The Second December Of Total War In Ukraine
Though the USA's federal government continues to be mired in partisan chaos, Europe stepping up for Ukraine in a sign of the conflict's future.
Ukraine has a very hard fight ahead of it, of that there can be no doubt. But the situation is far less grim than the media is making it out to be on this second holiday season of all-out war.
With regards to the holidays, I’ll still post weekly, just not on the regular schedule as both Christmas and New Years Day fall on Monday this year.
Also, a big thanks to all my readers over the past year. I didn’t expect that analysis of this kind would be interesting enough to power an email list over 600 strong and growing fast. The interest and support is much appreciated!
I’ll keep it up next year, hoping once more that it will be the last where Ukraine has to be the main focus. It’d be nice to actually write about systems theory, not just apply it to understand the worst conflict of my lifetime.
The first section will cover the fronts and be of more interest to most than the second, which I admit gets a bit esoteric. But with the true depth of American support for Ukraine going from “as long as it takes” to “as long as possible” it’s worth dissecting the intellectual front in the conflict. It gets a bit esoteric and cuts against the conventional wisdom, but the hypocrisy of the so-called West needs to be diagnosed for what it it: a threat to Ukraine’s success.
Moscow’s Latest Push
Ukraine has been on the defensive in most fronts this past week, taking advantage of Putin’s desperation for progress ahead of his election campaign to remove around a thousand occupiers from the field every day. Moscow is still exceeding its ability to replace high quality troops and even basic military hardware over the long run, an unsustainable situation that will have impacts down the line unless Putin is given a breather to fully recuperate.
Desperate to push Ukraine into collapse and convince its partners to cut aid, Putin’s forces are attacking on multiple fronts in what presents an almost ideal situation for Zaluzhnyi and his staff, all things considered. Ukrainian troops, while naturally reporting grim and depressing fighting under awful conditions, appear to be moving towards an elastic defense where they only bother to retake positions if they can inflict disproportionate casualties on the enemy in the process.
Had Ukraine followed Pentagon’s advice and thrown all its forces into a single lunge towards the Azov Coast on a narrow front this summer, it would almost certainly have lost all its modern kit and two or three times as many lives. And if Ukraine had exhausted its forces, Moscow’s turn to mounting major attacks on multiple fronts would have made a lot of sense. Apparently expecting exhausted Ukrainian units, ruscist troops on the advance are instead being torn apart by brigades like the 47th that were in the thick of intense summer fighting.
In fact, a rare encounter between a Bradley of the 47th and a ruscist BMP-2 was caught on drone feed between the Avdiivka Coke Plant and the frontline village of Stepove. Generally speaking, armored vehicles haven’t been engaged in a lot of tank-on-tank action during this conflict - something that was also true in the Second World War. There have been exceptions, notably during the early days of the conflict when ruscist units marching on Chernihiv got bushwhacked on the home turf of Ukraine’s 1st Tank Brigade.
But for the most part a duel between IFVs as seen in this incredible shot isn’t as common as you’d think. Just as was true eight decades ago, the ideal way to fight is to lure your enemy into an ambush where they never see what kills them. More tanks throughout history have generally been destroyed by anti-tank guns or missiles as opposed to other tanks - artillery and air power are the other main killers. When taking down the Western Allies in 1940 German forces rarely had an advantage when tanks met, most of Guderian’s steel fist being composed of mark two models armed with an autocannon not unlike the one put to such excellent effect by the gunner of this Bradley.
The situation in Avdiivka overall remains very dangerous for Ukraine, with ruscist forces slowly creeping west on the northern flank of the fortress town. It appears that Moscow is putting renewed effort into pushing the southern flank too, though there are some suggestions that the attack on Avdiivka is already being downgraded from a major offensive in order to pursue advances elsewhere, so this could actually be an effort to build on the orcs slowly pushing Ukraine out of Marinka, a bit south of Avdiivka.
The same basic strategy of having infantry teams sometimes backed by armored vehicles claw forward in places Ukraine hasn’t concentrated a lot of troops is similar to what Moscow attempted last year. It is costly and has little hope of actually breaking the Ukrainian defense, but does have the potential to pull frontline Ukrainian troops into close-quarters battles where they suffer casualties.
