Three Years Of Total War In Ukraine: A Saga Of American Betrayal
America's true Ukraine policy under both Biden and Trump is cruelly similar: betrayal, appeasement, and surrender. The sacrifices made by the Greatest Generation have been dishonored.
The all-out phase of the Ukraine War is now three years old, and it’s more than fair to say that few dreamed a conflict of this intensity could ever last this long. Had the USA proven to be a reliable guarantor of global security, Putin would never have dared invade Ukraine at all - in 2022, or 2014.
Building a more just and sustainable world system from the ashes of the Postwar Order is now a matter of vital national security for literally everybody. What’s happening to the world right now is tragic, but also a unique opportunity to rectify mistakes made the last time the world system crashed.
Trump actively setting the pillars of American security on fire is actually a service to real democracies around the world. The USA has never been one, despite the proclamations of generations of PhDs who set the definitions presently in use.
In the American federation, states have their own inherent sovereignty, with the federal government established under the Constitution to receive certain delegated powers for the good of the collective. A group of American states have effectively chosen to secede from the democratic world, aligning with Putin’s russian world delusion.
That’s their choice, but they won’t go alone. They are dragging saner Red States along with all the Blue ones over a cliff. America’s partisan leaders at the federal level are, so far, letting them have their way. But as state-level resistance firms up - and it will - the federation stands to crack if Trump pushes his claims to power too far. It’s going to come to him or the Constitution.
There is no going back now, at home or abroad. The Biden Administration’s repeated betrayals of Ukraine merely set the stage for Trump’s antics today, just as Trump’s idiotic deal with the Taliban enabled Biden to abandon Kabul. American partisanship is an engine for blaming anybody but one’s own team for everything that’s wrong in the world. Everything that’s happening in America today is the product of a codependent structural dynamic which has left the vast majority of Americans without effective representation in D.C.
In a strange way, American domestic politics and Ukraine’s fight for survival are now tightly bound. The entire world stands at a fateful crossroads: either the unraveling accelerates, plunging everyone into chaos, or a coalition organized around simple universal principles emerges as a new power center. American willingness to bargain away Ukraine’s sovereignty and apparent desire to incorporate new territories into the federation suggest that Trump would sell parts of the USA to Moscow or Beijing if he felt it was in his personal interest. This neo-feudalism, and it’s got to be squashed for the good of everyone - even most of Trump’s own supporters.
Sadly, there’s no way to end the war in Ukraine without hard guarantees for Ukraine’s security. There’s just no getting around the hard scientific reality that Putin’s regime is bound to expand its war however it can in order to evade the mounting consequences of its disastrous course. Putin and his fellow travelers are forced to portray any and all gains since 2014 as a grand victory against NATO, but to justify the immense costs and repeated humiliations of the past three years, only total triumph will now do.
Simply put: if Moscow is not stopped, probably by 2026, the risk of a general war in Europe merging with an attempt by Beijing to take over Taiwan becomes extreme. Down that road lies tragedy for everyone on the planet.
Unfortunately, American leaders and too many of their partisan followers don’t live in the same world as the rest of us. Belief trumps evidence, because the partisan incentives that animate these fools don’t value anything other than keeping the show going. It’s a gigantic pyramid scheme in the classic American fashion, snake oil and magic tonics peddled to people whose teachers didn’t arm them properly to cope with the torrent of insanity the modern world produces.
Barring a global organization emerging with the will and resources to counterbalance the collapse of Postwar America, the coming years will be ugly in ways that most Americans are in no way prepared to handle. Europeans are a step ahead, because they’ve got a better grasp of their own history and found their world plunged into madness sooner.
I’ve spent three years immersed in data from Ukraine, which, harsh as this may sound given the price others pay for researchers to obtain this knowledge, offers invaluable evidence of how modern war is waged. Combining that with a set of highly useful theoretical perspectives sheds important light on some pretty fundamental aspects of the human condition that more folks need to comprehend if a global nightmare is to be averted.
Unfortunately, what impact a rogue independent scholar can have in this market is limited. I have no illusions about the business of writing professionally: the market prefers spectacle to reliability. I’ve begun a search for funding sources that can help build this blog into something more, but it’s a strange quirk of such connected times that it generally takes personal relationships to access capital. So we’ll see how my efforts go. Probably have to get a book published first, which is its own long quest, one I’ve also begun. The Science of Victory in Ukraine is the book a whole lot of people need right now.
I find myself in a position not unlike that of the early climate scientists who understood fifty years ago that combusting carbon enhances the greenhouse effect, with dangerous and lasting consequences. Half a century later, global temperatures have warmed another half degree Celsius, and are set to climb another by around 2050. Nothing the powers-that-be are doing now is sufficient to avoid a lot of pain.
The future is incredibly predictable - if you know the right science. What to do about it in any given moment is the difficult question. Yet the answer on every front usually lies in properly designed democratic institutions. Building these costs and takes time, but is usually worth it. Democracy chains leaders, and that’s a very good thing, because real leadership is about responsibility, not ego.
Given everything that’s happening in the world, I feel an obligation to keep up the work, despite the time it takes to transform something like this into a sustainable business. Many thanks are due to those who share these lengthy posts)! Having a “platform” is an unfortunate requirement for growth, and the thousands of readers who regularly come to Rogue Systems Recon are the reason I keep building it up. If nothing else, the take you’ll always get here is unique. Apologies that this week I don’t have the time to be as concise as I should. But this is a pretty incredible moment, so I figure it’s worth an extra-long post.
This week, before diving into the usual overview of the fronts and another plunge into geopolitics as Trump shreds the last vestiges of the Postwar Order, it’s worth recounting the core reason why the Ukraine War was not over a long time ago. Simply put: American leaders have consistently betrayed their obligations to Ukraine. In doing so, they have desecrated the sacrifices made by the American veterans who defeated the Axis Powers in the Second World War, my grandfather and grandmother among them.
A reckoning will come, and it will be most deserved. A whole lot of Americans have much to answer for. They’re set to pay the price, losing everything they aimed to protect.
Trump’s Ukraine policy, for all the thunder and fury of the past couple weeks, is only a more honest continuation of Biden’s. Right now, his fellow Democrats (pundit James Carville remains a useful barometer, and a microcosm of why the Democrats fail) are ducking for cover and rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of being able to simply walk back into power without having to develop an effective new national brand after Trump totally discredits himself and his party in the eyes of a majority of Americans. They never cared about Ukraine or the American people. I don’t think this will turn out the way they expect. What has lately?
The failure to properly back Ukraine has shattered all American pretensions to global leadership forever. And without that key pillar of the American economy, this strange sham of a society crumbles. It’ll take a few years, but it’ll happen.
Team Trump, much like the Democrats, appears to be banking on finding opportunity in the crash more than they hope to actually fix anything. Facing serious headwinds in Congress and the strong potential for the courts to block many actions, the more confusion sown, the easier it should be to ram through the stuff Team Trump’s donors really care about in the window of opportunity available. Ironically, the more upset their fan base gets, the more money they seem to hoover up, so why moderate?
