feared that Moscow’s ability to scale up drone production would swamp Ukrainian efforts, in practice Ukraine’s small drone operations are improving at a rapid pace while Moscow’s lag.
This isn’t to downplay how hard the fighting is or the challenges Ukrainian soldiers and civilians face every day. But if by next summer the glide bomb threat is substantially reduced, Ukrainian operations stand to become relentless, at times positively explosive.
Right now, Ukrainian leaders are still having to decide how many people to send into battle improperly equipped now so that the chance to punch back in a big way is won. This horrible choice is inevitable, but made worse by partner hesitation to give Ukraine the gear its soldiers desperately need.
On the other hand, it’s easy to detect a growing desperation in the Kremlin to maintain the illusion that Moscow can fight like this forever. Ground operations are now conducted mainly to prevent Ukraine from building up combat forces in important areas - and grinding towards Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. The aim is to leverage a potential new cutoff of American aid in early 2025 to make a new Ukrainian counteroffensive look too costly for other allies to support. When the gambit fails, Moscow will then play Surovikin Line on a grander scale.
It’s useful to view the Ukraine War at this point as split into three distinct theaters - Northern, Eastern, and Southern - each predominantly served by its own portion of the ruscist logistics network. On either side of the Eastern Theater are two critical hinge points near vital arteries that, if severed, radically alter the supply situation along a huge chunk of the front:
Ukraine is fighting in Donbas to stop Moscow from seizing the urban areas still free, as these are essential bases Ukraine must hold to have any chance of cutting off occupied urban Donbas in the future. But beyond that, Ukraine’s fight across the Eastern Theater is focused entirely on maximizing the cost the orcs pay for each square kilometer taken on the road to key built up areas.
The vital question facing Ukrainian troops across all three theaters is where to make a stand through winter. As the mud worsens, control of hard paved surfaces becomes extremely important to sustain logistics. In addition, to endure the elements soldiers mostly have to be positioned under existing structures, especially basements. These can be heated without giving off an obvious thermal signature and store supplies under cover.
Multiple alternate sites are required thanks to the glide bomb threat, so larger towns are ideal, especially if there are heights nearby to briefly fight from in a bid to slow the enemy’s approach. Smaller towns in Ukraine tend to be little more than villages easily flattened by a few air strikes, so it’s to Ukraine’s advantage to fight near bigger settlements, especially when the orcs have to cross a big gap to get from their bases to the front lines.
These considerations have to guide what ground Ukraine fights for and how hard: after a six month slog it should be time to turn the tide once and for all, and as many soldiers need to be alive as possible to maximize the impact. As to the theaters themselves, the Southern has been quietest and the Eastern hottest.
The North Koreans have arrived in Kursk, at least the first few thousand, but so far they haven’t entered combat. Soon, no doubt. So here is where the Kim dynasty’s juche doctrine has led… and what a humiliation for mighty Moscow to be dependent on it! Though from the images so far, the offer of three square meals a day might be enough to convince a lot of them to defect.
Overall, Ukraine’s defense in Kursk continues to be stiff, particularly as Ukrainian forces have consolidated around a tighter perimeter northwest of Sudzha. Syrskyi recently reported over sixteen thousand orc casualties since August, and Ukrainians generally have the video evidence to back their claims up. Obviously Ukrainian casualties are undeclared, but in past operations that have gone well the ratio has been upwards of one to six or so - sometimes even better - implying maybe three thousand Ukrainian casualties, in the neighborhood of 500 fatalities and as many crippling injuries. Double that if you want an upper bound, half for a lower.
This is a lot of human lives, I know. But as many would likely have died holding out on some other front where the upwards of 80,000 soldiers Moscow sent to Kursk would have otherwise been available to accelerate the orc advance. 50,000-60,000 remain, but they’re apparently decreasing about as fast as the North Koreans can dispatch new cannon fodder.
The Kursk Campaign is a clear winner on two fronts: incurring disproportionate casualty rates and forcing Moscow to shift reserves. How long to persist is now the question, as there are other regions of russia which could benefit from a similar treatment.
