Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel: The Collapsing Western World
The Postwar world order is dead, the cause: self-inflicted wounds. Contrasting the support offered to Ukraine and Israel reveals the fatal flaw in Western leadership. tl;dr: it hardly exists.
Fair warning: this might come off as a bit of a rant. But there are times when truths must be stated baldly, and this is one of them. The world is at another dangerous turning point, and if it goes the way it looks set to, the consequences won’t be pleasant.
Israel has crossed a very dangerous line that puts military personnel and their dependents everywhere at risk in future conflicts if the tactic of sabotaging supply chains spreads. Those justifying or celebrating what Israel just did to Lebanon are as bad as the people who cheer when a Hezbollah, Hamas, or Houthi rocket strikes home.
It is they who bear the most responsibility for the ongoing collapse of the Postwar Order and its replacement with something terrible. Every value those who fought and won the Second World War sacrificed so much to secure is at risk.
History doesn’t repeat because it has to. The same bad ideas simply re-emerge time and again, like the spirit of Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings - until his power is removed. Old justifications for misdeeds are dug up and restored, and soon everyone is back to insisting that whatever We do is right because We’re the Good Guys, our enemies less than human and deserving of whatever pain we see fit to inflict.
Powerful people always play the same sick game. And so their people all wind up equally blind. It’s exploding pagers and handheld radios today, but tomorrow it’s going to be drones loaded with thermite or even acid plastering schools. When they do it it’ll be a terror attack, when we do it righteous justice. The kids will be dead all the same.
This is why so many people have struggled so long to create laws to govern behavior in armed combat. These are rules like not murdering prisoners or wantonly massacring civilians, refraining from launching artillery strikes on populated areas or using cluster munitions near noncombatants. They aren’t perfect, but they set some kind of standard. It’s something. A foundation to build on.
Those who violate these rules mark themselves out. Not in a moral sense, but a pragmatic one: if you choose to brutalize anyone without need, you’re liable to do it to everyone. If morality and ethics ever truly prevailed in discussions of international affairs, then the actions of Putin and Netanyahu would be held as being of the same essential kind.
That harsh truth is the poisoned chalice most leaders and pundits in the so-called Western World have chosen to sip from, to their lasting shame. Their decision presently stands to undermine and eventually demolish all efforts to preserve democracy and resist autocrats around the globe.
The biggest threat to their security that Americans and allies now face is their own hypocrisy with regard to support for Ukraine and Israel. This stands as a potent warning to Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, or any other country worried about Chinese intentions: you will be sacrificed.
American leaders in particular do not have the intestinal fortitude, as my drill sergeants called it, to fight China over Taiwan. All their talk otherwise is just that: a bluff. Only Israel will ever receive the level of support the USA pretends it is obliged to offer its allies, and that’s a function of forty years of powerful people in Israel and the US building close personal ties.
Just as in Ukraine, if faced with a threat of nuclear escalation American leaders can be counted on to find any excuse to stop short of fighting. China thus has an open door to isolate Taiwan from its allies by exploiting America’s manifest fear of a real right.
A popular argument this is not. But it’s a necessary one to make, because just like in the USA and Britain in late 1941, illusions about our military strength and ability to deter a committed opponent prevail. Japan absolutely shattered Britain’s position in Asia at the same time as it annihilated America’s main fleet at Pearl Harbor, and had it adopted a sane strategy in the aftermath it might not have gone down in defeat.
China’s path to taking Taiwan without firing a shot involves exploiting American hypocrisy to divide it from its allies in a slow, deliberate escalation that forces the USA to choose to take the first shot. America will be presented as provoking a needless conflict it isn’t prepared to win, using allies as convenient shields.
The closer a base or carrier operating area is to China, the more danger it’s in. Around 1,000km out, no matter how many missiles the Pentagon sticks on the Ryukyu islands that come close to Taiwan’s northern tip, China will always be able to fire more drones and missiles at US carriers and Marines operating forward than they can reliably knock down, so the former have to keep back. The latter… well, I get real Task Force Smith vibes from the Marine Littoral Regiment concept. It was right in 2010, but obsolete now.
If the US isn’t allowed to run combat missions from at least Japanese territory, then the carriers and the Marianas chain are the USA’s only forward base. That dramatically limits the areas China would need to strike or defend in a conflict, which limits the amount of combat power the US could use to break a blockade if it chose to. The modern USA is unlikely to ever fight when the odds are anywhere close to even.
