Ukraine, 2025: Beating Heart Of A Planet On Fire
Israel/USA-Iran, India-Pakistan, Taiwan, Korea - they're all sideshows compared to the Ukraine War. The outcome of each will be affected by events on the battlefields in Ukraine.
I had meant to take more time off in the wake of my father’s death, but as it turns out, working is the best distraction right now. Besides, with the Second Earth Civil War raging and set to get a lot worse, my dad would have wanted me to maintain focus.
The stakes are terribly high for everyone, and most policymakers are getting the situation all wrong. As a result, a veritable new World War is upon us. It won’t look the same as the last one, but make no mistake: the same sort of upheaval is well underway. Everyone imagines that global breakdowns happen fast, but even the Second World War’s core campaigns unfolded over years. We’re in for a long, bitter grind. And there will be no grand victory or final triumph. Just a settling point, then reconstruction.
Forget the cozy narratives pushed by popular historians: they get paid for building a marketable story. Only some historians are scientists, which is a major problem given how powerful historical narratives are in the hands of the powerful. Eras of collapse are driven by nothing more than an unusual number of people trying to see what they can get away with. That increase in the unruly population is almost purely a function of material inequality: too strong of a gradient separating the most and least powerful, and a casino mentality takes over.
Ultimately, that’s how Putin has managed to make a million of his people casualties in the Ukraine War: life for so many in the empire is so miserable that a 10% chance of surviving an assault looks like a winning lottery ticket. Of course, with the real survival rate over time much closer to 1% given that assault troops are used until they suffer a crippling injury or die, eventually word will get out and the supply of desperate idiots will dwindle as rebelling against Putin’s madness starts to look no more suicidal than being sent into meat waves.
But the road to that happy hour is long, and there are few hard guarantees. The rising chaos across the globe as the Postwar System falls into ruins creates new challenges. Ukraine still has to figure out how to launch a sustained counteroffensive to accelerate Putin’s fall. The risk of other conflicts drawing vital military support will remain severe for some time.
The Israeli-American attack on Iran that I’ve been forecasting since Trump returned to power is part of the big global kaboom of our times. However, it’s an order of magnitude less relevant to the future than the outcome of the fighting in Ukraine over the next year. Of all the stuff happening around the world lately, Israel’s forever war with everyone that its paranoid society chooses to be afraid of - especially Muslims - is a complete sideshow. And shitshow, to use the technical term for inflicting superficial damage then calling it victory.
The primary impact of the temporarily paused Iran War has been to further illustrate the fatal flaws in western support that have bedeviled Ukraine all these years. A complete lack of real scientific understanding of the material systems that constrain everyone’s behavior is one. An astonishing lack of self-awareness is another. Then there’s the rank bigotry at the heart of the western ideology…
Nobody seems to get that the blatant hypocrisy which prevails whenever Israel or America goes to war negates all that high talk about Ukraine defending so-called “western ideals” instead of its own simple right to survive. Media talking heads and politicians unite to mischaracterize events, while Pentagon-trained equivalents spout bureaucratic platitudes in a bid to shape public perception. The basic objective is simply to manage expectations so when things don’t go as planned somebody else takes the blame.
So all the tired old mistakes are made again and again. What Putin has done to a million of his people as of this month is what nearly everyone’s leaders would do in his place, justifying their actions with patent bullshit that ordinary folks are expected to turn around and force feed to anyone they come into contact with to prove their supposed patriotism. Most would wet themselves at the thought of facing down drones, but so long as somebody else has to suffer - cool. That’s western civilization in a nutshell, America and Israel being its paragons. Putin’s empire is an integral part of it too - which is why the collapse and dissolution of russia so terrifies D.C.
Civilization is a raw myth that simply refuses to die despite lack of any hard scientific evidence of its existence. Civilization, society - these are just words that mean less fortunate people must live and die according to the will of some privileged minority. So it has been since the first empires rose in Mesopotamia, leaders generating the civilized/barbarous divide to make it easier to murder folks from other lands and take their stuff. It’s just another pyramid scheme, a machine built to deny ordinary people freedom and basic rights.
The fundamental difference between the Ukraine War and virtually every other now underway is that it is a true war of liberation, a struggle for independence from naked tyranny. No conflict is in any way noble in and of itself, nor is violence for its own sake ever a source of glory, yet sometimes fighting is necessary. Shedding imperial shackles is the universal human fight, taking place at every level of life, from the individual to the global. If resistance to coercive power entirely fails, even the idea of freedom will be perverted by the self-serving actions of the powerful.
It’s vital to understand that Israel and America bombed Iran not because a nuclear Iran poses any real existential threat to either, but because a lot of powerful people have chosen to believe that nuclear weapons are magic, so certain designated bad people can’t be allowed to have them. The number and type in one’s arsenal correspond to hard power - or so they believe. Humans are suckers for easy calculations lacking intrinsic meaning.
This foolish presumption will almost certainly lead to the widespread use of these horrible weapons within a few short years. Yet the world will not end in flashes of white light, or even at all - it will only go through a change cycle as leaders use nuclear blasts to send signals about how tough and determined they are, revealing nukes for what they truly are. Once signaling fails to achieve a decisive result, it’s back to the mud and blood of ground combat, because leaders are never risking their own skins by nuking the other side into oblivion, guaranteeing a reply in kind.
War never changes, because power doesn’t. Violent missile exchanges like the ones between India and Pakistan or Israel/USA and Iran are cathartic, but never decisive. They’re a way for leaders to play at war with minimal risk to themselves. For now.
As at least one Ukrainian analyst recently noted, the effective value of a ruscist soldier’s life is well under $1,000. It takes that much dollar value in firepower to guarantee a casualty. A thousand bucks times eight billion people comes to just about eight years of Pentagon bloat. Within a decade, there could be enough drones on the planet to kill literally everyone faster than any nuclear war, an event that, while catastrophic, would leave large areas essentially untouched.
Ironically, even leaders will be more vulnerable in the drone-infested world. In fact, the belief that killing leaders automatically begets winning is likely to trigger rounds of tit-for-tat assassinations. Once that starts, all of a sudden control of territory sufficient to erect effective defenses will be in vogue again.
The trick to surviving the collapse phase of the adaptive cycle is to hold on tight to what is proven and reliable while seeking novel innovations to invest in ahead of the spring phase to come. Of course, the process of everybody doing this accelerates the dissolution of everything. The center fails to hold, and the age of axes and wolves is unleashed. This seems to happen every three or four generations, once the painful lived experience of the last episode has faded with the passing of those who remember.
That in the USA, draft-dodging liars like Trump, Biden, and Obama routinely outlive people like my dad, a working-class veteran, is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with it. Nothing in this world will ever improve until people like them are as vulnerable as the rest of us. And that day is extremely nigh at long last. They’re sowing the seeds of their own immolation under the dragon’s breath.
You’ll have to forgive my mood - having your father suffer a pulmonary embolism and die in your arms moments before being discharged from the hospital will tend to put a person into a rather mortal frame of mind. Certain insights come unbidden, and were I a spiritual type I’d even go so far as to suggest that these are among the most important to heed, coming from a unique confluence of forces.