Taking a broader view of the system and not fixating on specific components is extremely important in chaotic times. Trump may look like he has some grand plan, but it amounts to little more than keeping the spotlight on himself at all times. Allies run around pursuing their own agendas, ever suspicious of the intentions of the others, different factions always sabotaging their rivals.
In this, Team Trump is no different than any other American administration since at least Bill Clinton. About the last time that an American president truly stood on principle was back in 1991.
The Ukraine War simply would not have been possible had the United States ever applied the same standards used to justify organizing an international coalition to push Saddam Hussein’s Iraq out of Kuwait. Then, naked aggression was appropriately met with raw force in a bid to preserve the Postwar Order. Had Iraq and it’s dense stocks of Soviet gear not been smashed, the end of the Cold War would probably have played out very differently. But knowing that they couldn’t win a war against NATO in a bid to save their faltering empire, Soviet leaders didn’t even try.
What’s more, the US went to war despite Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of chemical weapons and the missiles needed to rain warheads down on Allied forces. Expected casualties ran into the tens of thousands, but the USA went to war anyway. Though the Soviet Union still existed, it didn’t lift a finger to protect its client or prevent a US-led coalition from asserting total military dominance in the Middle East.
Ukraine was owed the same consideration when Putin invaded. Unlike Kuwait, a tiny oil-rich monarchy created by the British that wasn’t exactly known for respecting human rights, Ukraine voluntarily surrendered its nuclear arsenal in the early 1990s instead of troubling the world with the danger of a rogue actor selling nukes on the black market. This was done out of a sense that the USA would always intervene to prevent an armed invasion by the regime in Moscow.
After all, what leader in D.C. would ever be stupid enough to let Moscow rebuild its empire unopposed? Competent hard power politics isn’t done that way. It’s like telling a neighbor that you’re totally fine with them taking over a workshop on your property without any compensation or even conditions. You don’t have to be a Kissinger or a Bismarck to comprehend this. Now Ukraine is in the position of being told to give up their living room, too, for the sake of peace, without any guarantee the kitchen is next - more likely, the whole house. What. The. Actual. Hell?
Ukraine has been betrayed over and over by America over the course of a generation. It’s such pathetic joke that Muscovites pretend they’re up against the full might of NATO in Ukraine - please! The only reason that the orcs still have ships afloat anywhere in the world is that American leaders are rank cowards willing to accept Putin’s tiresome bluffs about going nuclear. Putin was a convenient foil for decades. They thought he was contained, would always play the game according to their script. They were wrong.
The first grave American betrayal of Ukraine came courtesy of Barack Obama in 2014, when Putin seized Crimea. Then, as the USA was recovering from the failed occupation of Iraq and the 2008 financial crisis, the choice was made to tolerate Putin’s open aggression against Ukraine. Soon after, orchestrated uprisings by a small number of sympathizers reinforced by Moscow’s agents overthrew elected city governments in Ukraine’s south and east, plunging that part of the country into a proxy war by 2015.
Most of these uprisings failed, knocked out by local citizens rising up in protest. But in the border areas of Donetsk and Luhansk a group managed to consolidate a small separatist region with Moscow’s semi-covert support. As Ukraine’s almost non-existent army mobilized however it could to restore government control, it managed to push the separatists back towards the international border. That was when Putin began to dispatch “volunteers” with heavy military equipment to join them, shooting down an airliner full of civilians with a surface to air missile system.
Ukrainian forces were unprepared for an onslaught of this size and slowly driven back. Heroic stands were made, and daring raids by armored forces deep behind enemy lines - Syrskyi was involved in one - allowed most of the encircled Ukrainians to evacuate, though at a high cost. Moscow’s troops liked to reach local agreements to allow a Ukrainian troop withdrawal then promptly open fire when it began. Slowly the pre-2022 line of contact firmed up, a series of broader ceasefire agreements reached and soon broken, Ukrainian troops fighting bloody skirmishes with Moscow-backed separatists, sometimes professional russian regulars officially on vacation.
The failure to properly intervene during the intensified invasion or help enforce a ceasefire by deploying forces to Ukraine represents a second great betrayal by the Obama Administration. At least this much can be said for Trump’s first term: he attempted to blackmail Zelensky for political gain, just as he’s doing with the mineral access agreement Kyiv and D.C. are negotiating, but Trump also ultimately gave Ukraine the first modern small arms the U.S. deigned to provide.
Yet the most serious and consequential betrayal by far was the next. When Putin began building up a massive force on Ukraine’s borders in early 2021, Biden’s response was… to reward Putin with a one-on-one summit. That fall, when it became obvious that Putin planned to attack Ukraine on some scale, instead of even threatening to send troops the Biden Administration unilaterally ruled out any support that carried even a theoretical risk of escalation. Terrified of having NATO Article 5 triggered on his watch, instead of organizing a coalition to deter Putin’s assault Biden instead had the CIA and allied media insist for weeks that Ukraine was doomed - the implication being why bother. Even sanctions would only be applied after the fighting began - another signal of American intent.
For the United States of America to decide that any effort to physically defend Ukraine on any level, even to protect American citizens trying to flee or the airspace above nuclear plants that if damaged could contaminate large swaths of Europe, was to step away from any rightful claim to global leadership forever. A country with less than a tenth of America’s annual military budget was allowed to bluff the entire US-led NATO alliance into allowing Putin’s airborne troops to land at Hostomel, a move even a modicum of air and land power could have rendered totally impossible.
Would Putin have tried to take all of Ukraine had a single brigade from 82nd Airborne or regiment of Marines been on the ground in Kyiv in February of 2022? No. Even then it was clear that he couldn’t possibly take that risk. Ukraine was, simply put, supposed to fall, its brave warriors reduced to fighting a guerilla struggle backed by the CIA. Afghanistan on a grand scale.
American leaders can’t conceive of a world where everyone doesn’t jump when they shout. From the moment Zelensky demanded ammo instead of a ride, he has been an obstacle to whoever is running D.C. His raw courage utterly shames America’s leaders, and they know it. Their envy of him has always been palpable. Small wonder Zelensky is constantly chided for not showing enough gratitude for the mere fraction of the annual Pentagon budget that Ukraine has received so far from the USA. These people don’t like it when material reality steps on their postmodern illusions.
Biden’s slow drip feed of vital military aid after 2022 counts as yet another gross betrayal, America hoarding kit that Ukrainian troops badly needed to maximize their survival odds. Nearly fifty thousand Ukrainian soldiers have perished, and Zelensky recently revealed that nearly as many more are missing, most either captured or their bodies not recovered, with some having deserted. This nebulous missing category will be the source of the high end casualty estimates constantly made by the American press. Taking these at face value, the numbers suggest that 10% of Ukraine’s defenders have been lost, as many maimed.