If Ukraine accepts the temporary pain of pulling back slowly towards a prepared defense line as now appears to be belatedly under construction, it can potentially suffer very few losses while quite literally massacring the enemy. Drone footage near Avdiivka showed dozens of ruscist bodies littering one small stretch of tree line - even if these are all Storm-Z troops forced into suicidal attacks because they couldn’t buy off an officer or got caught using drugs, the supply of these is not endless and does have a social impact back home, even if small in the short run.
Moscow is apparently trying the same tricks north of Bakhmut in what several Ukrainian sources have referred to as the start of a major offensive effort intended to surround Chasiv Yar. Making a push like this as costly as possible was a major reason why Ukraine fought hard for Bakhmut last spring, and despite Moscow pulling troops from Zaporizhzhia to concentrate in Donbas success is highly unlikely thanks the defenses built in the area since last winter and Putin’s troops having to attack uphill.
One of the important things to keep in mind about winter fighting is that every effort has to be made to quarter troops in someplace insulated, ideally basements in settlements. That’s why attacks right now are focused on either cutting off or bashing through built up areas instead of bypassing them. It’s difficult to describe how quickly the will to fight fades in the cold; even highly trained professionals have to limit their exposure to the elements and gear breaks more often.
Another reason why it is better to have ruscist troops getting up to launch attacks than expecting Ukrainian soldiers to do it any more than is strictly required. In addition, thanks to uncertainties regarding US aid Ukrainian forces are once again experiencing shell hunger, having to ration and hoard to sustain shooting rates. Increased production of one-way attack drones ought to compensate, but this is another area where Moscow has unfortunately been able to scale up faster than Ukraine.
This doesn’t appear to be helping Moscow’s forces move forward fast though, in Bakhmut, Avdiivka, or anywhere else. The days of lightning pushes appear to be long past for Moscow, the personnel trained to conduct rapid operations mostly dead or wounded now. Just another domain where the trend lines and power curves favor Ukraine - if it doesn’t waste precious resources, particularly its veteran troops.
Kupiansk is the other front where Moscow is intent on pushing forward despite severe losses, reported to be in the thousands since the start of December alone. The frontline village of Synkivka is apparently a focal point of enemy attacks, but the fact that weeks of pushing south along the Oskil river haven’t done more than wedge the Ukrainian defenders back a few tree lines doesn’t bode well for Moscow’s future along this, what ought to be the most difficult front of all for Ukraine thanks to its proximity to supply bases across the border.
Videos show the weather in this area being the worst out of all the fronts right now, the ground covered in fresh snow that hides mines and few settlements to hide troops between the current ruscist positions and the strip of towns Ukraine holds along the river. Were I in charge of Ukrainian forces along this front I’d dump so many mines between these villages and the orc positions that it would take months for the enemy to clear paths and begin threatening the riverside towns. With fire support coming from the high ground on the western bank, Moscow’s casualties promise to be immense.
Of course, Muscovite air strikes remain a major threat, even if relatively inaccurate thanks to Ukraine jamming the guidance signal from geopositioning satellites - something Moscow does to HIMARS and Ukraine’s own glide bombs - lucky hits still happen. Ukraine’s Marine brigades sustaining detachments across the Dnipro in warmer Kherson are bombarded every day by these, and there having a fairly small area to focus on the impact can be devastating.
Ukraine has not made much progress expanding its bridgeheads over the Dnipro, but at this stage that’s not the immediate purpose of holding positions on the far bank. Pulling in as many enemy forces as can be blasted apart by drones and artillery fire is, and Ukraine’s doing an excellent job if reports about ruscist blogger complaints are anything to go by. Minutes or even seconds is the expected response time before a target once spotted to come under accurate fire, transforming even basic logistics into a slog.