In any event, these days it’s best to follow the rule: when in doubt, assume the worst. It’s a good idea to remain broadly doubtful, too. A lot of claims get made that don’t turn out to be supported by the evidence. Politicians and journalists are constant offenders.
While the English-speaking media ecosystem has been preoccupied by Israel and America exchanging fire with Iran, the fighting in Ukraine has remained intense. Trends continue to bode poorly for the future of Putin’s war machine, though the orcs are leaning into several technologies that appear to be especially hard for the Ukrainians to combat. Fiber-optic controlled drones are one, and it is concerning how slow Ukrainian command has been to adopt and counter them. Luckily, they’re less maneuverable thanks to having to carry a fiber spool, making them more vulnerable to shotguns. Whoever can first put a reliable mount with aiming assistance on every armored vehicle is going to be very rich indeed. Augmented reality goggles may give soldiers a fighting chance too.
But Moscow’s offensives are still like creeping molasses - dangerous if you get caught out by a wave, certainly (a molasses tragedy happened once in Canada, I believe), but everything the orcs accomplish nowadays is purely tactical. A hill here or tree line there, with rapid gains usually a sign of a pre-emptive Ukrainian withdrawal to more favorable ground. Whenever an orc push threatens something truly serious, Ukrainian forces block it in a few days, weeks at most.
This week’s post will cover two weeks of fighting instead of one, but a wider sampling window turns out to be just fine. After comes a discussion of what’s happening abroad. From now on, instead of splitting up the global section by region I’ll just touch on the most important active crises. Not much more remains to be said about developments in North America especially: Trump is following the golden path leading straight to the collapse of the American federal system. All that remains to be answered now is how far the fragmentation will go - and the death toll. This is what happens when policy is driven by emotion.
While the blind lead the deaf over a sheer cliff, individuals and institutions with the wherewithal to choose a different path may prosper. Boiled down, systems thought is about successfully navigating uncertain, complex situations by being brutally clear about what truly matters. Which connections are beneficial, and what ones are bound to turn cancerous.
In Ukraine these past years, the world has witnessed the very best of humanity pitted against the worst. This is not a moral judgement, but one bound to the simple fact that established boundaries - physical or otherwise - cannot be altered without mutual consent. Raping a person or a country is the same essential action. Either those who commit this heinous act are restrained, or everyone loses.
The Ukraine War is the litmus test that will reveal which direction the world is set to go. Forget Iran, and forget Israel: nuke both to glass and the world won’t change. But if Putin isn’t defeated in Ukraine, he’ll attack a NATO member next. Then, it’s on. And even if it won’t look like a Soviet style armored onslaught, instead featuring bits of border territory infested by infantry, either NATO fights back with full force, or falls apart. Even that won’t avert a war: it’ll only be tougher to win. There’s no other choice. Just ask the Ukrainians.
Overview of the Fronts: Weeks 24 and 25
Moscow’s advance in Ukraine, such as it is these days, continues to be so slow in nearly every sector as to render Putin’s claims of moving forward laughable. The million casualty mark was passed at some point during the last two weeks, with a quarter of those fatalities and another quarter crippling injuries. Keep impaling yourself, Vlad. When your enemy is doing something stupid, let them!
Ukraine’s adoption of drone-first tactics appears to have substantially reduced the strain on Ukrainian personnel thanks to fewer soldiers occupying forward positions. Decreased accuracy of glide bombs thanks to jamming is another big plus, though the orcs are working to counter this by adding receiver antennae. The threat of fiber-optic drones hitting logistics vehicles is growing, however, making movement within ten kilometers of either side’s forward positions dangerous. Cover is life, so most advances take place along tree lines.
Motorcycles are not solving Moscow’s basic problem of needing to cross dangerous country with soldiers or supplies without losing too many. Reports from several fronts recently suggest that food and water are in short supply among orcs stuck in forward positions. Water especially will be a big deal as the heat of summer waxes. Another imperfect adaptation are thermal cloaks, which while reducing the signature of the soldier underneath also tend to stand out against the environment, making their presence easier to detect.
As for a Ukrainian summer counteroffensive, Syrskyi is hinting at something in the works just like he did before Kursk last year. How large and effective it will be is difficult to say. I do suspect that Moscow is worried, though. Increased movement of ruscist troops to the Huliaypole area feels an awful lot like the orcs are worried about Volnovakha. Did I get under your skin, orc intel geeks?
Well here’s a map showing some other profitable Ukrainian offensive options alongside what it’s pretty clear the orcs want to try. Defend against every possibility if you like, Putin. Just remember what Frederick the Great said about defending everywhere…
Northern Theater
The past two weeks have seen virtually no change on the Kharkiv front. Moscow keeps on probing the Vovchansk ruins, but efforts remain tactical in nature. A larger assault is possible, but doesn’t look imminent or even likely. The proximity of Kharkiv to the front makes a surprise Ukrainian move as probable as a renewed ruscist campaign, in my estimation.
I suspect that Moscow’s forces here are weaker than they ought to be, with the flailing operations in Sumy likely pulling reserves away. This could mean that ruscist border positions in Belgorod are vulnerable. If the buffer zone Putin now says he’s after on the northern front were moved onto his territory, he can’t complain that much, right? It’s still a buffer!
Most of the action in the north is taking place up in Sumy, where the past two weeks may have seen the crest of the orc wave here. After yet another week of the orcs creeping south, last week saw confirmed Ukrainian counterattacks liberate at least one border town, others reportedly to follow.
At the moment, it definitely looks like the ruscist advance is stalling out before securing any of the forested high ground that Moscow needs to shelter troops from drone attack if the orcs hope to maintain a buffer on Ukrainian soil. Further west, Ukraine’s operations near Tetkino are ongoing, exerting control ever closer to the center of town. A couple companies of orcs are reportedly all but cut off. Either they surrender, break out, or their command has to commit relief forces along predictable lines of advance in what is certain to become a slaughter. Which is the point of the operation. Moscow applies pressure closer to Sumy, so Ukraine puts counter-pressure on Tetkino.
It’s a nice tactical win if it pans out, but won’t dramatically alter the balance of power on the Sumy front. Ukraine seizing a border town or two now and again is mostly a chance to prove how weak Putin really is. In the old days, the sudden loss of a town could potentially portend a breach along a much wider front. Drone surveillance makes this much less likely, generally affording the defender more time to react.
Whatever Putin is trying to achieve in Sumy, it’s coming at a high cost with little apparent impact on Ukraine’s reserves. It seems that Ukraine is rotating in brigades, most of them newer, suggesting that the plan is to remain mostly on the defensive here while formations with the experience and equipment to sustain large-scale assault efforts prepare for counteroffensive operations elsewhere.
Eastern Theater
The bulk of ruscist activity continues to focus on the eastern theater, but only on the southern edge of the Novopavlivka front, where Moscow is trying to reach the administrative border of Dnipro district, have orc gains been at all notable the past two weeks. Creeping progress on several fronts remains the rule, with the cost extreme and many advances only temporary.