That’s almost certainly a pessimistic estimate, but the pain is palpable regardless. Despite that, and the self-destructive stupidity of Team Trump, Ukraine isn’t anywhere near giving up, not even if American aid were suddenly cut off. Despite the constant American talk about how much territory Ukraine is losing, what Ukraine recaptured in 2022 alone still dwarfs all of Moscow’s gains since.
Yet another great American betrayal of Ukraine was the six-month total interruption of aid in 2023 and 2024 - and both parties bear responsibility for that mess, as the Democrats tried to lump Ukraine Aid in with stuff they knew plenty of Republicans would balk at voting for in an election year. Classic ploy. Hoping to score political points right up until his humiliating exit from the race in 2024, it served Biden’s interest to keep Ukraine on a leash, its future dependent on the largess of the Democratic Party. As with everything else Biden attempted, this failed to achieve anything more than an own goal.
Now here we are in 2025, and Trump has apparently decided to carry on the Democratic Party’s tradition of betrayal, parroting Putin’s propaganda in a way that makes a lasting peace all but impossible. Trump has now claimed that Ukraine started the war, lost millions of soldiers, and is ruled by a despised dictator. All completely untrue, not that this matters to his feelings-based mentality. Better not penetrate Trump’s incredibly thin skin, or else he’ll say mean things and threaten worse. I wonder if he knows that anyone who wants to assassinate him with a wire-controlled drone probably can?
Full stop: Ukraine will suffer greatly without US aid, likely unable to mount a decisive counteroffensive this year. But the fighting will continue even if Trump and Putin ink some new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the USA playing the role of the USSR this time around. That went swimmingly for Stalin, as any student of history will recall (sarcasm alert).
Thousands of drones will continue to strike deep into each side’s territory while ground troops test the front. No ceasefire in Ukraine will hold, never mind a peace deal, that doesn’t involve enough firepower on the frontier to defeat the orcs. Barring that, Ukraine may as well continue fighting despite the horrific cost to prevent Moscow from catching its breath and rebuilding its battered forces. Better to hang on and wait for Europe to mobilize.
American leaders face the same stark choice no matter how long they keep putting off the moment of decision: surrender to Putin, and as a consequence watch America’s global power evaporate, or back Ukraine fully, accepting the uncertain consequences of Moscow’s inevitable collapse. Opportunities abound in that eventuality, though I wouldn’t expect an East Coast corporate type to see more than risk. There’s a reason the Northeast isn’t as innovative as Pacific America.
I still assess all that’s coming out of Trump’s mouth right now as part of the way he negotiates. He thinks that if you hit every point of leverage at once the other side will be bulldozed into accepting his terms. But what usually happens instead is that Trump hypes a deal to the point that, to save face when it is about to fall apart, he backs off from the most ridiculous demands then declares total victory. You beat him not by playing his game, but holding absolutely firm to your position. He’s loudest when he’s weakest.
Trump may yet radically alter course on Ukraine, and that could even be the plan. Boosts the entertainment factor to have lots of dramatic turns hinging on some random pretext. He’s attacking Zelensky a lot right now, but in May could well be declaring that Putin is a nasty liar who has to be put in his place. Not that the USA would lift a finger to accomplish this, but at least Europe should still be allowed to buy stuff for Ukraine from US stocks no matter what happens. And once the EU has juiced its economy with a big spending program, the rubber will hit the road in a big way. Probably by next year.
Knowing that, Ukraine might still be able to mount a major counteroffensive this summer. When you’re in a fight for your life, reliability matters more than promises. As my wife, who works in university administration, often says these days, hope is a Labrador retriever, not a strategy. There is no option for the world’s democracies but to develop institutions that can cope with the collapse of the USA. And that has to happen fast.
The sooner the better, because the fighting remains tough on the front line - and anywhere Ukrainian air defenses fail to stop an inbound missile or drone. Fortunately for those of us who would prefer not to live in a world torn apart by egomaniacs squabbling over resources, Ukraine continues to fight like it has a plan. A lot is surely happening behind the scenes that the majority of the media remains oblivious to.
2025 Week 8 Overview
Oddly, considering the intensity of what’s happening at the global level, the battlefields in Ukraine this past week were mostly stagnant. Putin launched his biggest-ever drone attack on Ukraine over the weekend, sending a signal of his true readiness for peace, and Ukraine continues to bleed the orc economy with its own drone strikes. But on the ground, there’s a distinct sense of the orcs catching their breath, probably reorganizing ahead of the last wave of winter attacks.
At the local level Ukrainian soldiers on the front line probably aren’t feeling much relief. Attacks keep on coming. But without enough support and reserves to maintain their intensity, Ukrainian forces are generally able to cope.
Ukraine has been very cold lately, but in about a month the mud should be thick again. With the orcs increasingly reliant on wheeled transportation, that ought to limit what operational level gains they are able to make in the near term. As the leaf-up begins this spring, probably April, both sides will have more cover to work with. However, on the whole, weather appears to have more of an impact on drone operations than vegetation. Ukraine’s improved ability to knock out enemy surveillance drones ought to give Ukraine an advantage in summer fighting.
Northern Theater
The orcs have been pushing towards Ukraine’s main supply route into Free Kursk, retaking most of the village of Sverdlikovo and a stretch near the international border. Aside from that, though, the lines in Kursk have remained pretty firm despite frequent orc assaults on the perimeter. Ukraine’s push southeast of Sudzha hasn’t gone farther, but the positions Ukrainian forces now hold appear to be disrupting orc attempts to reach Sudzha on that axis.
Even the slight Ukrainian withdrawal this week looks intended to take advantage of the Loknya river, which should make a nice defensive buffer. The ten kilometers between this village and Sudzha is mostly open ground. Excellent country for drones.
North Korean troops are reportedly back in action, fighting in smaller units with more precision fire support - hey, so they can learn. You’d think North Korean generals would have paid attention to how the battlefield works before sending people to die, but I guess, like so many of their peers across history, they had to sacrifice a few thousand bodies to understand. And they’ve still got the problem of their soldiers having to fight in a totally alien land for nothing more than the glory of the sun-faced Kim Jong Whichever. It’s got to hurt to realize that all your years of intensive training mean nothing to a flight of five hundred dollar drones.
Barring an intense and sustained counteroffensive that’s run according to sound military principles, the orcs don’t appear likely to achieve much in Kursk in the near term. The same is true in Kharkiv, where skirmishing continues to little effect.
Eastern Theater
Across the east, only two fronts have seen any movement worth mapping this past week: Pokrovsk and Donbas-South. Ukraine continues to hold remarkably firm everywhere else. Though Moscow isn’t done throwing bodies at the line yet, and is only low on vehicles, not totally out.
At multiple other points across the long eastern front Ukrainian troops have come under pressure, which is standard. But orc gains have been close to nil. They’re still losing plenty of people and gear, but the point of mounting attacks at this stage has mostly degenerated into bluffing strength to send a message to Team Trump.