So far, the orcs have mainly been applying pressure to the western flank in Kursk. This appears to be as much because of the threat Ukrainian troops posed to Glushkovo as operational logic. Ukraine unleashed its second penetration of the border right as Moscow made the first big push from Korenovo to Snagost. After holding the ruscist troops in the Snagost valley for weeks, right after these broke out a few kilometers towards Sudzha the Ukrainians pulled the incursion and counterattacked the orcs head-on with 47th Mechanized Brigade, Abrams and Bradleys recently confirmed fighting on the ground in Novoivanovka.
Overall, Ukraine’s core strategy in Kursk is posing a big enough threat of seizing an even bigger chunk of real estate to pull the orcs in. The next two to four months will likely see a slow Ukrainian withdrawal towards the border that aims to inflict another fifteen to twenty casualties while suffering even fewer, as Ukrainian troops won’t have to risk pushing far into enemy territory.
Moscow will almost certainly launch attacks from the east, but as the fighting has quieted somewhat of late on this flank Ukrainian troops may be fresher and capable of a very stiff defense. Generally speaking, roads and streams rule the battlefield in Kursk right now, as the former allow supplies and reinforcements to move while the latter restrict orc attack lanes. Ukraine is fighting to control a defensible perimter it can also quickly move troops around to secure when a big orc punch needs cleaning up.
To the east of Kursk, fighting is still happening in Kharkiv - and also a sliver of Belgorod, supposedly, Zhuravlyovka or at least the woods along the border nearby under Ukrainian occupation. I guess once a lot of russia falls, nobody worries much about a little bit. Anyway, little ground is changing hands in Kharkiv-Belgorod, Kursk attracting most of the reserves allocated to either side.
Most of the action this week has been in the Eastern Theater, particularly on the southern flank between Velyka Novosilka and Kurakhove. Over the past few days Moscow has made some unusually rapid moves north of Vuhledar, jumping north between five and seven kilometers to the next line of settlements.
Bohioavlenka, Novoukrainka, and Shakhtarske have all been at least partially occupied, each lying along the road leading up to Kurakhove through Uspenivka. That makes the move a threat to the flank of the hard-fought 79th Air Assault Brigade and suggests that 72nd Mechanized Brigade is either exhausted or rotated off the line. 128th Mountain Assault Brigade appeared according to Ukraine Control Map, and as it was previously in the Orihiv-Kamianske area I have to wonder if a recent ruscist probe there is related to a rotation.
The speed of the orc assault and lack of evidence that Ukrainian units were overrun suggests that Ukraine is planning to pull the defense line back behind the paved road directly connecting Velyka Novosilka to Kurakhove. This orientation would reduce the total front Ukrainian forces in this sector have to cover from around 50km to 40km while keeping an even better hard road well behind the front lines. Ukrainian forces here would have their left flank covered by the large group defending the southern approaches to Pokrovsk as it slowly pulls back towards the highway connecting Pokrovsk with Velyka Novosilka.
Ukraine has only four to six regular brigades augmented by as many national guard and territorial formations in this area, no more than 10% of its total strength. Unfortunately the flat terrain and lack of a lot of water obstacles cutting across the line of enemy advance make a firm defense difficult. It’s also at the outer edge of Ukraine’s logistics network and in a place where wandering Patriot SAMs face potential attacks from three directions, making effective air defenses difficult.
A retreat to better positions seems well in order - provided they are prepared. This has proven a problem before. As Moscow’s forces advance, their logistics will become ever more vulnerable. Ukraine has begun using repeater drones along with attack models ranges up to 20km or more. If that continues, Ukraine will be able to chew apart any orc attack before it even deploys for battle - weather permitting. Firepower will have to fill the gaps.
Just north of the Velyka Novosilka-Kurakhove line, of course, is the fight for the southern flank of the Pokrovsk front. Here Ukraine is, as predicted, slowly being pushed back from the salient on the Vovcha north of Kurakhove. Fortunately a road runs along the northern bank of the reservoir, making encirclement difficult. Ukraine appears to withdrawn most of the brigades formerly in this area to stabilize the line farther north.
While Ukrainian troops should be able to slowly pull back here, the loss of the ridge south of Selydove and the town of Vyshneve on the road in from the southwest means that the town itself could no longer be defended. Kara-Dag got out, having fought well in a place I had expected Ukraine would swiftly abandon not long after losing Novohrodivka to the north.