Muscovite forces have managed to slightly expand the bridgehead over the Oskil on the Kupiansk front, finally securing the outskirts of Dvorichna as well as expanding the bridgehead south down the Oskil towards Kupiansk. That probably eliminates the prospect of any Ukrainian counteroffensive up the Oskil in the near future, though Ukraine could be setting a nice trap for the orc generals in charge here.
A large forested area on the east bank of the Oskil could in theory be cut off by a sudden and intense Ukrainian push north from positions east of Kupiansk. I expect that Moscow is well aware of the threat, but if Ukraine could achieve surprise and expand its counter-bridgehead over the Oskil, Ukrainian forces might greatly expand it.
The Lyman and Borova fronts have been mostly static, with Ukrainian forces week before last running a series of local counterattacks to stabilize the lines north of Borova. Another highly attractive front-level counteroffensive would be one that knocked the ruscists away from the Oskil where they reached it south of Kupiansk. This would eliminate the threat of 3rd Corps being hit from three sides at once.
Over the past weekend, however, the orcs finally managed to continue their advance on the other flank of the Borova front, near Hrekivka. While not a critical place to hang on to, it likely forebodes 3rd Corps having to pull back a few kilometers.
Moscow is on the cusp of securing a solid bridgehead over the Zherebets, eliminating the prospect of a Ukrainian counterattack restoring the lines here. This leaves the Lyman front effectively isolated from Borova, though at no real threat of imminent encirclement. The Nitrius river should present enough of a barrier to encourage the orcs to turn north or south instead of trying to reach the Oskil here.
Generally speaking, the more Ukraine is pushed back on the Lyman front, the tougher the orcs will find the going getting in a hurry. Forest belts along the Siverskyi Donets river allow Ukrainian troops to hide a lot of positions and gear from drones.
Muscovite hopes of breaking through to Siversk continue to be dashed for the same reason. Pushing west near the Siverskyi Donets means being exposed to attack from the forests on the northern bank, which Moscow has been unable to storm for almost three years. Week before last the orcs tried to advance through Bilohorivka, and 81st Airmobile Brigade stopped them cold. Again.
So last week the enemy went after the sectors held by 54th Mechanized and 4th Offensive Guard further south. All they accomplished was to secure some of the gray zone under relentless bombardment. After grabbing a few tree lines, a renewed attempt to break through in the north got a turtle tank a good five kilometers into Ukrainian-held territory before it was blown up in Serebrianka.
Putin might one day see his troops reach Siversk proper, but only after suffering a lot of pain over a few hard months. Actually taking the stronghold looks highly unlikely unless the orcs can break through on three distinct axes, each fraught with its own risks and covered by crack Ukrainian personnel who have been fighting in the area for nearly three years.
Week before last, the Kostyantynivka front was holding remarkably well under ongoing intense ruscist attacks. Ukrainian troops had to give up a few fields south of Yablunivka on the Kleban-Byk reservoir, but this was not unexpected, and all the enemy managed to accomplish across days of fighting. The Ukrainians are defending closer to Yablunivka than expected, but I’d always thought the practice of clinging to bridgeheads risky anyway. Motorcycles can move fast, but they can’t ford deep water, so water barriers remain very valuable. The orcs try to advance up both sides of them wherever possible.
A new perimeter between Yablunivka and the outskirts of Toretsk appears to be firming up. Which may be why the orc command here decided to finally try bypassing Toretsk and Chasiv Yar last week, with only slight gains registered thanks to the predictability of this shift and competence of the defenders. The fighting on this front more broadly has not changed, nor have the enemy’s plans to get closer to Kostyantynivka.
Over the past two weeks Muscovite troops have, as expected, continued fighting to clear a stretch of relative high ground between Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk of Ukrainian troops. To advance on either town requires that Moscow maintain firm control of the T-0504 highway. Trouble is, Ukrainian drones and artillery can hit it from behind the Kazenyi Torets, about fifteen klicks to the west. At a minimum Moscow has got to clear the western bank, but is struggling mightily to do so faster than the Ukrainians can set up new defensive positions.
If I were calling the shots in Ukraine, a counteroffensive to restore the Bychok line would be a high priority. The threat of the defenses around either Kostyantynivka or Pokrovsk being flanked would be eliminated.
Pokrovsk is fortunately at less risk from Moscow’s creeping advances here than Kostyantynivka, despite the presence of ruscist troops at the gates just to the south. The terrain east of Pokrovsk tends to funnel the orcs into convenient killzones between streams. To make matters worse for Moscow, the strength of the Ukrainian defense west of Pokrovsk has forced the orcs to try and cross the Solona river much closer to Novopavlivka.
The stability of the lines around Pokrovsk definitely puts the talk of Ukraine losing the place last winter in perspective. It’s fascinating how simple ideas like cover making an area easier to defend don’t register with many analysts. Maybe it’s because they’ve never trained as a scout. They can’t conceive of the perspective. Most are serving markets that want to hear about brilliant leaders and fancy kit more than the grim truth of the bloody business anyway. Incentives matter.
Southwest of Pokrovsk, the situation remains a lot more positive for Moscow, in large part because of a relative paucity of cover or favorable defensive terrain here. Novopavlivka has seen the most rapid ruscist gains lately, with the enemy actually managing a true deep penetration of Ukrainian lines last week, moving twelve kilometers in a couple days. There’s surprisingly little footage to suggest what happened, which suggests that a motorcycle assault wave was unusually successful.
Whenever Moscow scores visible successes in terms of Ukrainian material destroyed or POWs captured, they’re trumpeted - across the empire, people have been crawling through pipes blessed by priests to commemorate a completely inaccurate story about how the orcs reclaimed Sudzha. But precious little evidence has so far emerged to suggest much fighting happened at all despite the rapid ruscist move.
In the past, this pattern has been indicative of a voluntary Ukrainian withdrawal to better fighting positions. For months I’ve been critical of Ukraine’s decision to fight so hard as far east as it has, and can’t help but suspect that sheltering behind the confluence of the Solona, Vovcha, and Mokri Yali is best. Maybe the local corps command team now agrees - maybe they always did, but they weren’t allowed to make the necessary changes in disposition.
Whatever the reason, Ukrainian forces are bound to fall back from some of the positions they presently hold on the north bank of the Vovcha now that the south bank is compromised. The enemy will make some seemingly rapid gains here as assault teams fan out from the spearhead that thrust all the way to Yalta. But Muscovite attempts to cross the Solona around Novopavlivka do not look promising, with few settlements in the area to house the required forces.
More or less, the strength gradient stops favoring the orcs nearly as much starting around now. I continue to hope that the Ukrainian plan here is to let the orcs over-extend themselves ahead of a counteroffensive here or on an adjacent front.
In what appears to be a supporting effort as well as a bid to reach Dnipro district to score some political points, ruscist troops have continued attacking up the Mokri Yali river by Komar and moved into Shevchenko, to the west. They’d like to keep Ukraine from holding on to the east bank of the Mokri Yali, but beyond that there aren’t any important goals Moscow can hope to achieve in this sector. Reaching the Vovcha is probably on Moscow’s radar, but good luck with that when a major forest plantation is less than twenty kilometers away.