Ukraine is still inflicting around 35,000 casualties a month, around 40% fatal. Ukraine plans to produce three times as many drones as it did last year. Even if fully half of the survivors trickle back to be expended in subsequent meat assaults, Moscow’s ability to train and equip new bodies is under serious strain. It might be that Moscow really plans to deploy new divisions to Belarus, but their quality will leave much to be desired. They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to using armored vehicles, though I expect the more modern stuff that’s actually new, not refurbished, gets held back to the degree possible.
Notably, half of the ammunition the orcs use now comes from North Korea, shipments just begging to be messed with by somebody. A job for the drone submarines of the Pacific Forces, if I can get a few hundred billion dollars in startup funding…
Up in Kupiansk, Moscow’s bridgehead will likely expand until Ukraine deploys a full brigade to contain it, but the past week it’s been stuck in place. Further south, the Lyman, Borova, and Siversk fronts are all fairly static, with suggestions of the orcs reinforcing here still not borne out by movement on the ground, though towards the end of the weekend there were some signals of intensified combat. Could indicate the start of a new effort.
The Kostyantynivka front has likewise been pretty stable, the Ukrainian counterattacks in Toretsk and stubborn defense of central Chasiv Yar preventing the enemy from pushing further this week. Some deterioration of the front between Toretsk and the northeast edge of Pokrovsk is expected in the near future, but Ukraine has natural fallback positions south of Kostyantynivka and occupies a couple defense lines between that the Territorial brigades covering the area should be able to use to slow the advance for a long time.
A Muscovite attempt to push up the highway from Pokrovsk to Kostyantynivka would come as no surprise, so it makes perfect sense that Ukrainian troops launched a local counterattack this week to reclaim the highway junction Moscow keeps pushing towards near Malynivka. Until the orcs can clear the space between Yablunivka and Oleksandropil, Ukraine should be able to contain any bridgehead Moscow seizes over the Bychok in a bid to control the Pokrovsk-Kostyantynivka highway.
Ukrainian forces are still holding firm where they counterattacked west of Pokrovsk last week, despite the orcs committing reserves. Here the enemy bridgehead over the Solona is in grave danger, and it will be interesting to see how this fight unfolds. Ukraine’s posture across the Pokrovsk front is increasingly assertive, with the town of Lysivka being liberated thanks to Ukraine’s push into Dachenske the week prior. This has pushed the enemy over a convenient water line, which should make a push north towards Pokrovsk even harder.
The Donbas-South front is still the toughest one for Ukraine right now, but the evacuation of the Ulakly-Andriivka-Kostyantynopil area is having the effect of straightening Ukraine’s lines. Four veteran brigades, 33rd Mechanized, 79th Air Assault, 46th Airborne, and 37th Marine along with a number of attached Territorial formations can now be sent to rest or form a reserve on another front.
72nd Mechanized is reportedly back in action on this front after a two-month break, and Ukraine has shifted several other brigades like the experienced 71st Jager and the newer 157th Mechanized here as well. That ought to be sufficient to slow, even halt the orc push towards Novopavlivka, and hopefully maintain control of the Bahatyr-Oleksiivka sector, especially if the orcs redeploy troops to Kostyantynivka. Let three or four Ukrainian brigades rest for too long, and Moscow will be up to its ears in a surprise corps-strength counterattack.
Moscow may also be able to redeploy troops for operations elsewhere, however the attempt to push north from Velyka Novosilka suggests that orc command thinks it can continue pushing up the Mokri Yali river valley. Can’t complain when the enemy does as expected. Ukraine was always bound to pull back some distance from Velyka Novosilka, as being in the lowland it can be hit with drones and artillery from a safe distance. And Moscow’s advance, particularly on the east bank of the Mokri Yali river, was supposedly cut up pretty bad.
Southern Theater
The pattern in the south hasn’t substantially changed this week, just skirmishing along the Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia fronts to report. It seems the orcs can’t help but target civilians in Kherson with drones just because they can in what I fear is a taste of wars to come. Ukrainian forces, for their part, have been leaving Crimea along lately.
I’ve suspected for some time that part of the reason Ukraine is fighting in Kursk is to encourage Moscow to neglect the Southern Theater. The Krynky operation of late 2023 taught some important lessons, among them the power of a surprise raid followed by a swift withdrawal. Throw a punch, evade the counter. In moments and locations where Ukraine can secure drone superiority even for a few hours a day, this becomes possible.
Air, Sea, & Strike
Moscow launched its biggest-ever drone raid over the weekend, but inflicted only minor damage, as per usual. Ukraine has a pretty robust network of sensors and shooters that goes into action every night, and despite half of the enemy drones being decoys so far the orcs aren’t seeing much of an improvement in hit rates.
At some point mass missile raids seem inevitable again, especially if Ukraine really is low on Patriot interceptors of the proper type. Not all can handle ballistic targets. Often Ukraine appears to let slip information like that to test what Moscow responds to, though - doesn’t make much sense to announce a vulnerability unless it has been partly remedied.
More information did emerge this week that sheds light on how Ukraine is using its F-16s, and it appears that the Vipers are being employed more aggressively than I’d expected. Low-flying solo Vipers have been spotted near the front lines with a mix of air-to-air and air-to-ground ordnance. They appear to be routinely used to lob small glide bombs in support of troops on the front line.
One of the advantages of modern multirole aircraft is that a pilot can switch from hitting ground targets to shooting at jets at the flick of a control. Modern electronic warfare systems can interfere with enemy radars, reducing their range and effectiveness. So even if Ukraine’s Vipers aren’t packing the longest-range AMRAAMs or backed by an AWACS, they pose a real threat to any orc aircraft approaching the front line. This probably explains why they’re flying near the front without being hit by hostile fire.
Assuming that Ukraine was able to put together a Link 16 equivalent that allows Patriot operators and Viper pilots to talk, the combination is extremely dangerous for enemy aircraft. Moscow is careful with its pilots, actually attempting to rescue downed ones, which stands in stark contrast to the orc attitude towards infantry, with 90% casualty rates expected of those assigned to assault teams.
Something that does surprise me about Ukraine’s Viper operations is that solo flights appear to be normal. Traditionally aircraft in NATO have usually operated in pairs for safety. But the risk of being detected and attacked on landing, as well as the threat to the orcs of even a single hidden Viper moving near the front at low altitude launching an ambush, may mean that solo flights are optimal. In the Network Age, the availability of drones or even AI able to pilot an aircraft to safety if the pilot is incapacitated may mean that a two-aircraft section isn’t the best base unit to organize around.
Leadership and Personnel
Ukrainian sources announced the formation of eighteen corps this week, each with five combat brigades permanently assigned and a designated sector to cover. Skilled and respected brigade teams are at the heart of each corps. Can’t fault this arrangement.
A corps sector can be shrunk or expanded as needed, though special attention has to be paid to the seam between. Unless areas of responsibility are well delineated and communication between adjacent elements secured, there can be problems. But Syrskyi, Drapatyi, and company appear to be on the right track in scientific terms.