The rest of the Pokrovsk front has been stable - not quiet by any means, but Moscow has made almost zero progress towards Pokrovsk itself in weeks. One small bridgehead was attempted at Novotoretske, towards the crucial highway to Kostiantynivka just northeast of Pokrovsk, but hasn’t gone anywhere.
Much the same can be said of the fronts in Toretsk and Chasiv Yar. Though a week ago both looked to be in trouble, orc bridgeheads across the canal in Chasiv Yar were either eliminated or rendered so insecure they haven’t expanded and Moscow remains bogged down in the high rises in central Toretsk. Nor has Moscow made any more progress towards Siversk.
On the northern wing of the Eastern Theater Moscow has had a little more success over the past week. Here, Ukrainian brigades west of the Oskil and Zherebets rivers are fending off a clear orc attempt to push Ukraine behind them. There are several spearheads.
One push has cleared the space between Makiivka and Terny down towards Kreminna, something the orcs have been fighting to do for many months now. Ukrainian troops here are likely better off on the steep ridge west of the Zherebets anyway. Whether Terny and Yampolivka to the south share the same fate will be decided in the coming weeks. Regardless, Zarichne and nearby Torske should be much tougher to crack and force the orcs to cross dangerous country between there and Kreminna just to fight: there’s only one hard road, and it’s flanked by dense forest.
Further north, Moscow is pressing an offensive towards Borova, hoping to be able to threaten the flank of Ukrainian forces along the Zherebets and advance towards Lyman. This is all but a prerequisite to take urban Donbas, but will also be tough for Moscow to pull off given that it’s taken months for the spearhead passing from Pischane to Kruhliakivka and success would require advancing with Ukrainian forces shooting from the high ground across the Oskil.
The orcs are trying to send another one directly at Borova, but it hasn’t gone far, apparently pre-empted by Third Assault Brigade and counterattacked as soon as it gained a few tree lines. Similarly, direct attacks on Kupiansk itself keep failing, Moscow running into serious trouble coming within about fifteen kilometers of most built up areas unless backed by massive numbers of glide bombs.
To these there isn’t much hope of a solution in the short term, though more Patriot systems would help. It’s been an oddly quiet week on the strategic bombardment front, no mass missile attacks and only a couple Ukrainian drone raids along with the usual nightly ruscist Shahed air defense mapping game that every now and again results in a fatality on the ground.
It appears that some kind of understanding may be in place where each side is presently refraining from intensive strikes on power infrastructure. Putin insisted this was off the table rather out of nowhere when the Kursk Campaign began, which is a roundabout way of making an offer while pretending it was withdrawn. Behavior is the tell: each side seems to be waiting for the other to make a move.
Similarly, there isn’t much new news on the aviation front except for Britain claiming to have completed initial training for two hundred pilots. That’s fantastic, though it’s more about 2026 and beyond, a year needed in the best case scenario imaginable to transition to advance trainers then actual combat jets. But the pipeline’s existence is important, because by the end of 2025 Ukraine’s air force should be getting the sort of overhaul the ground forces ought to receive in the next six months.
In a strategic sense, Ukraine’s best bet is to continue doing exactly what it is: trade space for time while fighting stubbornly wherever it can secure a local advantage. Unfortunately, thanks to the way media covers conflicts, this is going to mean months of pundits talking about a crumbling front.
It might be true in some places, but the scale of this conflict has to be kept in mind. There are approximately a hundred brigades deployed, around sixty from the regular army, twenty the national guard, and another twenty the territorials. Each fields around three line battalions and as many supporting elements, about two-thirds covering sections of the front at any given time. That’s a lot of people to keep track of, and a lot of variation between experiences.
Statistically speaking, some battalions are going to get screwed over in the thick of battle. This plays right into one of the primary themes of the information wars both Moscow and D.C. are waging to convince ordinary Ukrainians of the ultimate futility of resistance. That message is presently being spread far and wide by open and unwitting allies of oligarchs in both worlds
The signal is only amplified when Ukrainian leaders act in line with propaganda. A recent incident has come to light involving a territorial battalion alleging both misuse by 110th Mechanized Brigade command and retaliation after refusing impossible orders. This is the same brigade command that back during the fight for Avdiivka left a bunch of soldiers in the exposed Zenit position for too long, resulting in a group of wounded being executed by the orcs after surrendering. I’m beginning to wonder if it concealed the dire situation back when Zaluzhnyi was in command until it was too late.