A ruined village here and there: that’s what most of Putin’s “advances” in Donbas amount to. It takes a truly astonishing lack of any sense of scale to think that he’s winning this way. Earlier in the war, Ukrainian casualties rates were around a third of the enemy’s, maybe half on a really bad day. If that range has shifted even ten percent in Ukraine’s favor, the impact only magnifies with time.
Southern Theater
There hasn’t been much change on the Kherson or Zaporizhzhia fronts since the orc attacks towards Orikhiv were repelled a few weeks ago. Both sides are still engaged in a constant back-and-forth in the Dnipro Delta, but a major crossing by either remains very unlikely.
Only at the eastern edge of the theater is there anything new happening; there the orcs have begun what looks to be another probing attack, this one aimed towards Huliaypole. Apologies to the Ukrainian defenders in that sector if my posts about launching an offensive towards Volnovakha from the area actually drew some orc attacks. Happy hunting, drone operators!
The Muscovite 38th Motor Rifle Brigade is trying to secure the village of Malynivka, which would serve as a nice staging area for a few Ukrainian teams kicking off any counteroffensive aimed at Volnovakha or Velyka Novosilka. It’s also the point where Ukrainian positions come closest to the extensive ruscist fortifications covering the area. As a tactical move, this makes perfect sense: why let the Ukrainians have a convenient jumping off point for a rush to seize positions they could then shelter inside?
Well, the 102nd Territorial Defense Brigade likely has something to say about that. In any case, this looks less like an activation of a dormant front than an attempt to support Moscow’s attacks further north near Zelene Pole by putting pressure on an adjacent Ukrainian brigade.
Ukrainian media has been reporting on the possibility of renewed offensive operations in Zaporizhzhia. This is plausible, but does not seem like a great plan for the orcs - they already lack reserves on half a dozen other fronts. Someone in Moscow may have decided that 35th Combined Arms Army had been taking it easy for too long.
Aviation Duel
The Ukrainians routinely send their own glide bombs onto ruscist positions these days, with special attention paid to logistics and command centers as well as drone operator hides. The volume of Ukrainian airstrikes still pales in comparison to the number of raids Moscow runs, however they appear much more accurate on average. There are some really neat cockpit videos taken by Ukrainian pilots as they make a bombing run. I have to admit to counting the seconds they spend at dangerous altitudes as they pull back on the stick and propel their bombs skyward before rolling back and diving for the deck.
American aviators used to orbiting in a pattern with dozens of jets waiting for tasking orders before dropping bombs on insurgents haven’t experienced anything like this outside of training. They’d better get used to it, because this is how aviation activity near enemy territory will be when facing an enemy able to meaningfully resist. Sorry, American/Israeli chest-thumpers, but Iran doesn’t count. That’s like a college team taking on high schoolers. No amount of pluck and grit will change the outcome, only the final score.
Nobody has reported any aerial kills the past couple weeks, so it’s a safe bet that Moscow is starting to use its aircraft in denser but less frequent attacks whenever these have to come too close to the front. With glide bomb accuracy degraded by jamming, it probably takes half a dozen jets launching several projectiles each to properly saturate a target area.
The big story on the aviation front remains Ukraine’s desperate search for air defense systems and interceptors. How very convenient for Putin that Trump decided to go after Iran now.
But they’re allies! Americanized talking heads may cry, but naivete is nothing new for them. Nor is ignorance of how power politics actually works as a system. The enemy of my enemy is often also my enemy.
Anyway, Ukraine’s standing need for more Patriots is one of those frustrating points of dependence on the United States that beltway types will exploit at every possible turn. Hence some Israeli talking head insisting that Israeli Patriot systems made it to Ukraine back when. Just an attempt to associate Israel’s self-immolation with anything good its useful idiots identify.
With European countries no longer officially detailing every piece of hardware shipped to Ukraine, it is to be hoped that the reduction in the number of Iranian missiles capable of striking Europe can be used to justify another round of Patriot donations. Should be good for another two, maybe three systems, judging by the past. How pathetic it is that the mighty “west” is still making excuses for neither sending more nor protecting Ukraine’s skies. Anything for Israel, but Ukraine? Oh no, because that might be a step towards World War Three. (eye roll)
As far as the aviation side of things goes, given how successful attack helicopters are at taking down drones with guns and sometimes even rockets, it’s really a shame that Ukraine hasn’t been given more of them. Even converted Blackhawk transports with guns on pods would be a big help, though Apaches would be very, very nice.
And then there’s the A-10, designed as a tank buster but perhaps better suited to Shahed hunting than most aircraft in existence. With a much lower cruising speed and a design optimized for mid to lower altitudes, a Warthog carrying laser guided rockets or gun pods under each wing could engage multiple drones before landing at a remote airfield to rearm and refuel. The fact that they’re armored means less danger from exploding Shaheds.
It’s a waste of potential to use high-powered multirole jets like F-16s to hunt Shaheds, even if this makes for good training. For years every suggestion about giving A-10s to Ukraine has been met with a chorus of armchair know-it-alls insisting that Warthogs could never survive. Even setting aside the fact that Ukrainian and ruscist Su-25s routinely fly close enough to the front to fire unguided rockets, a mission A-10s can also perform, it’s frankly insulting to assume that Ukrainians wouldn’t find any use for whatever platform comes their way. It’s a big country, so A-10s can safely operate over most of Ukraine.
As a parting shot - the USA is stupid for not already having a squadron of volunteers, modern-day Flying Tigers, defending western Ukraine from drones and cruise missiles. That’s potential combat experience wasted. Apparently only the Navy and Marine Corps will have truly competent aviators in the near future, thanks to the Houthis.
Strike Campaigns
At this stage, it’s a strange night when something doesn’t blow up in Putin’s empire. Sadly, the same has been true of Ukraine for almost three and a half years, but the fact that each side is drawing about even when it comes to delivering hits at long range says a lot. Ukraine does unprecedented things Team Biden ninnies would have warned might lead to escalation now, and nobody even notices. Except sometimes Trump, who is so jealous he put on that farce over Iran.
The less good news on this front is the frustrating persistence of the Muscovite missile industry. Despite sanctions supposedly leading to the inevitable exhaustion of ruscist missile inventories a full three years ago (thanks Michael Kofman et al) the orcs are set to produce three times as many Iskander ballistic missiles in 2025 than they did in 2024 - that’s dozens every month. Which is not good, because these are among the most effective orc weapons, and Patriot production isn’t exactly raging out of control. Cruise missiles get knocked down by jets and all kinds of SAMs, but the Iskanders require Patriots or Asters in the majority of cases.