RUSI, a British group I’ve come to highly respect, released another fascinating study on the mechanics of how Ukraine now fights. I’ll go into the lessons learned more in a future post, but I have to say I was pleased to see how much of their research confirms my theories about battlefield organization in the Network Age. Decentralization, robust communication, and fire support are key. Mobility too, with movements coming in properly timed pulses.
I can’t help but wonder if NATO military institutions are capable of adapting the way Ukraine’s forces have in so short a time. So much of an officer’s professional education is intended to teach them to be able to speak in a highly abstract, technical language to other officers. How much of that is now obsolete, but retained out of tradition, I wonder?
Good thing to investigate before it’s too late. I get the sense that the U.S. Marine Corps is on the right track, at least at the middle levels. Army officers appear less apt to write about their work online. I’ve a sneaking suspicion there are cultural reasons for that. Hopefully I’m wrong.
Regardless, so far as Ukraine’s military reboot goes, there may be some early signs of positive impacts, but it’s too early to be sure. Generally speaking, RUSI analysis is outdated by a few months once published - which isn’t a criticism. It takes time to produce quality research, especially if you’re coding interviews. But generally when challenges are noted in one RUSI report, by the next they’ve been at least partly dealt with.
An exception, of course, is the glide bomb threat. For that Ukraine needs more and better air support. A constant NATO AWACS patrol over western Ukraine would be an excellent form of support. Doesn’t have to be a no-fly zone, just a patrol. Properly integrated with Ukrainian assets, meaning Link 16 is turned on.
Anything that can be done to interrupt glide bomb attacks needs to be. Drones that hunt glide bombs are a possibility, but with Ukraine now using strike drones with a big enough payload to carry an air-to-air missile, converting some to interceptors should be tested. When the day comes that I can pilot one remotely from the comfort of my own home, I’ll pay for the privilege.
Geopolitical Brief
North America
Traditional Republicans like Nikki Haley, international conservative personalities like Boris Johnson, and fake socialist Santa Claus Bernie Sanders are all in agreement, along with around 80% of Americans: Putin is a bad dude. Yet Team Trump apparently doesn’t agree. Smells like that whole crew is preparing to dump one audience and cater to a faster growing market.
It’s egregious political malpractice to go against the instincts of 80% of Americans - you do that only if you’re stupid - or bound and determined to ignore the electorate going forward. Quite frankly, in any other administration people would be talking about the Cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment at this point. Also investigating J.D. Vance for hidden connections to Muscovite interests - but the corruption American senators get away with is a whole other ball of wax.
The Trump Administration’s choice of tactics at this critical moment, along with its utterly decrepit strategic approach will prove catastrophic for both its own and America’s broader interests. Trump is surrounded by charlatans whose policy choices are driven by pure emotion, all of them trying to build baby cults of personality in his shadow. He himself is showing signs of having been transformed by narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, the discipline that allowed his political team to eviscerate the Biden-Harris crew in 2024 totally gone.
Had the Democratic Party elders not been so ruthlessly and predictably incompetent, Trump would have lost the election after selecting a disloyal liability like J.D. Vance for his VP. I strongly suspect the choice was made to help deter a subsequent attempt - despite his public defiance, the evidence suggests that Trump went into deep shock right after coming off that stage. The consequences of putting a traitorous hack like Vance in the Oval Office is a strong impediment to someone offing Trump, though I give him no better than a 40% of surviving his term in office when you consider all factors.
Trump’s team is playing the wrong game for the time. In 2017 Trump could bully and bluff the world into dancing to his tune, but not now. All that he is set to accomplish on the global stage is the total sabotage of American power. It makes those rumors of him being a KGB asset almost plausible, except that I expect ruscist intelligence has kompromat on most American politicians.
All things considered, the end of American power isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the world at large, but it’s definitely going to harm core American interests for a long time to come. Trump’s adoption of Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine is probably a simple negotiating ploy tied to the minerals deal Ukraine is looking at doing with the US (and good luck making it work if Ukraine isn’t secure from aggression). But in doing so he has revealed that the true source of his personal views on Ukraine is the exact same as Joe Biden’s. For these hacks, it all comes down to simple vanity.
This is why Zelensky has faced a slow-rising tide of criticisms from Americans that are totally divorced from anything that Ukrainians care about. Since he put on his best Churchill in 2022, Zelensky has consistently outshone Biden, Trump, Scholz, the various parade of Tory Prime ministers in the UK, and countless other political hacks. The guy is basically leader of the free world now, and the raw jealousy a lot of lesser men feel is palpable in how they structure their attacks.
Attention is currency to politicians, and Zelensky’s superior skill as a communicator has always irritated a certain class of observer who is convinced that they could do everything better despite most of them never hearing a bullet crack overhead even in training. So of course Trump calls him a dictator. Says a guy who is blatantly abusing executive power in a way that would draw calls for revolution if any Democrat tried it. At this point, the default scenario for the USA is probably the next Democratic president deciding how to handle a new secession movement. That’ll be fun.
Trump the showman has always been terrible at actual business, but very good at pretending otherwise to the right people - these change, but enough are willing to be conned that he keeps on going. However, Zelensky is good at both entertainment and business, and knows the russian cultural mentality extremely well - American too. It’s worth noting that one of the criticisms being leveled at Zelensky by Trump’s people right now is that he’s not being nice enough. Biden’s at times said much the same. What paternalist trash!
Leading Americans are just play-acting as they think they’re supposed to as the world burns, everyone hoping the next shoe to drop hits somebody else. Ever stop to wonder why all those Democratic elders who were screaming about fascism last October are so very quiet now? Half of that is down to real fear of repercussions, the other a lingering hope that somehow they’ll wind up profiting from the Trump show. They could be blocking everything with the senate filibuster and organizing state coalitions to assert their rights. But it’ll be up to the states themselves to assert their rights.
The best answer to America’s problems is so simple that certain people would blow up the whole country to prevent it from happening. All we’ve got to do is divide the federal government. Unity is overrated.
It’s already functionally split into a minimum of half a dozen pieces anyway, because the federal bureaucracy is way too big to effectively manage from D.C. That’s why if you ever have to work with a federal employee, you’ll go to a regional center. Here’s a map of the federal court divisions, and below that how the Federal Reserve works.
Altering the contours of the political system to better match the existing reality of how the executive branch actually operates makes so much scientific sense that of course all partisan elders loathe the idea. Yet this is always how the USA was bound to evolve thanks to Manifest Destiny and the colonization of the West. If, like me, you’ve spent the vast majority of your life on the Pacific coast, D.C. today is little different in practical terms than London was to the American colonies in 1775.
Thanks to partisanship and gerrymandering, we’re effectively taxed without representation even when Democrats control D.C. Because without competition, there’s not much hope for accountability. When state-level government across the USA is consistently dominated by one partisan team or the other, everyone loses. Within the Red and Blue State coalitions there are strong differences on policy, but the two-party system forces each team to stick together in ways that are utterly self-defeating.