Chinese ships can sit just a few hundred kilometers off their coast coast, under and extending China’s air defense umbrella. Keeping dozens of jets constantly in the air east of Taiwan becomes possible, and that allows for plenty of submarines to lurk. Drones just make the geographic mismatch more compelling, because there are way too many launch points in China to hope to suppress. Beijing will be able to let its maritime militia and coast guard harass and board merchant vessels sailing to Taiwan while the military stands guard further out, daring foreign vessels to run the risk of being a sitting duck if shooting starts.
What’s Taiwan to do, fire first? Taipei would be portrayed as starting a fight nobody wanted. South Korea and Japan would be threatened with a nightmare scenario, expected by D.C. to join a potentially massive war caused by China was “only” inspecting some ships. Why, given how the US has slow-rolled aid to Ukraine, would they go out on a limb for Taiwan in this situation if China was taking care to not visibly prepare a full invasion force?
An important advantage Beijing would have in this scenario is the ability to set the pace and manage its risk. If Xi is confident the US won’t go to war with a nuclear power thanks to comparing US treatment of Israel and Ukraine, then learning how Japan and South Korea will act under pressure becomes very attractive. If they do respond with force, a quarantine can always be dialed back and declared a success. The USA’s own reaction during and after could easily do it more harm than good, alienating its allies or simply proving inept. A repeat attempt six months later might work out.
The stark contrast between American support for Ukraine and Israel is the vital tell, the public demonstration of where US priorities really lie. No one has any reason to believe that the US will adequately honor any commitment except one made to Israel. Even holy NATO Article Five is suspect, the potential for invoking it perversely used in Ukraine to justify not shooting down ruscist drones that approach or even enter NATO airspace. When push comes to shove, if there’s any way to cop out, Washington will apparently find a way to do it.
China doesn’t have to invade Taiwan to effectively seize control: it merely has to demonstrate once that no one can successfully intervene if it chooses to attack. Taipei can be slowly starved of resources and worn down once incoming shipments are vulnerable to interception. After witnessing the cost of fighting a war in Ukraine, even if you don’t lose, no democratic leader is likely to be quick on the trigger in a standoff with China. And if you don’t have the freedom to fire off the thousands of missiles and drones you claim to be planning to deploy off the Chinese coast to deter Beijing, they’re useless even if they materialize.
Who can truly believe that the USA would risk a nuclear war over Taiwan when even the least credible threat of it from Moscow deters support for Ukraine? That seed of doubt is lethal.
This, coupled to the real risk of the USA breaking up thanks to its internal partisan doom loop, is why I think a lot about how to structure a West Coast Defense Force and Pacific Alliance, a NATO for the Pacific. Hopefully a pointless hobby, but increasingly, I wonder…
If the past few years have made anything clear about the world we live in, it’s got to be the fact that rank hypocrisy rules international affairs. For those of us who actually care about stuff like freedom, democracy, and human rights, it is gut-wrenching to see such powerful concepts colonized and abused by people who insist they’re determined to defend them.
In any system powered by people, expectations are everything. People mostly behave according to their training: they learn what actions bring rewards or suffering and respond accordingly. Dollars are valuable because people expect that they can exchange a specially blessed piece of paper for things they actually need. When the prices of things change rapidly, people are forced to game out the best way to spend their limited income.
This requires time and effort - eternally scarce resources. It also takes place in a world of uncertainty, where being wrong determines a person’s position in the grand game for the next round. Those of us with the right skills, connections, or the blessings of luck can make it through alright, anyone not born in to the right situation faces barriers that tend to leave them vulnerable.
Some moments in time see the normal churn of life dramatically accelerate, usually when some major expectation shared by lots of people breaks. That generates tremendous uncertainty that filters into every interaction. People have a hard time gauging what’s going to happen, and some gamble. Instabilities magnify and intersect, leading to a widespread sense of everything once taken for granted falling apart.
Look around the world over the past ten to twenty years, and the truth should be obvious: instability is spreading, tensions escalating between groups. That in turn is pushing some to look for enemies abroad to tamp down on internal tensions produced by everyone’s growing fear.