Moscow has also reached the point where several hundred Shaheds can be sent into Ukrainian airspace every day, along with as many Geran decoys. These now fly higher than ground-based teams with guns can reach, so Ukraine is having to rush the production of interceptor drones to avoid wasting pricey missiles. With lots of short-range air-to-air missiles in stock, for now it’s fine to have jets hunting drones down when ground-based teams aren’t in position. But not forever, if Moscow sends ten thousand at Ukraine every month indefinitely. Jamming their GPS control signals throws many off course, but newer drones are bound to start using image recognition to guide themselves by comparing pictures of the ground under them to those in an onboard database.
At least where Moscow has mass, Ukraine has precision. Thanks to the dispersal and hardening of most Ukrainian military production, the main effect of Moscow’s drone raids is to terrorize civilians, while Ukrainian hits are actually damaging production. Though there are some suggestions that hitting military targets closer to the front is on the rise - a concerning development. Ukraine has to master operational strike with drones fast, or counteroffensives become a much harder lift.
Naval Matters
It’s been a quiet couple of weeks on the Black Sea, at least so far as the open source record goes. Ukraine appears to follow a general rule of avoiding an area for a long time right before launching a major operation, so I would not be surprised if another combined drone and Storm Shadow strike materialized soon.
If Ukraine had more than two AWACS aircraft, some aggressive moves over the Black Sea could be warranted. Backed by proper radar, a full squadron of F-16s might be too tough for the diminished Black Sea Fleet’s aviation component to tackle. Throw in a few Mirage 2000s firing Storm Shadows, and either Sevastopol or Novorossiysk could take a bad hit.
I’m still very hopeful that Ukraine has worked out how to hunt submarines with drones and is building the proper solution. But I have no evidence to back up my hunch.
Leadership & Personnel
Official word from Ukrainian leadership is that the corps transition will be complete by this year, with the first wave of corps leadership teams already in place. On the orc side of the coin motorcycle assaults and infantry infiltration are all the rage, with the former receiving decidedly mixed reviews.
Calling these “dragoon” tactics is great if you’ve got a fetish for European military history and want to be part of a club tuned to that kink, but all I see is a case study in adaptation at the wrong level. Figure out how to send in swarms of drone bikes and color me extremely concerned. Bikes can get into tighter spaces than any armored vehicle, and they won’t trigger anti-tank mines, so they do represent a threat. Claymores and other nasty antipersonnel weapons do just fine though… and therein lies the immediate solution.
The ruscist biker gang approach is highly dangerous for Ukrainian teams in forward positions because of how Ukrainian troops have had to adapt over the past few years. Since the glide bomb threat became so severe back in 2023, positions are no longer held by groups of 5-6, but 2-3. This necessary reduction in effective firepower gives a swarm of orcs on bikes a chance to get in close before drones can respond. Enough bikers moving to attack from different directions can always overpower three fighters lacking proper support.
But successfully forcing Ukrainians back by a tree line or two doesn’t breach the front, and moving farther presents serious logistics challenges. Fewer people forward also means greater depth of defense. Further, recent improvements in Ukraine’s ability to combat glide bombs means that the main impetus for keeping forward positions so lightly held has partially dissipated. Widespread adoption of armed ground drones should also help keep surviving biker orcs from massing to assault; it ought to be much easier to control an armed ground drone close to friendly positions than during assaults.
Bikes and other light vehicles are not valueless, but they aren’t a real innovation or throwback to historical tactics. The fact that riders dismount before attacking, whether they get to the fight on a horse or any other mode of transportation, is not significant. Any war of sufficient intensity and duration will witness the evolution of every tactical approach imaginable. It’s only natural that patterns will appear again and again. But each iteration has its own quirks, and at times apparent similarities are deceiving. Everything is always a component in a greater system, lacking independent identity of its own.
History doesn’t repeat, but certainly rhymes. Context determines the flavor of the age, but the forces that establish and constrain it? That’s pure chemistry. One of the ironic tragedies of our time is the inability of most people in power to step outside the necessary illusions imposed by their context to grasp just how much is actually out of their control. Which by extension makes it impossible to know what can be controlled with the resources at their disposal.
That’s a fancy way of saying that extremely important institutions are falling apart because of an increasingly pathetic lack of foresight. After that comes pure cowardice, simple greed nipping at its heels. It’s no accident that the best-performing battalions, regiments, and brigades on both sides of the Ukraine War tend to be those that formed outside the normal military chain of command.
Too many people don’t know what they don’t know: another of the many powers of systems thought is that identifying gaps in understanding is part of the process. To properly model a system, even if the first implementation is as crude as a mental map of boxes connected by lines, figuring out what is tangible and measurable is a key early step. What can’t be measured can’t be managed, so even if only a little bit is known, start with that. Other elements will reveal their presence, often indirectly, clues leading to new investigative avenues.
It is all too common in established institutions for certain knowns to become so bound to the essence of the thing that they stop being questioned. Down that path lies inevitable oblivion through numbness to vital stimuli, for the same reason that people who lack the ability to feel pain tend not to live very long.
Ultimately, Ukraine’s corps transition under Syrskyi is bound to be a test of whether the established Ukrainian military can accept its own death and rebirth. Institutional stagnation helped prevent victory in 2023, and now the final stages of a fundamental change in accountability structures is taking shape. I expect the first test to be a counteroffensive effort in 2025. Ukraine will want to make a big move before Moscow can interrogate the new system and find new ways to adapt.
Here’s hoping I’m right, because I fear that by 2026 it will be too late. Even if the Iran War is on pause, the conflict is far from over. Trump took the showman option for the predicted attack on Iran: a superficial blow that he can pretend is a grand triumph but leaves Iran hardly set back at all with only one path forward. With plenty of uranium just a few centrifuge spin cycles from full weapons grade, and almost certainly having squirreled away enough uranium for half a dozen bombs in remote underground sites with everything required to construct a nuclear bomb, Iran could test its first nuclear device by the end of the year.
At least the blow was weak enough that Iran’s counterstrike on the American base in Qatar was equally symbolic. Had it been otherwise, a whole lot of American service members would have been casualties by now. More Iranians would have fallen soon after, of course, but anyone who believes that Israel and the USA had total control of Iranian skies needs a lesson in geography. There’s no winning a war against Iran without a ground invasion, and good luck with that.
World System Brief
Teaching geography hasn’t been my job for about eight years, so I won’t go into detail. But suffice to say that Iran is big and rugged, and Israel is known to lie about the effectiveness of military operations. America too - and the CIA far more than the DIA. That doesn’t mean Iran had an easy time of it these past couple weeks, but to take for granted the wild proclamations of American political and media entrepreneurs is to ignore decades of unjustified bravado.
In short, Iran’s nuclear program lost a fair amount of depth, but is almost certainly still just a few months from fielding half a dozen nuclear bombs on missiles that have not been destroyed. This means that in a few months Netanyahu will be back for a new round of mowing the grass - because that worked oh so well in Gaza. And all his current claims about having set Iran’s nuclear program back years will be forgotten, because he’s that brazen. By then Trump will probably be happy for another foreign distraction too.
It is perfectly understandable that Ukrainians and allies would celebrate what’s been happening to the regime in Tehran lately. Knocking the mullahs back would seem to be a net gain for all involved, and Iran all but declared war on Ukraine by helping Moscow learn to use and manufacture the Shahed drones that have terrorized and killed so many Ukrainians. I’ve certainly got no desire to see the Tehran regime survive.