Looking more broadly at the technology front, however, Ukraine is beginning to encounter large numbers of ruscist drones with thermal cameras, making them highly effective at night. It is a testament to the lasting futility of sanctions that Moscow’s production of high tech sensors remains only moderately impacted. Missile production is reported to have gone from 40 to 100 a month, allowing Moscow to amass an arsenal it has begun to again unleash on Ukraine.
The two sides’ mutual strategic bombing campaigns are heating up, though more slowly than expected. Moscow has once again begun sending waves of Shahed drones at Ukraine using a variety of techniques to get some through. So far it hasn’t fired off many missiles, though the other day it sent ten Iskanders at Kyiv in a surprise barrage that the capitol’s air defense system handled with ease.
Likely Moscow is trying to map out Ukraine’s air defense network to find gaps. To hit targets deep in Ukraine it either has to find a way to slip weapons through or overwhelm the defenses in a target area. Oddly, Moscow has never fired enough missiles and drones in a single salvo to accomplish this, something even Hamas worked out how to do to get a few shots through Israel’s Iron Dome.
It’s a waste of resources to send exactly as many weapons at your opponent as they can take down, but Moscow has done just that on a number of occasions. Kyiv is likely protected by both a Patriot battery as well as a Franco-Italian SAMP/T system for long range and ballistic threats, plus a NASAMS battery and an IRIS-T battery to boot to handle smaller targets, but that still presents a finite number of interceptors available to take down incoming missiles and the drones not handled by hunter-killer teams with anti-aircraft guns and shoulder-fired SAM.
More attractive to Moscow may be targets that have a much lower density of protection than the capitol. It seems almost certain that Ukraine’s second Patriot battery, also protected by a NASAMS or IRIS-T system, is guarding Odesa based on ruscist aircraft that have been knocked down over the Black Sea and the vital importance of Ukraine’s maritime connections to the rest of the world. Germany has just handed over a third Patriot battery, and I’d like to hope that it will be positioned to close to Mykolaiv, out of Lancet range and inside the protective bubble of the system in Odesa but still close enough to the Dnipro bridgehead to extend an air denial bubble over occupied Kherson and push back the ruscist bombers.
It is also entirely possible that a civilian area like Kharkiv or Lviv might receive the system. Kharkiv is a much riskier deployment because it’s so close to the enemy’s home territory, but Lviv only rarely comes under attack. There are of course many other cities and targets that Kyiv could believe that Moscow wants to hit more, and Patriot batteries are mobile, so moving around it is a possibility.
Having a few more would, it goes without saying, be nice too. But the US has most of the ones in active service, and something like six had to get plopped down in the Middle East to cover the last holdover deployments of the War on Terror while Israel flattens Gaza. Another SAMP/T maybe, France? Italy? Of course, I’d like you folks to send Ukraine some of those Leclerc and Ariete tanks and armored vehicles, too...
On the topic of strategic bombardment, Ukraine’s countervailing campaign is also underway. Dozens of drones have been used together in strikes against an airfield hosting bombers in northern Rostov district as well as logistics targets across occupied Crimea. There, earlier Ukrainian attacks have apparently forced Moscow to move its air defense systems around on the peninsula, making them less efficient.
How much damage these attacks cause isn’t clear, but if Ukraine has the ability to mount a raid of similar size every few days Moscow’s air defenses will be badly strained trying to guard the rear as well as the front. I also suspect that we’ve not seen a fraction of the ingenuity Ukraine will show in terms of what it attacks. Is it possible to blow up a small section of each rail line supplying ruscist troops in Ukraine every day? How fast can Moscow repair even simple damage if its constantly happening and delaying schedules?
It’s questions like these that give lie to the media narratives that hold Ukraine’s fight to be trapped in a stalemate. The pace of operations rises and falls. This is normal. Each side will try to innovate and adapt.
Ukrainian troops involved in active operations are tired, of that there should be no doubt. But if Kyiv can get a proper rotation going and minimize personnel commitments across most of the front, it can let the enemy exhaust itself over the next two months before intensifying its push across the Dnipro in a big way.