Putin of russia and Netanyahu of Israel are the two world leaders most united in their fundamental need to provoke as much conflict as possible to secure their own survival. They are, though conventional wisdom despises this inconvenient truth, allies. Under Netanyahu Israel has become Putin’s silent and entirely willing partner in promoting chaos throughout the Middle East.
Both leaders stay in power by keeping those who would like to replace them fixated on battles abroad. Israel’s democracy has calcified under the weight of fighting an eternal war for survival, while russia never really had one. Both are dominated by oligarchs who drive national policy in a particular direction to secure their interests. Each benefits from instability in the region, Israel because its leaders have to remain in a state of perpetual conflict to avoid dealing with the slow takeover of the country by religious extremists, russia because Putin wants to become the leader of a global OPEC as fossil fuel reserves inevitably dwindle.
Putin is building an empire to ride out climate change; Netanyahu stays out of jail by remaining Prime Minister, a position he holds solely because he is delivering what a dangerous group of bigots on Israel’s far right wants: ethnic cleansing of all territories they see as belonging to ancient Israel. This extends well into modern-day Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, extremists claiming a Biblical right to dominate the region all the way to the Tigris and Euphrates.
Both Putin and Netanyahu are, in the process of clinging to power at any cost, destroying their own people. Israel’s actions are now the very fount of modern antisemitism, while russia will remain a pariah forevermore. Both countries are destroying themselves, lacking any kind of real future because the more you invest in war, the less you can spend on your people’s needs. Agents of both Israel and russia have spent decades cultivating relationships across the rest of the world, particularly the USA, in an explicit effort to influence domestic politics in their favor.
You don’t get told this story by leaders or journalists very often for a simple, banal reason: the idea of Israel being a card-carrying member of the global club calling itself the Western World has been baked into the conventional wisdom. Israel has managed to make itself an extension of the West, leaders leveraging personal relationships intentionally cultivated as part of a national strategy for securing its existence.
No conspiracy is required: the process happened naturally, if coincidentally, mainly thanks to the US reeling after losing in Vietnam. Seeking a new justification for actively managing foreign affairs that didn’t demand deploying troops to fight Soviet proxies directly, US leaders latched onto backing Israel in the late 1970s. Preventing another Arab-Israeli war from potentially escalating into a nuclear conflict gave D.C. an excuse to expand a military posture near the heart of the world’s fossil fuel economy.
This ensured that the US would always be a stakeholder in OPEC decisions, if indirectly. After the oil crisis produced by the Arab embargo during the 1970s shattered America’s economy - US production of conventional oil had peaked and was on its terminal decline - US leaders were determined to play both sides, offering to mediate between Israel and the Arab governments while more or less buying both off with massive amounts of military aid. While understandable, this had the effect of angering substantial portions of the Arab Muslim community, which for good reason perceived the USA as the sole force preventing them from overthrowing their corrupt leaders.
American leaders gained something else from the bargain: a new claim to be actively defending democracy despite publicly abandoning South Vietnam. When Iran’s Revolution in 1979 removed the Shah, a longtime (and extremely brutal) US ally, the subsequent hostage crisis hit the USA right in the Vietnam syndrome. Hatred of Iran got baked deep into the American mindset, leading to the US backing Iraq’s invasion of Iran and even helping Saddam Hussein deploy the chemical weapons he used.
With Iran’s new regime declaring itself to be a sworn enemy of Israel, an alliance of convenience deepened. Forgotten was the fact that Israel had once attacked a US intelligence vessel, the USS Liberty, killing American sailors in an incident that still hasn’t been adequately explained. In fact, Israel has killed quite a few American citizens over the years, as anyone who stands with Palestine is a Palestinian in the Israeli mindset - and all Palestinians are now Hamas, just like all Lebanese are apparently Hezbollah - another message Israel just sent.
Over the 1970s and 1980s, Israel became perceived as a loyal foothold in a region filled with extremists who supposedly all hated Israel and America equally, a narrative that was solidified by Al Qaeda’s bold attack on the USA in 2001. Decades on, Israel and the USA have forged deep institutional relationships that rival the Five Eyes pact which allows the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to share sensitive intelligence. Military contacts run very deep, giving Israel an unquestioned channel of influence that demonstrates its value every time Israel comes up with an innovative new way to shred the laws of war.