But for all the loose talk of some new Axis - or whatever the conjunction of interests keeping Putin aligned with historic enemies China and Iran is being labeled this year - only his relationship with North Korea has borne more than superficial assistance. Iran definitely gave Moscow a leg up on producing inexpensive strike drones, but Moscow would have managed that on its own eventually. China is allowing a lot of dual-use tech to flow to Moscow and increasingly restricting Ukraine’s access, but that’s just business. Beijing also loves how the Ukraine War continues to reveal the naked bluff at the heart of US power; every day portions of Ukraine remain under orc occupation Xi Jinping feels more confident in American weakness under the current generation of weak leaders.
Iran’s leaders do appear to have been deluded enough to believe that Moscow would offer Su-35s and S-400s to protect Tehran before Israel would be given a chance to pre-empt their arrival. They failed to learn the correct lesson from Syria: that Moscow has always been exploiting client regimes in the Middle East with zero intention of protecting them. Moscow and D.C. are mirror images when it comes to policy in the region; nothing has changed since the Cold War.
The game is about dependency - which is one of the many reasons that attacking Iran was such a stupid move on Trump’s part, further proof that he’s a weak tool in cognitive decline being ruthlessly used by his self-absorbed advisers. Iran is too big and diverse to conquer, and the regime isn’t going to topple because of an outside attack - they never do, unless they’re already mired in a civil war. Instead, Iran is set to take the highly enriched uranium scattered across the country before the nuclear facilities were hit and rush to a bomb. North Korea will be happy to help. In the best case scenario, Iran just became a permanent hydrocarbon reserve for Beijing, a useful proxy that can always draw the USA in by threatening Israel.
Regime change is in fact the ultimate goal of the Iran War, but barring an organized domestic armed uprising on the scale of the one that took down Assad after years of awful fighting all that bringing down the mullah regime could do is fragment the country. Which will suck in everyone, the consequences soon spilling over to unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan.
If you want to generate some kind of radical populist pan-Islamic movement armed with nukes, this is how you get there. It’s as if Trump is communing with the spirit of Osama Bin Laden even harder than Bush did.
Pick your outcome: either is worse than the situation which prevailed the last time I posted. The claim that a nuclear-armed Iran poses an existential threat to Israel comes down to pure bigotry: it’s flat-out assumed, against considerable material evidence, that the regime in Tehran is so irrational that it can’t be trusted to follow the cold logic of mutual assured destruction. No matter what the Iranians say or do - and this would remain the case whether or not the mullahs all got their heads put on pikes tomorrow - Americans and Israelis would portray them all as murderous savages bent on Israel’s annihilation at any cost. Nobody seems to be interested in asking why a supposedly irrational Iran hasn’t gone nuclear at any point over the past two decades since Netanyahu first insisted to the world that Iran could build a nuclear weapon in short order. But never mind logical consistency: it simply does not apply in Israel’s case.
A similar pathology holds when covering each side’s military operations. If you only pay attention to media-appointed experts, it probably sounds as if Iran got bombed back into the stone age without scoring any meaningful hits of its own. Which is silly, because if that were the case Israel wouldn’t accept a ceasefire before rolling back Iran’s military a whole lot further, and also would not have shifted its justification for the war every other day from Iran’s nuclear program to its missile arsenal and finally the nature of the regime itself.
One of the first things the talking heads do in every war is establish arbitrary standards, like Iran firing a thousand missiles at once or Moscow achieving lasting air superiority over all of Ukraine within a few days. When it doesn’t happen, they proclaim failure. This misunderstands Iran’s (and Ukraine’s) strategic situation. If you use up half your arsenal in a single strike, you may achieve spectacular effects once - but without regular follow-up, they always fade. It’s the threat of more violence that made Trump so fearful of Iranian retaliation that he jumped at the chance to portray Iran’s symbolic bombardment of a US base in Qatar as a weak revenge for the USA using up its supply of massive earth penetrating bombs and didn’t achieve the objective.
He’s so desperate to claim success that the strong likelihood of Fordo only being temporarily cut off from the outside world is adamantly ignored. The same pattern holds in the broader conflict: Israel has posted surprisingly little footage of destroyed Iranian equipment given the number of attacks claimed. And Iranian missiles were getting through Israeli and US defenses nearly every time a salvo was fired. In short: nothing has actually changed a bit. Israel and the USA only accomplished what Israel did in Gaza for years before Hamas broke the siege and killed over a thousand Israelis in a single day.
But politicians don’t have to care about facts when they can provoke emotions. And so many commentators and analysts of a certain age hold such a grudge against Iran that they automatically presume that Israel is somehow trustworthy.
Another issue with all the cheerleading for Israel is that it obscures proper analysis of the true hazard posed by Iranian attacks. Ten to twenty percent of ballistic weapons make it through even the toughest missile defenses, and contrary to how Israel is portraying the situation the damage done was real and focused on military facilities. Not that Iran cares if civilians get hurt, just that there’s no point in wasting expensive missiles on them. Of Iran’s arsenal of several thousand ballistic missiles, only a quarter to a third could reach Israel anyway.
It’s American and other service members in their stupid lily pad bases across Iraq and the Gulf States who are at real risk, because the other two thousand can mostly get them. Which was the message Iran sent with the limited bombardment of Al Ubeid in Qatar. Fortunately, the damage to Iran’s nuclear program must be sufficiently superficial that Tehran didn’t feel that there was nothing left to lose. Otherwise there would be little point in a ceasefire. The US strike on Fordo in particular was carefully telegraphed and staged to ensure that Iran was able to evacuate the enriched uranium there while access routes were struck to give the impression of the place being sealed off.
Trump and Netanyahu were actively angling to provoke an Iranian attack that killed Americans in order to justify attempting regime change in Iran. Iran refrained from responding to one American provocation after another, up to and including the hit on Fordo, to avoid this lethal trap. If and when some Iranian-allied militia in Iraq manages to get through an American base’s defenses in the coming weeks, all of a sudden Trump’s tone will shift.
The one thing Israel did do an unambiguously good job at was to use drones to knock off a bunch of senior Iranian military leaders at start of the war. Though this will probably improve the quality of Iranian leadership overall - as well as create a thirst for revenge through asymmetric tactics that can’t be directly connected to Tehran. Ceasefire in this context only means nobody slings missiles for a while. Covert ops will intensify, and if Israel gets to assassinate generals and scientists along with their families, what’s stopping Iranian-backed militias from attempting the same?
As far as military systems go, one of the biggest analytical distortions emerging from the conflict is the patently ridiculous claim that Israeli and American aircraft have been able to operate freely over Iran. Everything about the pattern of strikes suggests the exact opposite: that crewed jets entered Iranian airspace as part of carefully designed strike packages: aerial armadas that can aggressively suppress enemy air defenses and aircraft near them to deliver ordnance to targets. For the most part, these Israeli jets were unleashing missiles, not bombs, to avoid having to fly directly over targets. This isn’t air dominance or even lasting superiority - it’s classic NATO doctrine from before the War on Terror so badly degraded professional military science and practice.