The first F-16s are set to arrive by the new year. Around two dozen Ukrainian pilots are at least two months into advanced training. They don’t have to be ace veterans to fly well behind Ukrainian lines and still use their radars and long-range missiles to change the equation over the battlefield. Two dozen pilots is enough to keep a pair of F-16s in orbit over each Patriot battery, with even a single two-ship ready to dash towards the front lines and hurl a dozen or more missiles at Sukhoi bombers trying to drop glide bombs enough to deter them from trying too hard to be good at their jobs.
In summer there will be two dozen more. By fall another batch will have joined. Slowly, inexorably, over 2024 Ukraine will become more potent while Moscow’s forces grow weaker… unless and until Putin fully mobilizes after the elections, the impact of which will be felt about a year from now.
That’s why Ukraine won’t and can’t wait for 2025: next year will be decisive. Either Ukraine is able to improve its forces in qualitative terms while preventing Moscow from building up a reserve, or no matter how much Ukraine’s industry accelerates Moscow will find a way to draw on China’s.
The fact that a lot of voices in the US are beginning to encourage the view that Ukraine needs to pause for a year is a dangerous warning sign for Ukraine. Much has been gained; it can all be lost if selfish interests in the West are allowed to subvert the fight for Ukraine.
Ukraine And The Trouble With The West
With media attitudes in the English-speaking world increasingly glum about Ukraine’s prospects this holiday season, one of the real impediments to Kyiv’s success is its allies’ commitment to the ideology often called “Western Civilization” or simply “The West” by adherents to the faith. Having spent most of my forty years of life living along the West Coast of North America, I can’t help but roll my eyes whenever anyone from New York City or London goes on about their precious Western World.
I also spent a couple years in grad school helping professors teach geography courses focused on the “Western” and “Non-Western” worlds and have a pretty solid sense of the pseudoscience behind the concept. To put it bluntly, the “West” doesn’t exist any more than the “East” or “South” so - it’s all just rhetoric. Part of a longstanding effort by extremely powerful interests to cloak the mechanisms used to exploit billions of people around the globe - including the majority of people living in the West.
Those devoted to the ideology of the West pretend it to be a universal scientific approach, but this is propaganda. The deeper truth about Western Civilization is not one that most students are ever taught in school; even at universities past and present any critique is usually tainted by religious or Marxist views that seek not to displace it, but seize control.
Most students have to go all the way to the doctoral level before they are ever exposed to the deeper philosophical logic behind the misbegotten idea of the West. And if you want to actually become a tenured professor, questioning the faith system that elevates professors into secular priests, experts whose authority in their field cannot be questioned, is anathema.
Blinded by fear of what happens if Putin falls, the expert conventional wisdom that assumed Ukraine was lost in 2022 will take any chance to spread the message that Ukraine can’t possibly win and must negotiate a ceasefire. These defenders of the status quo do not want people to realize that Ukraine has never been closer to victory than it is today.
A major reason why is that Ukraine’s leadership executed an excellent bluff over the past summer with the much-lauded launch of major counteroffensive efforts against Putin’s forces. Even going in Zaluzhnyi and Zelensky made it clear that they never really wanted to mount a major attack, not until they had all the tools required to ensure success. Zelensky likely pushed one over Zaluzhnyi’s even greater reservations because the political side of the government represents the will of the Ukrainian people and deals with partners abroad while the military is about maintaining its capacity to defend Ukraine come what may.
There is an obvious tension with Ukraine having political imperatives to attack when in a military sense major operations needed to wait until 2024 because of allied dithering. Even in April Pentagon officials were reportedly urging Ukraine to begin operations despite the ground not being suitable yet and key weapons systems still not yet delivered. In addition, there wasn’t enough time to properly train the new brigades raised in the winter and shipped to NATO instruction centers for basic training.
But Ukraine’s forces couldn’t sit around and do nothing, or the Biden Administration’s nudging towards renewed negotiations and territorial concessions in exchange for hollow promises of NATO protection or half membership would grow into an avalanche of pressure. In American culture, your best bet at sabotaging a movement is to take it under your wing. Once Americans feel as if they are an insider, have personally made it, their stake in the status quo makes them compliant.