Israel’s recent use of booby-trapped pagers and handheld radios to kill a couple dozen and maim thousands in Lebanon this week is a case in point. As the loud proclamations about how genius Israel’s move was and how devastated Hezbollah must be prove, all talk about international law or the humane conduct of war by people who proudly back Israel is trash.
A sick, cruel, frankly evil lie, designed to sanitize what our side does as justified while everything the bad guys do is wicked and senseless. This age-old con is the one that leads to moments of uncertainty and fear exploding into carnage. Israel has become like an abused child who grows up to see abuse as the only language that matters. The whole Masada complex will not end well, no matter how “Chosen” a people believes itself to be. Every group thinks it’s Chosen and deserves its Holy Land… not all get to have it.
Using explosive devices hidden in electronics - or, as some suggested but doesn’t appear to be the case, hacking them to make their batteries explode - is a war crime, pure and simple. It is the very definition of an indiscriminate attack no matter how you slice it. Those attempting to claim it was somehow “precise” or “targeted” are spreading misinformation and dangerous propaganda that undermines all efforts to actually defend democracy. They’re acting as Putin’s unwitting tools in this awful great game we’re trapped together in.
However the explosive charges were delivered, the effect was identical to using a cluster bomb on a populated civilian area - something the orcs of russia do all the time in Ukraine. There it’s condemned - though NATO still won’t physically act to protect Ukrainian or even NATO civilians from drones and missiles that go astray, even though they don’t know the weapons actual intended destination. But when Israel does it, it’s supposed to be an innovation? Get real.
Israel’s backers, of course, will say that anyone in Hezbollah is a legitimate target, and sabotaging pagers used by the organization is a focused strike. This logic instantly falls apart for the same reason saying that Ukrainian civilians just shouldn’t have wandered outside during a ruscist Iskander cluster strike: the shooter has no reasonable way of knowing who will actually be hit.
Precision is using a laser to put ordnance through a window or deploying a drone to fly into a hole in the roof. Mistakes happen, but a laser designator, drone feed, or sniper’s scope puts the onus on the trigger-puller to verify the target is legitimate. That is the seed of accountability, which is necessary for any laws of war to operate.
In sabotage of this sort, you have no chance of being even remotely sure the items would only or even mostly be used by Hezbollah fighters. They also had no way to know whether someone using a pager would, oh, say have kids who might grab it and bring it to dad.
Yes, that’s what killed at least one Lebanese child. How many people were hugging a kid or changing their baby’s diaper when the pager went off, mutilating both?
We’ll never know, because the media is already hard at work sanitizing an outright crime as okay because Israel did it. Never mind the backlash if Ukraine were to pull this off in Moscow, blinding a few thousand Muscovites. It would lose support in an instant and be forced to accept a bitter ceasefire, which is why one of these days the FSB is bound to try a false flag attack.
Another important thing about groups like Hezbollah to keep in mind is that they operate just like any military organization anywhere. Some fighters are full-time, dedicated folks who launch rockets and snipe Israeli soldiers. Most, however, are the equivalent of civilian employees working at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. That whole tooth-to-tail ratio thing at work again.
What nobody wants to admit about groups like Hezbollah and Hamas is that they exist because of Israel’s wars against Palestine and Lebanon. Yes, the groups are nasty and ruthless - they have to be to survive. They’re made the same way you get an antibiotic resistant strain of bacteria. The old Palestinian Liberation Organization once tried to fight using tanks and uniformed soldiers, but Israel wiped it out decades ago. A full course of treatment, to carry on the metaphor, requires building alternative governing institutions.
To maintain a connection with the community they claim to protect, non-state groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and Al-Shabaab all provide essential services in areas they maintain a presence. Courts, police, schools - they’re paid for through active taxation, just like in any country. The institutions aren’t at all fair, but they’re better than a state of pure predation by whoever has the biggest guns, which is what an Israeli attack leaves behind, being not a step towards any kind of victory, but a message intended to sow terror. That’s the Dahiya doctrine, which has failed to destroy any of Israel’s enemies but sure has fatally compromised it morally.
Already evidence is emerging that Hezbollah’s active military ops aren’t crippled, as Israel alleges (it’s also been alleging Hamas is defeated, yet fighting in Gaza continues), because it hit folks working on the civilian outreach side. Israel very likely hit a lot of public employees effectively forced to work for Hezbollah because it takes care to be the only service provider in town. Anyone less organized gets wiped out by Israel after someone alleges they’re Hezbollah too - Iraq or Afghanistan veterans are all too familiar with the local grudge game, I hear.