Mistakes will happen, but cases of neglect must be visibly punished. There are no excuses for threatening members of a unit that refuses bad orders with execution - if morale is that shot, rest it or break it up. Soviet-style nonsense must be cut out before it can fester. This is exactly why pro-orc types have lately been pushing the line that Ukrainian generals don’t care about ordinary soldiers: their goal is to damage morale and recruitment.
Of course, plenty of Western pundits whisper nonsense about Ukrainian competence too - or have since the NATO-planned 2023 offensive was replaced about a week in by something actually sustainable given the resources available. It’s notable that the American side of the information war visibly turned hard against Zelensky after the Kursk Campaign. All of a sudden talk about his legitimacy burbled to the surface. Suggestions have been made that Zaluzhnyi might become president if elections were held.
American leaders love to imply that an ally can be replaced - they’re as big on bluffing about how much power they really have as Putin. There are, unfortunately, many American oligarchs for whom bringing Ukraine into the “Western Club” is about a combination of profit-mongering and cultural imperialism, and they like to cultivate ties with potential tools.
The American media’s largely scripted reception to Zelensky’s Victory Plan is another big tell - when Americans in a position of power don’t like something but fear saying so, they come up with important-sounding but ultimately vague excuses. “Readiness” is a useful one for the Pentagon to claim that it can’t dip into the old M1A1 stocks at the Sierra Army Depot even though it’ll never send US troops to battle in anything that old ever again. All the fear-mongering about escalation is in the same league.
Information wars don’t have a strong effect in the short term, but like other forms of advertising can alter public perception of what is normal after a while. The way most people are taught to think about nuclear weapons has been impacted by an information war going back over half a century.
On The Science Of Nuclear War2
The popular vision of nuclear arms and warfare has been deeply, perhaps even fundamentally, tainted by politics. Bringing them up often triggers a strong emotional response as a result of eight decades of justified public concern about how nuclear arms might lead to a global apocalypse.
From popular films like Oppenheimer in the West to Putin’s mouthpieces who constantly yammer about their big, bad nukes straight through to the tinpot dictatorships like North Korea, it’s the same con: those with a few nukes pretend these make them invincible, the few with a great many are determined to keep the club small for that very reason.
In more autocratic, authoritarian regimes, lack of direct public accountability breeds long-term instability due to lack of effective mechanisms for reconciling conflicts without violence. Fear of what happens to you personally if your clique loses power to rivals leads to escalating efforts to retain control of formal institutions of power.
Desire for nuclear arms is always tied to a regime’s fear of losing power. Nuclear weapons become a totemic symbol of the state’s alleged might that can offset glaring weaknesses in other power domains. But while foreign threats are always cited to justify their development, in truth it’s always domestic rivals the clique most fears.
If you dive into the history of each nuclear power, there are always two paramount fears the regime that obtains nuclear weapons fears: threats from without and within. Unauthorized use has been a major concern since day one of the nuclear age, and not only because of the risk of unintentional war. Abroad, anyone with nuclear arms gains a degree of freedom in global affairs that Putin’s assault on Ukraine amply demonstrates. That is enough to explain the longstanding desire to prevent proliferation on the part of even leading nuclear powers.
Though the defeat of Nazi Germany was at the forefront of the thoughts of the funders and scientists behind the Manhattan Project, American leaders in the 1940s were also keenly aware of the internal instability the USA might experience in the aftermath of the Second World War. Though the standard storyline in America today has it that everyone then was unified in defeating fascism, fear of a large returning veteran population adept at organizing to accomplish difficult tasks like storming Omaha beach loomed large in elite thought.
Those fears have faded, but preventing designated bad countries like Iran or Iraq from getting the bomb is today seen by many leaders as being worth the cost of an intense conventional war. Meanwhile the United States is allowed to completely ignore its longstanding legal obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to move towards total disarmament.