Ukraine since day one has exhibited an intuitive understanding of the mainstream American psyche; constructed by elites as the thing is, Ukrainians may recognize the Soviet-like tendencies in modern-day American society. Being just about the nicest people on the planet, it’s good to see that Ukrainians wed that with a ruthless pragmatism befitting a people whose lives are under such threat.
This summer, Ukraine appears to have gone through all the motions of mounting a massive push only after delaying the start of the attack for as long as possible. And four days in, once the Ukrainians had solid evidence to take to NATO demonstrating that without the full set of ingredients for a combined arms offensive asking Ukraine’s troops to throw everything into a single lunge was insane, Zaluzhnyi shifted to the real plan he assumed would be necessary all along.
This isn’t to say that Ukraine didn’t hope to achieve more this past summer, or that the thousands of soldiers killed or injured in the fighting were thrown away - the test was necessary and, like the defense of Bakhmut, did serious damage to Moscow’s personnel and equipment reserves. Before Ukraine broke through in Kharkiv last fall and forced Moscow to retreat from the right bank of the Dnipro in Kherson, it launched multiple operations in both sectors over a span of months that didn’t achieve any spectacular results. But through them, Ukrainian commanders learned of the vulnerabilities they later successfully exploited. That’s the power of good recon.
But my overall evaluation is that Ukraine’s leadership went into this summer privately expecting much less than they let on in public and likely wouldn’t have launched a major operation at all - much less one that struck in almost the exact place me and other open-source analysts anticipated - had this been politically viable. Ukraine’s best option was to attack just hard enough to offer hope of a breakthrough that would press the Biden Administration to finally lift its refusal to send vital gear like ATACMS and F-16s.
The price for this play is the one that Kyiv is paying now: when American politicians want to take revenge, they signal to the press that they’d like to see more critical coverage. By the middle of July it was clear to the Pentagon that Ukraine wasn’t following the original plan. Right about then the reliable establishment mouthpieces Kofman and Lee came back from another of their research trips to the front to sow the seeds of the narrative that now undergirds most analysis of the summer fighting: that Ukrainian troops are still too somehow Soviet to win. If only they fought in the proper NATO style, the implication goes, then all would have been well despite not having modern air support.
It’s an absolutely classic victim-blaming excuse used by Western leaders whenever something doesn’t go as planned. Once the “expert” community has been prodded to turn negative in the USA, the broader media follows. Their job is to let media editors pretend that their reporting relies on sources with substantial credibility and is therefore authoritative. And because being an “expert” in matters of foreign policy depends on access to insider sources, most are well leashed and follow the established dogma. In this, blaming US leadership has been a no-no since Vietnam.
That’s why there’s an ongoing flood of rumor-mongering in the US media about hostility between Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi, interviews with tired soldiers feeling gloomy about the future (interviews by Ukrainian journalists give a more nuanced view, as always), and calls for Ukraine to go on defense throughout 2024 to build up its strength. It’s all part of a classic American insider information war op designed to let Biden walk away from Ukraine and declare victory the same way he did Afghanistan if required to win re-election. Another key bit was Biden’s longstanding commitment to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes” eroding during Zelensky’s last visit to “for as long as we can.”
The US federal government has long been a source of the stuff that would give Orwell nightmares. And much of the US media has adopted wartime rules with respect to the Biden Administration - the reason he insists that he’s defending American democracy and ties Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler’s is to get the media to treat him like FDR. A president that famously hid the fact he relied on a wheelchair most of the time from the public - not that this should have mattered, of course. But the lesson is to never underestimate how key players in the US media see their role as sustaining certain national myths despite claiming to serve the public as a vital Fifth Estate and check on government power.
As the war against Putin drags on the non open source media is becoming ever less reliable in reporting the full truth of what’s going on. A concerted effort is being made in the United States to push the Ukraine War onto the backburner, allowing the Biden Administration a chance to bundle it with a bunch of other foreign policy issues and act as if anyone who questions any aspect of the package is secretly pro-Trump.