Israeli leaders don’t seem to understand that eventually no one will care any more if they’re labeled an antisemite, because the term will have been reduced to meaning just “someone who criticizes Israel,” something the Nazis could only have dreamed of. Not that Netanyahu and their ilk care, because in their little pyramid scheme so long as Israel exists as an imaginary safe haven Jewish communities everywhere are somehow safer. If they come under attack, they can always escape to Israel… there to be pushed onto a settlement in the West Bank or Gaza where they will remain dependent on the Israeli security system thanks to the unhappy neighbors.
Operationally, the impact of Israel’s attack will be limited to the short run - suggestions are already emerging that it only happened because Hezbollah caught on to the threat. It should have been part of a massive Israeli onslaught to make any military sense - that might still come, but the timing is now off. Hezbollah will be ready. And ordinary Lebanese will soon move from terror to rage.
Israel’s actions have indeed terrified Lebanese civilians, so that part of the plan worked as intended. But this kind of strategic bombing approach always backfires. In a country riven by divisions that keep it perpetually on the edge of civil war, this is more or less guaranteed to push ordinary Lebanese into Hezbollah’s arms. Iran wins, Syria wins, Hezbollah wins - and Netanyahu wins, because a wider war is his explicit aim.
That is the true strategic purpose behind this operation. It’s a terrorist attack designed to provoke an unrestrained Hezbollah response that gives Netanyahu enough cover with the Biden Administration to call Israel’s subsequent assault on Lebanon self-defense. Ultimately, Netanyahu is bound and determined to pull the USA into an open war with Iran and its “Axis of Resistance,” itself is just a con designed to profit from Palestinian misery without actually risking an open fight with Israel.
Netanyahu is in an excellent position no matter what happens in the US election because Biden, Pelosi, and other leading Democrats have made it clear that Israel is untouchable. Harris won’t dare to try and rein Israel in with the election this close and potential re-election in the back of her mind, as most Americans trained to accept without question that Israel is basically the 51st State. To question Israel is now to question the entire premise of American foreign policy since the 1940s, which is that America won and so deserves to lead the world.
Note that Trump and that Kennedy idiot (why is there always a Kennedy around?) have now publicly embraced Putin’s propaganda about the Ukraine War, claiming that backing Kyiv risks a nuclear exchange. Funny how they act like they care about peace when in a heartbeat a Trump Administration would send Americans to die fighting Iran at Netanyahu’s behest. It’s highly unlikely that Trump would fight for Taiwan, however, and in broader American political circles you can already sense vapid minds wondering whether Taiwan is really worth a fight. After all, the US really wants to bring chip production back home…
When a system starts to collapse, connections that weren’t apparent at first suddenly reveal themselves to be key drivers of the fall. It’s characteristic of this period that everything feels confused, old assumptions failing with alarming frequency. Conspiracy theories abound, driven by it seeming so impossible that a world that once felt so controlled is proving manifestly chaotic. Folks naturally fall back on the people and ideas that feel most familiar, and the process self-accelerates.
It’s abundantly clear that these days will be remembered as a time where everyone should have known what was coming, the warning signs all there, but those with the power did nothing to halt the slide. They will be seen as having closed their eyes to the truth, doubling down on hypocrisy, sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Sound like climate change? It is, except bad governance will kill more people first while also accelerating environmental deterioration everywhere.
If you read outlets that purport to grasp international events, especially American ones like The New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, and their sort, it is now seen as a fact that the USA and other allies constitute an Alliance of Democracies standing against an Authoritarian Axis. This has become perhaps the most dangerous, deluded, self-destructive conceit of modern times, that old cartoon show Super Friends brought to life.
Our leaders like to wrap themselves in a public faith they call “The West,” “Western World,” or “Western Civilization,” but this object simply doesn’t exist. No common values unite the countries in this grouping; it’s a geopolitical artifact left over from the Cold War.
Now, this isn’t to imply that democracy isn’t a good thing or that an alliance of democracies is a mistake: the exact opposite is the case. It’s precisely what the world needs right now.
But the rest of us are going to have to build it ourselves. And we’ll have to do it despite most of our leaders, celebrities, and CEOs. To them, we’re little more than cattle.