This sort of hypocrisy almost always covers up for a desire to wield power. It has been widely established that American leaders have threatened to use or implied the potential for using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear opponents on numerous occasions. In a very real sense, Western proponents of the Nuclear Taboo are the mirror image of Putin’s propagandists who shout so much about wiping out London or New York in response to NATO weapons supplies: it’s all a gigantic head game.
People being people, the fact that everyone in power knows this is what allows some, like Putin, to make threats which exploit the already fragile situation. Which undermines his own essential nuclear bluff in a way that will lead to actual nuclear use designed to bluff readiness for a worse exchange.
The odds limited nuclear conflict are increasing all the time. Yet virtually every media product over the past half century that has dealt with nuclear war perpetrates the Cold War myth of the thing being one great big world-ending kaboom. The truth is that a cathartic bombs fall and nearly everybody dies scenario is about as realistic as a zombie apocalypse.
It’s absolutely possible, make no mistake. But it would require a chain of events that are so unlikely as to render threats of global total nuclear war laughable.
In particular, large-scale destruction of major cities is off the table. The reason is simple: numerous excellent modeling efforts over the years have demonstrated that the nuclear combustion of just a few dozen urban areas would plunge the whole planet into a winter lasting several years. When stuff burns, smoke is produced. Particles go up into the air, and remain - that’s what smog is, the residue of all the pollution coming from exhaust pipes in urban areas.
Most heavier bits quickly fall or wash out of the lower atmosphere. That’s what fallout is, and while the radioactive hazard is very dangerous, the impact dilutes rather quickly with distance from ground zero. Hence all the videos of people standing in the open observing nuclear tests: in the end, they’re just really big bombs. Standard chemical explosives leave poisonous residue too. Ignited by nuclear fire or not, any blaze that burns at a hot enough temperature to ignite a structure is going to vaporize a lot of extremely nasty chemicals in the process.
What would kill in a scenario where any substantial number of cities went up in smoke is not the radioactive fallout, but collapse of global food chains during the multi-year winter that would follow. Those with greenhouses powered by renewable energy would survive, but everybody else… yikes.
It has never actually been the potential for a great, world-ending kaboom that prevented a nuclear war from breaking out, at least not after the early 1960s. The Second World War demonstrated rather conclusively that destruction alone does not end wars. Only the proven threat of physical defeat and occupation forces regimes to reconsider their choices, and sometimes they have to crack apart before a remnant sees reason.
War is politics, and politics is war. There are always hidden rules that get worked out as regimes interact and seek to secure their interests against uncertainty and surprise. Leaders can usually rely on other people suffering the consequences of their policy, creating a buffer between them and the harm they cause. That’s why stuff like assassinations are so upsetting to them.
Ever since the first atomic weapon was tested, the use of each subsequent weapon - twice in wartime, thousands during the Cold War - was meant to deliver a simple message of capability. Most people who wind up in positions of power are wary of a fight where they themselves might be harmed, so this message resonates. Leaders are always embedded in a clique that itself seeks survival perhaps even more strongly than an individual might.
This explains why countries like Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, China, India, and possibly a few others covertly, like Iran, invested in small arsenals. South Africa developed them once because the minority Apartheid regime wanted a trump card.
The other nuclear powers, France, Britain, and especially the USA and USSR, built their arsenals to demonstrate that they were global players to reckon with no matter how strong their conventional forces were. In the case of the first two, a nuclear arsenal compensated for the loss of empire, and eventually transitioned into a cost-effective way to guarantee national security deployed under the same logic as employed by any other small nuclear power.
The USA and USSR got locked into an escalating demonstration of capability that resulted in each, at one point, deploying over ten thousand warheads. Nuclear arms became both a symbol of each regime’s might, but also, paradoxically, presented a massive liability. Each constantly created new capabilities to carry on pretending this was necessary to avoid the other side thinking it could win a nuclear war. The addition of each new capability also created a need for defenses that could protect it against enemy attack, both sides dispersing and hardening their arsenals at great cost to demonstrate resilience against any surprise attack.
Naturally, each side’s military actively sought ways to defeat some or part of the enemy’s nuclear force if worst came to worst. Over the decades, the increasing precision of weapons made it possible to shrink nuclear warheads, allowing for each side to directly target the other’s deployed nuclear weapons to an unprecedented degree. This is why by the 1980s the USA’s and USSR’s nuclear warfighting plans had moved away from striking cities at all and embraced what is called counterforce targeting.