Unfortunately, even bundling issues together doesn’t get a funding package through D.C. any more. Contrary to my expectations, no eleventh hour deal was cut before the holidays to fund Ukraine, border security, Taiwan, and Israel. This raises the odds of everything failing to move when the government faces another shutdown showdown in January. During election years neither side wants to pass anything that has even a remote chance of benefiting the other, and with each partisan team insisting that only it represents true American democracy it is possible both will perceive more benefit from the government crashing than making concessions.
Even that would resolve eventually, but the legislative package might be totally rebooted in the meantime. I expect that Ukraine will eventually get the aid promised by the US - but it will likely receive no more whatever happens in 2024. That’s why it’s great to see more European countries beginning to step up in a big way - European civil support for Ukraine has always been more substantial than American, but now it’s taking over in military terms as well. A sign of the times to come.
In the future, I am quite certain that the core of any global democratic alliance will be the EU and the democratic countries in the Western Pacific. The EU along with the UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, and New Zealand makes for a powerful global bloc in possession of a far more realistic understanding of world affairs than anything the USA could ever lead. Especially if fellow backsliding democracies like Israel, Turkey, and India are supposed to be involved, along with allied autocracies like Saudi Arabia, of course.
This naturally runs against the conventional wisdom in American foreign policy circles. It is biased by an unscientific commitment to a worldview where America is good and has holds resembling a divine right order the world as it chooses, so their analysis is fatally flawed. Worse, this seed of imperialism is now evolving into a general proposition that Americans with college degrees from Ivy League schools are in a similar position with respect to their own populations, who are allegedly too vulnerable to populist demagogues to be trusted with democracy.
Part of the reason I ditched doctoral studies was coming to understand that much of American academia has degenerated into a kind of church. Tenured faculty in the USA spend their lives poring over effectively sacred texts written by people they had to read while in grad school. Knowledge is split up by clique; faculty fight to have their field adequately represented in the university’s general education curriculum to ensure a constant pipeline of prospective grad student recruits - new acolytes.
The situation is not all that different to the one Galileo faced when dealing with the Church a few hundred years back. And as Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend noted, the Church did not force him to recant because they rejected his arguments, but because he made them the wrong way, failing to satisfy the traditions of established Church elders.
It’s ironic then that the myth of Galileo bravely standing up to traditional authority has been twisted by modern academics into a story about how science progresses through open debate. In point of fact, as philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn noted, many scientists have noted that science generally progresses over the graves of scientists.
This is the case because knowledge production in society is a sub-system bound to a greater one: society’s ongoing need for facts that leaders can pretend are fixed for all time. Some scientists will naturally realize the benefits of working closely with powerful interests. They then use their privileged position as society’s acknowledged “expert” class to espouse public truths that allow anyone who asks too many questions to be safely silenced as a non-authority trying to operate outside of their designated lane, so to speak.
But science, strictly speaking, is not a search for truth, but reliable explanations. The reasons for this are nuanced, but not all that difficult to grasp. They boil down to the simple fact that 100% objective truth is impossible: independent minds are always free to choose their beliefs, however ill-advised. They can only be convinced to behave as if certain truths are binding in public.
And even at the core of scientific thought and practice there are essentially arbitrary choices that have to be made. There is nothing in particular that should privilege the human perspective in this universe, yet most scientists do precisely that - because part of science is communication, and that always entails humans who have scarce attention to pay.
Luckily the “harder” sciences have found parts of reality that work according to highly specific and predictable rules. In sciences that study people, the situation is much dicier because people’s words and behaviors don’t always correlate in the short term. The truths that people hold - and more importantly choose to express through their behavior - subtly vary depending on their life experiences.
Western philosophy attempts to solve the inherent problems caused by the indeterminacy of reality by doing the exact same thing that the Christian church did in Europe for centuries: create an artificial truth and try to educate everyone to accept it. After all, if no one speaks against a truth, doesn’t it then stand?
Instead of God and Saints and Sin, Western Liberalism has Reason and Education and Truth. True critical thinking in a systematic sense is limited by a set of taboos and mythical assumptions that are taken as established and universal fact by society at large and drilled into young people from early in life. The Western project has always focused on education, just like Christianity did, because it is here that you train people what truths they had better believe in if they don’t want to suffer social consequences.