Too bad that acknowledging the simple geographic reality of modern America is essentially taboo to the country’s so-called “thought leaders,” precious few of whom have any serious education in systems, ecology, or even geography beyond memorizing maps. They think that if you cite the right popular historians in a clever way that you’ve won a debate, which somehow magically gives you the right to dictate policy to everyone else.
But once a society goes full-on postmodern, debate breaks down, becoming a tool for identifying who belongs to what tribe. Self-contained reality bubbles form and persist. The only option is eliminating the core resource that the tribes are determined to fight over.
In America’s case, that’s the federal government, due to its theoretical ability to force compliance with policy. These days, this capability is far more informal than formal: as the Ukraine War proves, warfare is a costly business. The ability of the United States military to defeat a popular insurgency even within its sovereign borders is deeply suspect. As it should forever be. There is no cause for Americans to ever fight another civil war for any reason. Separation is superior. Drones are too easy to make and deploy on a decentralized basis for anyone to hope for final victory in a major civil conflict anyway.
There are few material pressures that might lead to a real civil war in the USA - but certain popular delusions could upend all calculations under the right circumstances. Thanks to the politicization of American history that has dominated since the 1960s, the true story of the American Civil War has been distorted. Each partisan team seeks to portray it in a certain light to power its claims of moral superiority over the other. That’s why the conflict is mistakenly described as either a war over slavery or states’ rights when it was truly a struggle for the power to dominate the federal government. Why else would the Confederacy spend so much of the conflict trying to seize D.C. by invading Union territory?
The Confederacy started the war by firing on federal troops at Fort Sumter. To that point, a majority of Americans supported the Deep South’s right to leave the union. This would have eliminated the most serious point of contention in the country, which was Southern slavers being able to force people in the Free States to return slaves that escaped. They were imposing their culture on everyone else by exploiting the federal government. Once unable to eliminate that refuge, slavery would have become too costly to maintain in the face of increasing foreign opposition from countries that ultimately found other sources for cotton anyway during the Civil War.
Yet once all but a few states that still hoped to remain neutral had been forced to choose sides, thanks to the public outrage the Confederate attack provoked even in the upland, Scots-Irish dominated portions of the seceding states, Lincoln and Jefferson both decided to end the war sitting in the Oval Office. The Confederacy would, upon victory, have imposed a new Union on the North just as the North did to the South until it abandoned Reconstruction in the late 1870s.
Totally forgotten in the history of the Civil War Americans are taught today is that it was only when violence had broken out and Lincoln called for volunteers to reclaim federal property across the seceding states that a second and more important group of Tidewater states, namely Virginia, joined the Confederacy (and split in two, hence West Virginia).
The Union firmed up in reply soon after, federal troops occupying neutrals like Delaware and Maryland. Yet given the choice, most Americans would have split up the country to avoid all the bloodshed. It ultimately resolved nothing, the freed slaves abandoned by their supposed abolitionist allies after a few years, despised as collaborators with what felt like a foreign occupation.
Democrats who imagine themselves to be the ideological descendants of the Northern abolitionists may run around acting like they’re morally superior, but former slaves who migrated North to work in the new labor-hungry factories were treated with hostility and repression. Elites in the old Deep South states, for their part, do everything they can to play down the fact these were all originally controlled by a small group of plantation lords who were explicitly trying to build an imitation of ancient Greece and Rome. For them, everyone without sufficient wealth deserved to be a slave, race merely serving as a marker of who they could legally enslave today.
Most American Civil War “history” today is a perverse trap designed to feed into the partisan doom loop. A huge amount of it was basically invented in the 1960s, about when most of the Civil War monuments that people like to fight over were put up. The fact that a huge chunk of the history taught to American students is part of a process of deliberate socialization intended to instill deference to certain elitist presumptions about the world is what gives me pause when discounting the likelihood of a second civil war. Though such a disaster would make no rational sense, in many ways neither did the first. Emotions were exploited by leaders in an opportunistic fashion, which is part of why eradicating slavery only became a Union war aim after many battles had been fought.
Pulling this all back to American policy towards Ukraine, from the very beginning partisan distortions have badly affected public understanding of the conflict. Policy options have also been constrained as a result of people not understanding exactly what of all they were being told about Ukraine is the slightest bit factual.
The Biden Administration expended tremendous effort trying to control the narrative about Ukraine, desperate to avoid being responsible if Ukraine fell but also terrified of the consequences of Putin’s empire collapsing. So they pretended that limited aid was both responsible for saving Ukraine and also that any more would carry an unacceptable risk of nuclear escalation.
Trump’s public attitude towards Ukraine is equal artificial, a function of his negotiating style and desire for a quick win on a topic of little personal interest before moving on to other things. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that the behavior of D.C. lately has proven to every other world leader with a spoonful of common sense that Trump is trying to distract everyone from some extreme challenges the supposedly mighty USA is facing. He’s signaling that America is so weak that it has no choice but to do a deal with a lesser power like Putin’s russia.
It’s a signal of just how topsy-turvy things are in modern America that a group of supposedly super-macho uber-masculine dudes are insisting that russia is somehow strong when there’s no shortage of compelling video evidence proving otherwise. This much should be obvious even to the likes of Elon Musk or Joe Rogan: a country that inherited most of the old Soviet arsenal manifestly cannot subdue a neighbor boasting about a quarter the population and a tenth of Moscow’s annual military budget. Even if Ukraine were somehow scamming the US, they’re doing a darn good job of providing a service in the process!
Team Trump appears, in diplomatic terms, content to roll over and show its belly to Putin’s people in negotiations. Trump is nakedly trying to threaten Zelensky into signing away Ukraine’s natural resource rights to the USA, which is likely all the entire fandango ultimately amounts to for Trump personally. Even if Ukraine agrees, the way Trump is going about this will only make Zelensky more popular at home and demonstrate to America’s allies that the country is on the road to implosion.
The total lack of anything resembling a scientific strategy of governing other than threaten to break stuff to see what you can extort is bound to doom Trump’s second term. Considering the people around him, it’s beginning to look like something of an open question as to whether this is their plan. Most visibly perceive a financial stake in maximum chaos, as they can always find some enemy to blame.
Step back for a second from the partisan blinders the majority of media outlets foist on their audiences, and the fundamental similarities between the Biden and Trump administrations is palpable. Both promise the moon in their own way, even as they have to know they’re bound to fail. But enough of their backers want to believe that it doesn’t matter.
When it comes to policy, this is a pretty messed up situation on every front. That’s part of the package, and also the point. Team Trump’s leaders have only one professional concern: building their personal brands. Vance went to Munich and gave a speech lambasting European politics not because this served American interests, but because he’s cultivating a market he hopes will grow. Vance, Putin, Orban of Hungary, Fico of Slovakia - they’re basically a cartel serving anyone who wants to believe that there exists some set of “traditional” values that have been fixed since time immemorial. Funny, coming from guys whose own values change with the season. They care nothing for their own people, always happy to switch to a more lucrative audience.