In the event of an actual nuclear exchange, no side is likely to attack the other’s cities, at least not right away. These are better left alone as bargaining chips - and as a way to communicate that there are limits to the conflict. That’s how leaders will communicate that they aren’t going for a kill, so their opponent should do likewise. Mutual assured destruction was only ever a guarantee for regimes - everyone else was expendable.
Back in the Cold War, nuclear theorist Hermann Kahn came up with a concept called the escalation ladder. Often misunderstood today as a prediction of the inevitability of an all-out exchange once you take the first step, in fact he was describing a situation old Clausewitz understood well: two nuclear combatants have strong incentives to avoid total war. As a result, they seek to create a gap between what they did do and what they could do, not going all-out in order to leave space for more escalation.
It is this relationship that perversely makes the large, sprawling arsenals deployed by D.C. and Moscow far more dangerous than most people realize. Not truly believing that either will commit to an all-out exchange, both have an incentive to conduct limited nuclear wars that go no further than attacks on a portion of the other side’s arsenal even in the worst case.
The most attractive target is intercontinental ballistic missiles in silos - like the ones the USA has all over the Great Plains, upwind of the Corn Belt. Weapons the US military-industrial-media complex is throwing billions of dollars renovating for a new Cold War. Long described as America’s nuclear sponge, the ICBM fields are ground zero for any future attempt by Moscow or Beijing - now rapidly expanding its own arsenal to match the USA’s - to bluff D.C. into backing down during a future crisis.
While it might seem far-fetched, Putin could wind up in a situation where it became rational to unleash his land-based ICBMs - which he knows the US could almost certainly quickly destroy in a war anyway - to strike the USA’s. As they started to fly he’d call up the White House with a simple offer: you do no more to us in reply, hitting now mostly empty silos, and we’ll call things even. Negotiations over all outstanding issues can begin before this has a chance to go any further.
This is escalate to de-escalate taken to its logical conclusion. When leaders give in to Putin’s nuclear bluffs, they make it more likely. This grim scenario is why the USA should be reducing its inherently destabilizing ICBM arsenal, not expanding it, eventually relying solely on submarines to ensure a resilent second-strike capability. Lacking the ability to easily strike a limited portion of the broader US arsenal, Putin and other enemies will have to look for another channel to send any messages, something less damaging to the world’s food supply and half of rural America.
So, where does Ukraine stand in this? Zelensky has been talking about nuclear arms recently explicitly because Ukraine doesn’t want them or the complications they bring. Nuclear weapons are in fact generally more trouble than their worth, destabilizing both externally and internally. They make a country less safe, not more - however, if you’re already unsafe, especially if threatened by a nuclear power, the cost is worth it.
This is why Zelensky’s remarks, though controversial, were necessary and well-timed. The stakes of the conflict are now clear as crystal: Putin is defeated and the power of nuclear weapons is partly neutered, or uncontrolled proliferation will begin. Ukraine won’t be the first, but also not the last. It’s NATO for Ukraine, or half of Europe goes nuclear. And does anyone want Orban or Erdogan with nukes?
Geopolitics3
Israel finally got around to launching its promised retaliation for Iran hitting it with a couple hundred ballistic missiles at the start of October, and it was mercifully proportional. Supposedly around a hundred jets were involved, a core group of a few dozen likely delivering the main punch of air-launched ballistic missiles from outside Iranian airspace. Israel seems to have hit a few largely symbolic targets that it can claim represents crippling blows but mostly just communicate what Israel could have done in a bigger strike.
Israel just communicated that it accepts the rules of the game as they presently stand: anything short of what it has done already, that is to say, killing prominent allies of Iran and IRGC officers in Tehran and Beirut, will not trigger another massive Iranian reply. Hostilities can continue at the present level going forward. Israel will continue moving towards the effective annexation of Gaza and southern Lebanon.
I actually have to give the Biden Administration credit for this one - through strategic leaks, anonymous sources, and probably some outright threats, Netanyahu was convinced to refrain from hitting Iran so hard that it would be obligated to launch an even bigger barrage than the last. Biden’s primary objective was of course to prevent oil prices from skyrocketing prior to the elections. An oil shock would be the death knell for the Democrats’ electoral hopes at the federal level.