For the record, Putin’s ruscism focuses on education about so-called “traditional values” for the exact same reason. Western means Christianized, and Moscow sees itself as the Third Rome, rightful guardian of the heritage of the entire Christian faith. Catholics, Evangelicals, they’re all heretics in Muscovite eyes. The reverse is also true - the Ukraine War is a kind of holy war with Ukrainians caught in the middle, seeking only their freedom.
True traditional values focus on the relationship between the individual and the community as a dynamic construct, allowing freedom through choice of association. Put almost any group of individuals together and throw a survival challenge at them and they will swiftly develop a unique language and ultimately worldview that comes to define major aspects of their joint and separate realities. Groups take on a kind of consciousness that becomes reality for them just as a person’s sense of individual identity governs how they go about their daily lives.
But the magic of human adaptability is that no hard rules govern this process except what works. And when a group encounters failure, the diversity of individual minds within it can give rise to a radical reconfiguration of the group that alters its capabilities. Alternatively, a group that is too fixed in its ways can fall apart, sub-groups seeking a more sustainable future on their own.
Western Civilization is nothing more than an bigoted claim to eternal intellectual and moral superiority over all other bodies of thought. It’s a tool of power that denies the true diversity within the so-called West and seeks to subjugate most of the people within it to the rule of what is fast becoming a hereditary elite. Freedom is defined by the freest, who are always those with the most wealth.
The best way to become a politician, entrepreneur, or professor in the Western model is to have a parent that paves the way. The next best option is to become friends with someone who did. Part of the bargain of joining the club is accepting its worldview and patterns of speech - this is a major reason why the Democratic Party in the United States is now the party of white collar college educated types who care a lot about the words people use in their everyday speech.
Why? Because the way you speak signifies your class and therefore proximity to power in modern American life. The slow unification of cultural language and political views along mainly geographic lines while economic, political, and social inequality keep rising is the root cause of the USA’s dysfunction and probable near-term collapse, with some form of effective separation being a real possibility.
The supposed division between “Traditional” or “Conservative” and “Liberal” or “Progressive” in the Western context is actually just a rebranding of the old fight between Church and State over who gets to determine truth and decide which utopia holds for all. Real traditional values are inherently geographic in nature, today primarily followed only by indigenous peoples across the globe.
True traditional values emerge from the experience of generations of people making a life in a place and run far deeper than modern concepts like race, ethnicity, or nation. They aren’t inherently exclusionary either, contrary to popular belief pushed by proponents of Western thought, which secular or religious aims to erase geographic differences in order to put everyone in a single grand society governed by the same set of rules. In the process it creates a hierarchy of peoples based on how much power they can secure, and this in turn generated an endless cycle of rising and falling large powers ruled by elite cliques that invariably destroy themselves in a major war.
At the same time they insist that their way is righteous and universal they oppress all deviance and diversity within themselves, sowing the seeds for future collapse. Balance is essential, but also secure spaces where people can be however they wish to without infringing on the rights of others to do the same.
True traditional values are rooted in voluntary associations bound to strict conceptions of acceptable public behavior. These aren’t intended to be oppressive - though to some degree there will always be a sense of hostility between elders and youth that is productive on the whole - but enabling. By delineating standards of public behavior as set (and altered) by the democratic will of the community on the smallest possible scale, the natural tribal tendencies of humans can be set in a grand social mosaic without the need for a ruling ideology other than live and let live to the degree possible.
Bigotry, hatred, and fear are not traditional values. Nor is telling anyone where they can or cannot be: only what public activities are allowed and when, with all rights and responsibilities in a community applying equally to all members.
Though people died at high rates thousands of years ago and there obviously was organized violence, the era of intensive warfare as we now think of it emerged when dynastic rulers demanded to be treated as god-kings over their petty domains. The common conception of progress throughout history really ought to be inverted - in truth the past few thousand years have seen basic freedom sacrificed on the altar of slowly improving people’s overall quality of life.