Cons are like that, but the understandable desperation millions of people left behind by globalization feel will out. The failure of the liberal world order so many wanted to believe was inevitable was always bound to end like this. It just can’t let people be to evolve in their own way or stick to principles even when it’s hard. So it fuels a violent, self-defeating counterattack.
What’s essential to keep in mind is that for all the justified thunder about Trump’s Ukraine policy favoring Putin there has so far been only limited material impacts on aid to Ukraine. The greatest danger at present is losing access to an important source of Patriot air defense missiles, even temporarily. However, if Japan or South Korea will step in and supply to Europe, that could be enough to compensate. Losing HIMARS would be unpleasant, but there are alternative ways to deliver firepower now. And as for Starlink - Ukraine has an alternative for that, too.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, the US has provided almost the same amount of aid to Ukraine as Europe. The funds are better accounted for than any asset owned by the Pentagon or Musk. And so far, nobody is talking about cutting Ukraine off from buying kit from American companies. Despite all the very real consequences of Trump’s bluster the past week, on the battlefield talk is just that. Unless and until Ukraine starts to run out of essential gear, nothing has actually changed.
Ironically, it’s Ukraine’s resilience that gives Trump space to throw Kyiv under the bus. Trump can’t afford losing Ukraine like Biden did Afghanistan if he wants to get anything through Congress. And if Trump is allowed to rule by executive order because Congress cedes its power, well, that’s a whole separate issue. At a certain point, questions of legitimacy come down to personal belief. And if enough folks believe the federal government has turned the Constitution against the people, fragmentation is all but certain.
Trump, in a way, did Ukraine and its true allies a favor. He has totally confirmed my theory about the unreliability of the USA. By demonstrating his feckless weakness straight up, nobody can claim to be be surprised if he does go full lunatic and try to actively sabotage Ukraine. I still do not see this happening in the end - more likely by far is Putin breaking a big, beautiful, daylong ceasefire, prompting Trump to flip again. Whatever provides the audience maximum drama - and keeps the spotlight on Trump.
But when a gun is pointed at your head, it’s prudent to assume the worst, even if you happen to be quietly optimistic about the buddy sneaking up behind the threat. It is far past time to build international institutions that can replace the Pax Americana that never really was anyway.
Europe
The German federal elections are over, and prospective Chancellor Merz immediately declared that Europe must seek full independence from America. Germany’s government is now likely to shift towards a more pro-Ukraine position than it held under Scholz, who like Biden only wanted to pretend to power Ukraine to victory. The mentality of the German SDP is as outdated as that of the Democrats in the USA - and now it pays the price of being a junior member in the governing coalition.
Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia, the Baltics, Netherlands, and Poland are all aligned. Italy and Spain are on board with opposing Putin for Europe’s sake, and most of the smaller countries in Europe are at least willing to go along with the rest. The stage is now set for America’s long-term replacement in NATO by Ukraine, which ultimately bring more to the table than the unreliable and possibly doomed USA.
European shock at the brazenness of Team Trump’s total disregard for alliances that have lasted decades is already steeling into a level of determination I’ve never witnessed in the EU, if the tone of media coverage lately is anything to go by. Americans have this strange stereotype about Europeans being weak and pacifist that is totally unjustified.
Ironically, during the Cold War it was European leaders who favored going nuclear right away in the event of a Soviet invasion. Having experienced the Second World War, most assumed that it didn’t make much difference whether a war was conventional or nuclear: everything would be destroyed anyway. This remains a key reason why European military spending is low save where a memory of Muscovite occupation is still strong.
Europeans figured that if the Americans wanted to play deterrence with conventional weapons when any major conflict would go nuclear sooner or later anyway, let them. That let the Europeans play both sides in the Middle East, warlike Americans always the bad cop to their good.
The deal is scrapped the moment enough Europeans no longer trust American security promises. That threshold has been crossed, and it will not be possible to reverse the process now unfolding. It will take a few years and a lot of investment, but the European Union finally has sufficient motivation to accept higher debt levels if that will push member economies into growth mode. German creditors won’t like it, but right now Germany is America’s closest serious partner on the continent - something it is to be hoped the end of the Scholz era will change. A slumbering giant has been awakened. Great job, Trump.
It appears that soon only the USA, Hungary, and Slovakia will oppose NATO membership for Ukraine. If NATO and the EU work out how to bypass or even eject wayward members if they won’t cooperate - better Ukraine than them anyway - NATO and the EU will come out stronger in short order. Start guaranteeing stable profits for a decade or more, like European-style industrial contracts often do, and suddenly Europe’s stability relative to the USA makes it a growth market. With a larger population but lower wealth and higher unemployment, Europe has material slack in the economy to exploit - the USA, on the other hand, is still running too hot. Europe’s main need is cheap energy, something American companies will be happy to provide, at least until the current fracking boom ends in another crash a few years down the line. By then, Europe will have had time to build out a lot more renewables, perhaps even nuclear. Ukraine does have uranium reserves.
A sufficiently coherent Europe could have more raw economic and military power than the USA. If closely allied with other democratic countries around the world, the grouping would have enough strength to deter China, contain Moscow, and leave the USA to molder.
There has already been talk of Europe setting up a $700 billion fund to back Ukraine. If this materializes, and is committed as quickly as the resources can be absorbed, Moscow’s own military spending will be easily matched. If European NATO will get its act together and treat Ukraine’s Armed Forces as an effective member with primary responsibility for defending the eastern frontier, enough gear could be transferred in six months and soldiers trained to turn the tide and force Moscow into peace on Europe’s terms by the end of 2025.
The capability is there - all that is lacking is the political will to put it in motion. American delusions about the primacy of American interests and power have made it possible. It doesn’t have to be a named “European Army” as such to fill that same role. And once the break from America is complete, Europe will be in a position to become stronger. In the long run this could be a bad thing, but for the next couple generations there seems to be no other choice.
Beijing and Moscow are certainly going to make the most of American retreat. And come to think of it, all it would take is a single terrorist attack attributed to a cartel in Mexico to pull the U.S. into some kind of self-defeating counterinsurgency effort with Team Trump in charge. One can only hope foreign intelligence services aren’t ready to have some fun.
Middle East
Tensions continue to simmer, but so far the various ceasefires are holding… barely. A return to war in Gaza looks all but inevitable, though. I expect that once Trump’s people are done blowing up European relations, they’ll use the confusion to pursue their agenda in the Middle East. Which is basically Netanyahu’s, because somehow he’s friendly with both of America’s dismal halves.
But Israel is another country where history is distorted to justify the policy preferences of the powers-that-be. It would make a lot more sense for Israel to be the 51st state than Greenland or Canada (which would be 51-60 anyway). I’d object to either of the latter less, particularly Canada, as that would automatically improve the USA in every possible dimension I can imagine.