Yes, Israel blew up a lot of stuff in Iran. But that Trump and Netanyahu are determined to insist everything went as planned and castigate anyone who questions their story suggests less damage than hoped. In my book, based on what could have happened, both sides drew about even in the exchange, correcting for assumptions going in. Everyone can inflict pain. Nothing about this was decisive. The next round will be even worse.
Iran’s air force was kept out of the fight not so much because Israel took it out early on, but because there wasn’t much point in sending up a handful of elderly aircraft against dozens of modern Israeli jets. Israel scored incredibly few confirmed kills of operational aircraft, broadcasting footage of F-14s fighters blown up on the ground that open source types soon confirmed were static displays. Iranian jets apparently dispersed throughout the country and worked to intercept Israeli drones, mostly avoiding destruction.
And as for Iran’s air defenses, Israel was able to knock back the long-range stuff during the opening round of attacks. Iran’s centralized air defenses went down, but it’s such a big country that these were bound to be unreliable anyway. Far more important are the many mid-range SAM systems Iran fields, as they are locally produced, not Muscovite imports. Their quality likely leaves a lot to be desired, but the threat of even one popping up under an Israeli or American jet means that extensive precautions - like operating in strike packages - are required. And they also shoot down incoming missiles, meaning that more have to be fired to hit a desired target. This gets expensive in a hurry. Stocks are also finite.
The behavior of Israeli and US aircraft throughout suggested deep insecurity about operating at lower altitudes or even outside of corridors regularly patrolled by F-35s. Most of Iran was left alone. Ambushes by SAMs or even Iranian jets flying at low altitude and using the terrain to their advantage remained a constant hazard.
The reason that stealth aircraft were useful to Israel and the USA in the fight is a function of Iran’s air defenses being a full generation behind NATO standards. An F-35 is a safer jet to fly in hostile airspace than an F-16 because less radar energy reaches enemy receivers, reducing detection and weapons range. Stealth aircraft are not invisible to radar; instead they fade into the background clutter that systems normally filter out because the processing power needed to cope is extensive. Faster computing and networks of different types of sensors, however, can compensate. F-35s are loud, the heat of their engines is impossible to fully hide, and long wavelength radars can pick up a rough enough signal to cue other sensors.
Stealth jets are a great tool for imperial policing missions, but not so much extended combat against an equal. They’re expensive, stealth coatings rapidly degrade, and advancing digital technology already threatens to render them visible enough to hunt and kill. Iran, however, lacks the necessary gear in quantity, so its air defense systems have to operate in pop-up mode, trying to ambush jets that come into range before F-35s can pounce. This forces attackers to send aircraft in larger groups, which are hardly covert, and once the target knows that a strike wave is incoming, vulnerable assets can move to shelter.
In short, the fight between Israel and Iran was a lot less uneven than commonly assumed. Both proved able to repeatedly deliver explosives to important targets. Israel is certainly capable of hitting harder and more reliably in an absolute sense, but the impact on Israel’s economy and home front had the fighting continued would have been serious. And in the medium term, the suffering for all involved will now be that much worse. This fight is about two leadership cliques inflicting pain just to prove they can. Trump tagging in while pretending that this wasn’t the plan all along if Iran couldn’t be provoked into inflicting casualties on US personnel was no shock at all.
If anything about the American intervention came as a surprise, it’s how incredibly thin the effort was to make it seem like it came out of nowhere. American media talking up sending some B-2s flying towards Guam while others went for Iran by flying over the Atlantic as if that represented some kind of brilliant American football play is Putin-level nonsense. It’s as if someone thought the Iranians would be floored by bombers they couldn’t hope to oppose anyway coming in from the northwest instead of southeast, passing over areas Israel has been working hard to sanitize ahead of the event.
Other media hacks have been crowing about how Trump was faking everyone out by saying he’d decide on bombing within a couple weeks when the wheels were already in motion to effect the strike. They don’t seem to get that the past six months have been staged in the baldest fashion possible. Or maybe they know full well. Just like any sane observer in 2002 had to know that even if Saddam Hussein built a nuke, that didn’t mean he’d commit suicide by giving them to terrorists use on New York City or D.C. I guess once you reach a certain level of success, you’re happy to play along with the twisted power games.
Where American media was happy to cheerlead the USA into a war against Iraq on false pretenses twenty years ago, this time they chose to pretend the seeds weren’t sown for months. It’s more than a little sickening to watch the journalist set snap to attention while Trump’s supposedly isolationist MAGA base abandoned all opposition and trusted their cult hero as soon as American bombs fell. And people have the gall to say that Trump is unpredictable - give me a break!
The dirty secret of all coverage of Trump since 2015 is that the media has always been in on the scam. Even when it was fashionable to call him a fascist. Nowadays, the media is bent on refusing to acknowledge that there’s no longer any non-violent way of protecting the Constitutions against the cowards in D.C. who have colonized it. May drones take them all.
And don’t get me started on the rising generation of Iraq War veterans who have forgotten all they claim to have learned from the experience. Hegseth, Gabbard, Vance and the rest all cater to the Americans who firmly believe that Vietnam was lost only because the US didn’t go in hard enough and Iraq turned into such a bloody mess because Petraeus didn’t get his troop surge soon enough. It’s all egoist delusion.
Who pays the price for the madness? Everyone stuck in the middle, wearing a uniform or not.
Circling back to Ukraine, Ukrainians will not benefit from an Iran that winds up dependent on Moscow and Beijing. Ukraine’s cause will not be aided by Moscow being able to tell the world that it has to do in Ukraine what Israel and the USA are doing in Iran because Ukraine could build more nukes faster than Iran could ever dream. Just be glad, Ukrainians, that most Americans don’t understand that you mostly adhere to a different flavor of Christianity. Evangelicals believe they’re the only true Christians - everyone else either sees the light one day or deserves to suffer.
Anyway, Trump and Netanyahu now have a perfect excuse to make sure that as few military supplies reach Ukraine as possible, fulfilling their ongoing tacit alliance with Putin. Iran is highly unlikely to simply surrender, so the conflict will continue, Moscow neither materially improving Iran’s defenses nor cutting Iran off completely. If D.C. is dumb enough to see Ukraine and Iran as the same, tradable commodities in the great diplomatic game, Putin will be happy to pretend to oblige - then stab everyone he can reach in the back.
It’s an optimal situation for the murderer in the Kremlin. The Muscovites can build their own Shahed drones now, so Iran is a highly disposable partner. With one hand Putin can pose as Iran’s friend and offer to mediate while using the other to hold the door open to Israeli strikes by not supplying air defenses promised for years now. Most bystanders around the world will see in the attack on Iran only another imperialist assault on a weaker country, which by extension justifies Putin’s own imperial actions in Ukraine. Cute package.