War is politics, and theirs revolves entirely around profit, both personal and institutional. The Western establishment exists to secure profit-generating opportunities for the fortunate, with the dream of becoming one of the lucky few in a false meritocracy keeping the majority in line. This is why Western military professionals are having such a hard time understanding Ukraine, particularly the logic of hitting Kursk: a fight for survival is not the same as a conflict that stands to boost one’s professional prospects.
For decades Western military institutions have decayed, transforming into a kind of religious order that seeks to maintain itself in a particular mode of being forever, not win wars. Defense companies build fancy expensive kit that takes so long to field it’s effectively obsolete when it arrives - but hey, no worries, because then the company can charge to handle the upgrade process!
In Ukraine soldiers and technicians are having to Macguyver so-called NATO-standard shells to fit in NATO-standard artillery barrels, and their drone innovations have pretty much made standing NATO-standard doctrine obsolete. Ukraine is having to retrofit 60-year old Leopard 1 tanks to cope with the fact that NATO and the US are hoarding newer tank models, pretending that they could ever ethically send their personnel to war in the current generation with its proven vulnerabilities. Decades after knowing that anti-tank missiles were a huge threat, Western armies chose to rely on Cold War designs intended to win tank-on-tank duels that almost never happen in Ukraine.
The entire Western military establishment stands to be revealed as a massive taxpayer con if put to the test in the fight with China many seem determined to have. China might not have gone to war recently, but history shows that sometimes starting from a blank slate is superior to being bound to outdated institutions. In a fight, the US military will spend months trying to make its custom systems work as described in manuals, officers flustered and frustrated when little glitches no one ever thought about undermine all efforts. Once again, it’ll be the frontline personnel who pay the price.
I wouldn’t make such a bold claim except that nothing about Western involvement in global affairs makes any sense unless you accept, based on the evidence from Ukraine and Israel, that a vast chunk of the military-industrial-media complex in the West sustains a bald-faced lie about the quality of its services. With fewer than 10% of Americans having spent a day in uniform, there is almost no public pressure demanding real accountability from the military. With the services all putting on their best 1940 face of late, it’s ironic that all have forgotten it was often drafted civilians with no military heritage who wound up performing the best on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific.
Also forgotten is the fact that those laws of war Americans are taught to believe our people follow, always, because we’re the Good Guys, are fragile. They are not followed because an international court exists to try all offenders - an attempt has been made, but notably the USA refuses to fully join. That’s why there’s almost zero chance of Putin ever going on trial at the Hague: George W. Bush never did, and the USA’s War on Terror caused the deaths of far more people than either Israel’s annihilation of Gaza or Putin’s attempt to destroy Ukraine.
If you don’t think this rank hypocrisy badly damages American and allied national security and puts personnel at risk, I’m sorry, but you’re badly mistaken. The laws of war, fragile as they are, represent one of humanity’s most important developments. Humans have always tried to contain the damage caused by wars, participants knowing deep down that they happen because someone made a mistake or leaders got too ambitious. As modern industrial countries began to wage wars of extermination, pulling entire populations into the military machine, preventing fighting from degenerating into mindless brutality without purpose became a serious challenge.
Tolkien described his time in the trenches during the First World War in this way: we were all orcs. Barring a stern commitment to ruthless discipline in the conduct of the thing, war reduces everyone to an orc.
The term is in fact highly appropriate to describe russian soldiers in Ukraine because orc is derived from an Old English word loosely translating to demon. In Tolkien’s world, an orc was what you got when you put a human into an industrial war machine. The only control a person has in that state is their ability to inflict brutality. But this goes both ways, making combat even worse than it has to be.
You want your soldiers to fight, but not with reckless abandon. If everyone could simply disable the other side, that’s what most would do. Ideally, you want the enemy’s soldiers to stop fighting at the slightest excuse, something only possible if they trust that they won’t be tortured or killed.
Putin’s orcs are made to believe that’s the fate in store for them if they give up: make no mistake that the fact 95% of Ukrainian prisoners report being tortured is part of a broader message to all orcs. It’s a sign of how deep ruscist propaganda runs that many are blowing themselves up to evade capture, some even trying to take Ukrainian soldiers with them. This makes taking prisoners risky - another cruelty of the Putin machine.