The cost of this started to become clear in the early twentieth century, as global communications allowed more people’s perspectives to be heard. With history no longer the province of a self-aggrandizing elite, truths about how the world has always worked are becoming more widely known.
As in any major war that didn’t go at all as the powers that be anticipated, Putin’s all-out assault on Ukraine has triggered a collapse of the world order all can now see was always an illusion. And in truth, it is far from the first utter failure of Western philosophy to perceive the fragility of the so-called Postwar Order most scholars are now raised to believe is something sacred, its end the apocalypse all Christians are taught to fear, thinking that any end must be The End as told in scripture.
The inability - or unwillingness - to do what was necessary to secure Ukraine’s victory in 2023 was a warning of the state of Western thought in every dimension. War is always an acid test for ideology and received wisdom. At its base level are thousands of individuals trying not to die, working in groups because the best way to not die on the battlefield is having a buddy or three to cover your back. Even the best soldier can’t see in every direction at once and sometimes has to sleep.
A big part of why the media has been so down on Ukraine over the past couple months is simple and understandable frustration with the story not going the way Ukrainians and its partners hoped. But another is a clear desire on the part of some very powerful people to transform Ukraine into an arm of a global conflict that is meant to last forever: a Second Cold War they imagine will be as controllable as the first almost wasn’t.
And they’re mainly the ones most keen on everyone thinking that Ukraine has to dig in and prepare to fight the rest of this decade. Ukrainians don’t deserve that, not when they’ve pushed Putin into a corner and can break his forces by the end of 2024.
As I’ve argued in weeks past, Crimea is now the key. And thanks to Ukraine winning the Battle of the Black Sea so far, it is more vulnerable than ever. Rapid aid to Ukraine in January can make a difference before spring, helping Kyiv expand a vital bridgehead across the Dnipro in time for the first couple dozen F-16s to enter the fight.
2024 cannot be spent preparing Ukraine to fight on for years. Western support is too unreliable to trust forever for Ukraine or anyone. The willingness of Western leaders like Biden to throw people in Kabul to the Taliban as well as his softening rhetoric on Ukraine - US support is only for as long as possible, now - is a warning of their intentions.
While my argument might sound grim for Ukraine, an essential step in getting it the proper support is breaking the stranglehold of Western thought on the public imagination regarding this war. It has done immense damage to Ukraine’s defense, even and perhaps especially when it comes to the military advice that senior Pentagon officials like to give to Kyiv.
The reality is that Ukraine is pioneering the new era of military science. And what its fighters have learned though years of bloodshed is that the full spectrum of military tools is needed with sufficient depth to lose a bunch and be able to have it replaced. Losses are inevitable, but at least modern gear keeps the people using it alive at higher rates. To be blunt, if NATO countries aren’t willing to hand over everything in their arsenals in short order, the alliance is a joke and Putin knows it.
The trouble with Western support for Ukraine is that it pretends to be about virtue when it’s always been about self-interest. Putin’s regime secured power using NATO expansion as an excuse for hardline policies that in turn gave NATO an excuse to continue its existence after the dissolution of the USSR. Ukraine is trapped at the center of a parasitic mutualism that is responsible for Obama failing to move as he should have when Crimea was taken in 2014 and Ukraine left defenseless despite US obligations dating to the 1990s.
This needs to end. The best solution is an alliance of reliable democracies willing to intervene if necessary to protect any other democracy under threat, whether Ukraine or Taiwan.
Barring that, just sent every piece of military hardware available to Ukraine. Open every base abroad for intensive training. Move fast, and this terrible war could end in 2024. It’s better to push for that than an endless grind into infinity as the American defense industry desires.
As it was when this war began, Crimea is the key. And if Ukraine’s partners help it gain superiority in multiple domains over occupied Kherson and then the peninsula itself, Kyiv stands a chance of striking the heart of this conflict without having to slog through all of Donbas.
It’s a strategy worth fighting for - and better than the one the Biden Administration has put forward so far. Just in case Congress actually cares about such things.