Thankfully, the world appears to have been spared a bigger blowup for now. Unfortunately, in these tit-for-tat exchanges, there is always the risk of a mistake that forces escalation to the next level.
I expect US military action against Iran in Trump’s second term, because as soon as his type starts to have trouble implementing their big plans - as he will, if he’s at all serious - they find a scapegoat abroad. It’s a relationship as old as politics. Talk about Trump being a “peace” candidate is inane. It’s as pathetic a play as Harris embracing the Cheney family to make Democrats feel as if they’ve finally “won” the national family argument. This is what happens when an oligarchy transforms democracy into theater.
Unfortunately, I see no hard evidence that the Harris-Walz administration will be able to sustain support for Ukraine even if elected. I’m sorry to say, but the essential core of Team Blue’s support for Ukraine has always been dangerously hollow, tied to portraying Trump as in bed with Putin, therefore unelectable. This is probably the last time that play will work. The Alexander Vindemans and Anne Applebaums of the world are already latching on to the thin assertion that Ukraine’s Victory Plan “lacks details” or is just a “laundry list of asks” as a prelude to walking way after the election and blaming Zelensky.
At this point, either the polls, both partisan and non-partisan, are all completely biased in the exact same way, or the next president will face a Congress so narrowly divided that passing major legislation is impossible. Whoever loses will turn to the courts to carry on the partisan squabbles because a significant chunk of their base will reject the result, some declaring America’s democracy to have ended.
There are just no happy short-term outcomes to forecast for America at this point because the country has grown apart. Most states are not competitive, and therefore lacking democratic accountability, because politics now intersects so strongly with regional culture. All peacetime political debates in any democracy boil down to who pays the taxes - that’s the dismal reality of political-economy. Trump’s talk about raising tariffs is actually code for regional economic warfare: the interior against the coasts. Ironically, that includes a fair few Red States, but both parties are positively obsessed with the dwindling populations in the Northeast, so self-destructive trade wars it is.
The underlying tensions tearing the USA apart are structural, driven by the emergence of not two, but half a dozen regional alliances built on broadly shared cultural values reflected in an enduring local partisan majority. Biden’s election merely marked a four year slowing in America’s self-immolation. On the plus side, fire is both a source of destruction and renewal. Sometimes it’s the only viable means of disposing of dead brush.
Fortunately, unlike back in 2017, America’s allies are alert to the danger. They know exactly who Trump is and what he represents. A major reason why Zelensky’s Victory Plan was so coldly received by officialdom in the USA is that it plainly foresees the inevitable: American retreat.
In any case, the Ukraine War has already gone international, the lessons about warfare and power politics it is teaching being steadily absorbed by players big and small. North Korea’s direct involvement is pulling South Korea in too, and though it will take some time before Seoul changes its export laws, its ability to supply non-combatant countries in NATO means that an expanded ring exchange should be possible that Japan might participate in too.
Both have robust domestic military production capabilities and a lot of older inventory they don’t export because of strict laws. But if they can equip countries in Europe that don’t share a border with russia, that should unlock a corresponding flow of modern gear to Ukraine. And needless to say, industrial cooperation is desirable, with domestic production of modern stuff in Ukraine ramping up.
The flip side of the USA’s visible dysfunction is that nature abhors a vacuum. Across Europe and East Asia a reconsideration of what mutual security means is set to unfold. And it’s about time.
Conclusion
The loss of any American support will hurt Ukraine, but in reality, Ukraine has survived first and foremost because Ukrainians chose to resist. They didn’t do it just because the government told them to, but because of the natural human urge to defend their community against an invader.
There is plenty of military hardware across the democratic world and countries with a stake in a future without unchecked nuclear proliferation and blood-drenched wars of conquest to power Ukraine through to victory. Even if Putin’s dream came true and the USA dissolved, enough of the country is rich enough and reflexively anti-imperial enough to join with the rest of the free world and win this thing. It might even happen faster if D.C. weren’t involved.
But even taking D.C. out of the picture, Ukraine can still fight and win. In fact, the collapse of the USA the world has known for eighty years might be the kick in the rear democratic leaders need to reform global institutions as should have happened long ago.
Overview
Science
Geopolitics