In war, the only real rule is that which I do to my enemy, my enemy will do to me. The reason that prohibitions on using chemical weapons, blinding lasers, and other innovative means of delivering harm persist is that most combatants agree that the risk of mutually going all out is detrimental to maintaining discipline in the ranks. Soldiers who feel like there’s a purpose beyond slaughter and a standard to aspire to that renders them superior to their enemy fight better. Ethics are adaptive.
An armed force quickly degenerates into a mob if it has no ethical foundation. Prisoner exchanges take place for much the same reason. Soldiers are (normally) encouraged to take prisoners not only to gather intel, but to get comrades home. Protections for civilians are supposed to be in much the same spirit. War is monstrous enough, so don’t make it more brutal than it has to be.
Adding controls to behavior are what allow peace to emerge, combatants able to watch each other take deliberate, planned steps that restore confidence in the other side’s willingness to respect the rules. The first side to voluntarily limit its behavior and stick to its commitments tends to gain tremendous credibility, which can translate into power. It functionally seizes a bit of terrain that acts as a force multiplier from then on, so long as violations are not widespread or systematic.
Behavior rules international affairs, not morality. It was the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that motivated the military buildup now maturing in China. The same act convinced Putin to fully embrace the imperial ambitions he clearly nursed even as the Soviet Union fell. The Western World blew up the Postwar Order by failing to restrain its purported leader from launching a pointless, counterproductive conflict.
Failing to correct course in the Obama years, his choice to continue most of the War on Terror then his failure to respond to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 or Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, sealed America’s fate. Trump is the natural consequence of a generation of disastrous foreign policy failures that have demolished the myth of Postwar America. A lot of Americans, like a lot of russians and Israelis, will apparently pay any price to have their imaginary golden age back.
Israel’s actions have shredded the core moral claim of the Western World to uphold universal human rights. There’s an asterisk next to human in all Western thinking, even in science, with rich people of European descent having the priority claim when in doubt.
Some doors to hell just shouldn’t be opened. Warfare is bad enough without weaponizing supply chains, using the thin fig leaf of “well, we only tried to kill bad people” to ignore the consequences of this being done by our enemies to us. Does anybody think America isn’t incredibly vulnerable to this sort of attack? It’s a short step from poisoning the food or water supply in an area that Hezbollah members allegedly frequent. Why not just cut to the chase and use nerve gas, or nuclear weapons?
There comes a point in any fight where two sides can come to so closely resemble each other that the remaining differences become moot. The Soviet-Nazi war was that for most of the people caught between Berlin and Moscow. Both sides drafted Ukrainians and punished those who wound up on the wrong side. That’s the secret heart of Putin’s rhetoric about neo-Nazis in Kyiv, in fact. Note how his entire appeal rests on telling a generation of bitter old Soviets that he’ll bring their glory days and pensions back? Most of the orcs dying in Ukraine today aren’t old enough to remember much of the USSR, they just grew up being told about the times when everything was great.
Israel long ago crossed the threshold into territory where supporting Israel in any way makes a country fully complicit in Israel’s actions. Hating Muslims may be socially acceptable in much of the world where Christians hold sway, but just as in the Crusades, if dropped into the Levant most Israel supporters wouldn’t be able to tell a Jewish community from a Muslim or Christian one. Until Britain decided to make the Mandate of Palestine a nifty place to encourage Jews to migrate, people of all three faiths lived together in as much peace as anyone can in such an arid region.
What nobody likes to admit about Israel is that Zionism has turned it into a trap. Israeli society is roiled by the dangerous question of what being Jewish is supposed to mean in terms of behavior and communal rights. Prosecuting war crimes and whether being of a certain religious order exempts you from military service expected of everyone else are controversial in Israel. You don’t want to be an Arab-Israeli citizen right now, walking a terribly fine line, always wondering when someone will decide that you’re Hamas.
A couple thousand years of diaspora means that Jewish households with Western European, Eastern European, and African heritage express their identity in distinct ways. Like any country, Israel has to work out how to keep different groups happy, and so far the only answer is to keep boosting immigration to fuel settlements, attracting investment from abroad to boost the economy, and generally pretending that Israel can continue on in a permanent state of semi-war indefinitely.