Again, this is how the so-called west defeats itself. You can’t claim the moral high ground then make excuses when it prevents you from doing as you please. The cry but they’re different and bad! is always echoed on the other side of the board. And once you’re down to lashing out to prove that you’re tough enough to not be worth victimizing, what’s the point of morality anyway - except to soothe one’s conscience after committing horrific deeds?
If raw power prevails, then morality is defined by the survivors. In that case, those who have the more potent science will tend to prevail, because science is about reliable prediction. Once you know where you opponent will be, devising a plan for victory is a lot easier. The cool thing is that the best science suggests that minimum application of violence is ideal. Rarely do the good and the practical conform in this life.
The Iran War will prove tragic for everyone because in the coming years nuclear weapons are set to become a crude proxy for estimating how much power a country or alliance has. Aside from guaranteeing their eventual widespread use, this will generate a need for ongoing low to mid-level conventional conflicts that allow each party to bluff how existential the fighting is at any given moment short of going nuclear. That’s bound to cause widespread collapse of institutions and services in affected regions.
The most robust and resilient institutions will tend to be more local and rooted in as close to universal values as exist in this world, always proven by material action. Self-help networks and other communities working towards a common cause will be the primary drivers of change, filling the gaps left by rapacious corporations and governments until both are properly chained.
It won’t be this way because of some grand ideology or magical new technology, but as a function of the way humans are. Broader structures like society and state are more artificial than focused ones like community and governance. Conflict is expensive, so structures rooted in it eventually die like invasive weeds.
Applying one or all of a variety of remedies discoverable by science can speed the process along. And sometimes even mitigate future outbreaks. But the system must be mapped before it can be managed. I really need to figure out how to get funding to get that done.
Getting back to more practical matters, the drain on attention, resources, and moral positioning that the Iran War represents only amplifies the need for Ukraine to strike back in 2025 if at all possible. Though Putin’s economy is finally hitting a wall and stocks of gear are critically depleted, if Beijing recognizes the potential of the moment a surge of support for Moscow’s war effort would make a lot of sense right now.
Trump’s behavior suggests that, while he would absolutely sell Taiwan to China for a tacit understanding about long-term spheres of influence, Beijing must also consider the possibility that the ideological loons around Trump will push him to risk a conflict in a bid to secure the best possible terms. That’s essentially what Trump is saying he did with Iran, so the ploy must be anticipated, despite the obvious risks. This presents both a grave challenge as well as a tremendous opportunity to lure the USA into a trap that, once sprung, will irrevocably alter the balance of power in the Pacific and beyond.
The sacrifice of Iran might just be the first stage in something Putin and Xi cooked up together, seeing how the winds were blowing this spring. With two of the four aircraft carrier groups assigned to the Pacific stuck off the coast of Iran for the foreseeable future and one from the Atlantic preparing to deploy, Beijing won’t find a better moment to strike than this summer. It isn’t like the threat of the Iran War starting up again will fade any time soon. Not when all sides are declaring victory.
At least when Beijing makes a move, it won’t be an all-in massive bombardment of US forces in the West Pacific, some kind of new Pearl Harbor. Beijing is smarter than that. You don’t give the US a stage-ready crisis straight out of a movie. Instead, you simply take advantage of Team Trump’s lack of serious foreign policy chops and obvious unreliability to draw the US into a one-on-one standoff east of Taiwan that ends with Trump quietly confirming that the US won’t fight a war against anyone remotely resembling an equal. Not unless openly attacked first.
Iran’s leaders appear to have foolishly believed that Israel and the USA would never go so far as to risk major Iranian retaliation despite mounting evidence that Netanyahu and Trump wanted a war. Somehow, Iran’s leaders weren’t ready for one even though it was unleashed right when I’d predicted Trump and Netanyahu were planning to start the campaign. I said it was inevitable, and it was so. Anyway, no one will make the mistake of trusting Trump’s diplomacy ever again.
Beijing would be well advised to assume that war is inevitable and seek to force D.C. into a fight on grounds that leave it alienated from its most important ally, Japan. This is likely to be some form of lasting maritime quarantine that seeks to prevent “military cargo” from reaching Taiwan by randomly stopping and inspecting vessels in Taiwanese waters. That would represent a claim of effective sovereignty which, if either unopposed or unsuccessfully opposed, would destroy American credibility.
Trump’s use of the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program to cover up for his plan to work with Netanyahu on attacking Tehran sent a vital message. There is not a single reason to ever trust his word, but many to take control of the relationship by forcing his hand wherever possible. Trump is the kind of person who is only tough when he thinks his opponent is weak. In the wake of the kerfuffle that ensued when Zelensky stood up to him in the White House, Trump has had lots of insults to sling but hasn’t cut Ukraine from military aid again.
The net vector here seems clear from where I sit: Trump is loud, but his shtick is tired and increasingly hollow. In that, he really is the soul of today’s America. As far as I’m concerned, if a single American or ally winds up killed by Trump’s banal charade, I sincerely hope that he, Vance, Johnson, and any other leaders Iran is able to get at are taken out with extreme prejudice.
It’s high time for leaders to suffer for their mistakes instead of ordinary folks. Around the world, the majority of powerful people are after the same thing: to remain powerful forever. Good democratic institutions are the best bulwark against this preening ambition.
Concluding Comments
I think I can be forgiven for suggesting that everything seems to be coming up aces for Beijing. You couldn’t ask for a more fortuitous confluence of events leading up to Xi’s moment in the sun.
How ironic it will prove if, after all is said and done, an indigenous Taiwanese resistance backed by smuggled allied non-US support is able to prevent China from maintaining a blockade, much less effecting a landing. Ukraine proves that outcome to be as likely as not, because powerful people everywhere have badly misjudged the moment.
Grasping for whatever you can hang on to when the long winter is coming isn’t the optimal strategy. It’s control over certain types of resources that matter, and the rudiments of digital technology can be obtained almost anywhere. Where once oil was the hinge upon which the world swung, now the ability to maintain a self-contained technological ecosystem is paramount. And I don’t mean at the country level, but something much more natural.
The majority of countries on this planet are artificial constructs. They only gain true legitimacy by proving that they respect the will of their people and are accountable to them. No formal legal document can override this universal scientific fact. Nor are borders forever irrevocable - they only cannot be altered without consent.
That US presidents can apparently wage war without the approval of Congress, as well as - at least according to certain partisan Trump-appointed judges - trample on the rights of states by taking over the state National Guard without consent, marks the end of any legitimacy the existing federal system once held under the Constitution. D.C. now poses a direct and dire threat to the fundamental values that truly define the USA.
And they ain’t Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, or any other fad psuedo-historical category popular with some affluent demographic. They’re just an expression of the inherent human drive to seek life, liberty, and happiness.
This is the link that forever connects Ukraine’s ongoing fight with liberation struggles everywhere. Ukraine isn’t still fighting because Zelensky or Syrskyi wants this, but because the Ukrainian people have no choice. Putin continues to insist that they are just misguided russians and claim that violence is necessary to teach them the error of their ways. This is genocide. If you won’t fight that, you’ve got no business policing the world to prevent the emergence of new nuclear powers.