In any case, there’s no sign of preparations for an attack on Iran yet, though Israel would probably want to resupply quite a bit first. The carrier Truman got a minor hole punched in her side after colliding with a merchant ship near the Suez Canal, so she’s got to get fixed up or replaced first. Always fun to be down a carrier because of a mishap like that. I can’t help but wonder if the deployment of a semi-celebrity captain to replace the now-disgraced former captain of the Truman is politically motivated, a reflection of anticipated need for a combat veteran in command in the near future, or the guy just really needed a break from his family after seeing them for a few months.
I’m hoping the first, because a war with Iran would be a really bad idea. You’re just not getting that nuclear program at this point. Ship has sailed, encountered a storm, foundered, and sent the crew to the lifeboats. Maybe somehow they’ll survive and return to find the vessel still afloat and recoverable, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Pacific
At this stage, and being a Pacific American, I don’t see the federal government breaking down as a bad thing in the medium to long run. Without having to subsidize the poorer South and Midwest with our tax dollars, we’d have a whole lot more money to invest in our local infrastructure. Reform the way the federal system operates, and we’d wind up with a healthy multi-party democracy and substantial autonomy for our more conservative rural areas out of necessity.
And as no one at home or abroad can rely on D.C. to fulfill its obligations to defend the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic, we’d wind up safer, too. Team Trump has chosen to represent not the will of the American people, but the desires of a clique of rich Southerners.
In Pacific America, half of Republicans reject this madness, only allying with with Republicans in the South because of how the US partisan machine operates. Most of the American West, even if more conservative on average than Pacific America, is the same. This renders Trump’s coalition deeply unstable. This may be behind the speed at which Team Trump is breaking things.
The degree to which American politics feels inherently alien when you spend most of your life on the West Coast is difficult to describe to people used to a functioning political system. Though technically part of Blue America, in a political sense, the seat of the federal government is so remote and the policy concerns of states back east so different that it’s increasingly difficult to even imagine the country as united.
I’ve long believed that it is probably the destiny of Alaska, California, Hawai’i, Oregon, Washington, and the Pacific Territories to wind up either their own independent country or as an autonomous region in the USA. Culturally, economically, and politically we’re increasingly distinct by grace of the fact the majority of people who now live in these areas are recent transplants. They came for a certain quality of life defined by the region’s unique environment, but the distances between population centers have preserved a tremendous degree of local flavor. Individual freedom and community responsibility aren’t opposing concepts in Pacific American culture, but complementary.
About every eighty years since the War of Independence, the USA has effectively collapsed then put itself back together. The centralization of power in D.C. that Americans are so accustomed to is a fairly new development, one that began when Pacific America was little more than a colony with a tiny population relative to the rest of the country. Now, Pacific America is a nascent world power trapped in a federation that’s once again falling apart, the federal government a prize different factions seek to control in a bid to dominate their rival. This is not sustainable, but it is driven by natural processes that aren’t dissipating any time soon.
America has three different futures to choose from. One is violent conflict, another a state of effective paralysis lasting a generation or more, and the third is peaceful division of the federal government along regional lines. Control of the nuclear deterrent, appointment of federal reserve governors, and ensuring the free movement of citizens and property between regions can be left to a Council of Presidents, each elected by their own region. The new regional federal governments otherwise inherit all assets and obligations granted to D.C., free to interpret and amend the Constitution according to the will of their voters.
I would suggest that each region take responsibility for its own part of the world. Pacific America would handle all foreign affairs between the Indian and Arctic, including deterring Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang from attempting to rewrite borders that have stood for decades and must never be altered by force. A Second Pacific War must be avoided if possible. That requires a nuanced touch that the D.C. establishment is manifestly bad at.
Unfortunately, the historical records suggests that the United States will make serious mistakes the first time it goes up against an enemy. It is also very normal for a rising power to deliver a nasty shock to a declining one that hasn’t realized its predicament. With most American policy towards China rooted in bigotry, not a scientific understanding of the real threat posed by Beijing, disaster is probable.
And while in prior conflicts the USA had the ability to adapt, this may no longer be the case. After three years of all-out war in Ukraine depleting inventories, American production is ramping up at a slower pace than European. It is unclear whether American industry could flex to the same degree Ukraine’s did and produce huge numbers of robust but affordable drones.
American military thinking is overrun with presumptions of dominance, a substantial portion of officer education about teaching a set of truths which benefit the established institution more than they enable success on the battlefield. The more a personality blabs on about lethality and dominance, the less they usually comprehend about the brutal nature of modern warfare. Like the officers who went into World War One insisting that combat was ennobling, if put to the test, they’ll learn the error of their ways. But too late for a lot of people under their command.
With respect to the Pacific, a combination of mythological thinking about the real history of the Pacific War and dangerous misconceptions about an imagined homogeneous Chinese mentality pose a serious risk of pulling US personnel into a trap. Right now, Beijing would be crazy not to provoke a crisis around Taiwan that demands a major deployment of American military force. Given the way Trump is decimating America’s alliances, Beijing stands a very real chance of engineering a scenario where it’s just a good portion of U.S. Forces in the Pacific against China’s bulked up military.
In a showdown where Japan, South Korea, Australia, and possibly even Taiwan were all hesitant to risk being dragged into something by an American administration that might immediately turn around and sell them all out, all it would take is one mistake by the U.S. to see half its combat power in the theater crippled in the span of a few hours. Even if China suffered worse losses, simply crippling just two U.S. carriers would transform the balance of power because the U.S. can’t rapidly replace such complex assets.
This is the danger that Trump’s antics have placed the USA and its allies in. If China is half the threat everyone insists, Xi will make a move. Putin had better be on the run by then, or we won’t be speculating about whether World War Three has begun any longer.
That China is conducting a live-fire exercise in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand represents a pretty stark signal of where Beijing believes the future is heading. It’s time for Pacific America, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan to unite.
Concluding Comments
Well, that was another very lengthy piece - apologies for the lack of brevity these past couple weeks. But when you study International Relations as an undergrad, later pick up a couple masters degrees in policy and resource management, then spend a few more years in a doctoral program focusing on systems science and theory, moments like these are pretty compelling.
It also doesn’t help that I keep making forecasts that prove broadly accurate. Or at the very least, less inaccurate than most paid experts analyzing the Ukraine War. Three years in, the thing is no less horrific than it was back when civilians were being murdered in the suburbs of Kyiv by orcs. Preventing that from happening there or anywhere else ought to be as big of a priority as fighting climate change, racism, or inequality.
America’s pattern of betraying Ukraine - and too many other allies to count - are why the world badly needs an alternative. Parts of America will be happy to join. The rest are free to make their own choice. Even if that means surrender to Putin. It’s what all tough, independent, self-made men do, right? Oh to be able to wave a magic want and send certain individuals to the front for an essential life lesson.
Ukrainians have been fighting for our freedom for years. American betrayal will come with a heavy price - for Americans.