Israel, if its press is any indication, has degenerated into a country that can only avoid a perilous internal reckoning by maintaining a sense of existential crisis among the general population. Hamas did a brilliant job of cementing that, allowing Israeli leaders to adopt a position where to be safe they have to destroy Hamas, then Hezbollah, and possibly the Houthis before finishing off Iran.
An impossible job, even if the US helps. Similarly, it’s not possible for Putin to win in Ukraine unless the US not only cuts off its own aid supplies but uses NATO to limit what countries like Germany, France, and Britain send. Israel’s forever war now serves as a potent distraction from Ukraine, the potential for a broader Middle East conflict a convenient justification for not sending more weapons to Kyiv.
It should be kept in mind that Putin and Netanyahu have spent over a decade coordinating their actions in Syria, the country routinely bombed by Israeli aircraft despite the presence of major ruscist forces and modern air defense systems. If anyone believes the two aren’t working together now to keep the USA focused on the Middle East at the expense of Ukraine, they’re dangerously blind.
An emerging Trump-Netanyahu-Putin axis is forming, one that leads to the US joining Israel in a war on Iran that forces Iran’s mullah’s deeper into Putin’s arms. In the delusional thinking that has infected much of the American right, a strong russia forms a natural counter to China, and Putin is absolutely trying to hedge his dependence on Beijing by cultivating an alliance with the Neo-Right abroad.
If you consider the fact that Trump is taking active steps to get any close election - and it will be close, Harris still unable to reliably win 50% of voters in the swing states and having peaked in the polls exactly on schedule - decided by the Supreme Court and Congress, the next few months look very dangerous. Ukraine invaded Kursk not only because it made military sense to hit the enemy where it was weak, provoking a lopsided exchange of combat power, but also because it subverts the emerging Western narrative that suggests Ukraine’s time is up and it must now trade land for a false promise of peace.
The trouble with the Western World isn’t that democracy isn’t important, it’s that the people running the show aren’t being honest about what they mean by democracy. Our supposed Democracy Alliance is supposed to include Saudi Arabia, a country known to butcher journalists in embassies. India is nominally a democracy, but if you’re Muslim, Sikh (especially abroad), or labeled “anti-national” by some Modi-loving creep on TV, your supposed rights don’t matter much in this system.
Look, you just can’t claim the moral high ground while supporting “our” dictators out of geopolitical convenience without the whole charade looking painfully thin. The regime in the Philippines was recently making headlines by repressing dissidents, but all you hear about Manila these days is how it’s bravely enduring Chinese bullying over some uninhabited rocks both claim in the South China Sea. Hungary is part of NATO and the EU, entitled to the full range of benefits even while it actively hinders Ukraine’s accession.
It’s this fundamental dishonesty that sabotages every real effort to rein in China, defeat russia, or end the reign of terror of the Mullahs in Iran. People aren’t dumb, and this sort of behavior breeds contempt, and worse.
A line from the excellent Canadian rural comedy Letterkenny puts it best: Show me who your friends are, I’ll show you who you are. This is the guiding star of international relations in the real world. And humans being human, they’ll often choose an honest monster over a kind hypocrite.
In the final analysis, a supposedly democratic world order that supports Israel’s behavior is too unstable to last. It won’t beat a challenger driven by the fear of being surrounded and isolated, like China. Instead, the alliance will walk into some obvious trap, get savaged, and retreat, leaders scrambling to blame some scapegoat and cover their own assets.
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan must be prevented for the same reason that russia’s assault on Ukraine has to end in a decisive defeat for Moscow. Substantial high quality science suggests that, setting aside all the insipid, ignorant, obsolete West-East nonsense about mythic Thucydides Traps, a China that goes down that road triggers a world war sooner or later.
The West is what made China into the monster it threatens to become; but that simply means whatever succeeds the West when it finally dies has to be rooted in something sustainable. Either to avert a defeat around Taiwan before any invasion begins or repel one after it lands, alternative institutions are key.
If military institutions in the Western World cannot be reformed, then they must be replaced. Supporting Israel in its madness while Ukraine is forced to suffer sends an unmistakable signal that our defense institutions have abandoned democracy and science. It is a public declaration that so long as Israel is threatened, the West will sacrifice Ukraine and Taiwan.
Putin must be laughing in his dacha. One aspect of his war, at least, is going as planned. The messages he and Bibi must exchange after a few drinks…