Ukraine War: Endgame In Sight
With the US elections finally done and the result thankfully conclusive, geopolitical dominoes are falling fast. The collapse of the Postwar Order is undeniable, and powers are resetting.
Moscow is still visibly racing to push as far as it can before the mud season makes major operations much more difficult. With the US elections finally over, it appears that both Ukraine and the orcs are prepared to launch large-scale drone and missile attacks again.
Thanks to the extreme resource demands of this kind of warfare, intensity well in excess of even the bitter Iran-Iraq conflict during the 1980s, there is a hard time limit on Moscow’s ability to sustain large-scale operations. This appears set to fall around the middle of 2025, and the assumption of systemic problems emerging then appears to power Ukraine’s overall strategy.
Ukraine’s basic challenge is building up enough combat power to exploit the opportunity, minimizing personnel and equipment losses in the meantime. Raw territorial control is only a tertiary concern, the fundamental strategic goal being to hold the enemy along a convenient line across the Eastern Theater until major flanking operations can be mounted next year.
As hoped, the end of election season has finally unlocked American aid previously held back to avoid negative impacts on the doomed Harris campaign. Having failed as totally at “defeating fascism” as France and Britain did in 1940, the Biden Administration no longer has any reason to refrain from deploying the full extent of its executive powers while it can.
Aggressive, even reckless action is called for. American federal politics through 2025 are set to revolve around the question of how far executive power truly runs. The House will be so close that a group of moderate Republicans facing re-election in swing districts come 2026 can likely be convinced to work with Democrats to stymie overly partisan legislation. Right now, the best thing the Democrats can do for themselves and America is generate endless lawsuits over executive power, mirroring what the Republicans have done.
At least billions of dollars in aid is moving out at long last. If Ukraine gets enough gear to mount an effective counteroffensive campaign in 2025 and has full license - even temporary - to strike deep into russia - Trump trying to cut Ukraine off will lead to his being held responsible for any future Ukrainian collapse. He might not be able to run again, but the man does care about looking strong. Trying to do that by pressuring Ukraine to accept a peace deal that’s tantamount to surrender will backfire badly.
The strange flip side of Trump’s election is that Ukraine holds the key to his legacy, just as it did Biden’s. What he chooses to do in any given media cycle is impossible to predict, but the fear of looking weak always defeats any commitment he makes in public. No longer needing to keep voters, who I expect he secretly despises, happy, he’ll be all about the trappings of the office and his legacy. The latter will not be well served by bowing down to Putin.
In the second part of this week’s post, I’ll outline what I see as Ukraine’s natural operational path for 2025. Though the fair-weather friends (certain American historians, notably) are already embracing defeatism, Victory in Ukraine is actually in sight. Sadly, the road ahead will be very hard and require tremendous sacrifice from too many.
It shouldn’t have been this way: a consequence is that few will trust American promises ever again. The late election was more lost by Harris than won by Trump, who turned out pretty much the same people that he did in 2020 while a vital chunk of the Democratic electorate stayed home. Yet Trump is now who America will always be to the rest of the world. The impacts on American power will be severe.
A lot of people who are criticizing Ukraine these days and talking up peace in exchange for territory because the country is exhausted appear willing to ignore the sacrifices made by tens of thousands of Ukrainians and allies. That’s why I’m posting on Veterans/Remembrance Day. Ukrainians facing down meat waves on the zero line don’t get today off. So that fewer are forced to give up their lives before Ukraine’s freedom is secure, they need more and better support.
Anyone actually fighting this war desperately wants it to end tomorrow, but not at the cost of passing the pain on to their children. Stefak Korshak unleashed a two-part piece over the weekend that’s absolutely worth a read. It is heartening to see that Ukrainians are a lot more savvy about their situation than English language media generally allows.
To sum up: most Ukrainians know full well that they’re fighting for their survival and have never trusted too much in American promises. There are and will continue to be serious differences of opinion in the country when it comes to strategy, but around two-thirds of Ukrainians are determined to see the war through to the end no matter what. They know that Putin obeys no rules and weighs every aspect of his relationship with all others - and even his own peers - on the scales of his own reptile ambition. You raise a white flag, he’ll have a goon strangle you with it. Offer him a millimeter, he’ll take that as a sign he should have demanded a kilometer and move to take it at first opportunity.
There’s little point in agreeing to a deal that leads to this happening all over again in three, five, or ten years. To advocate a frozen conflict at this stage is to accept defeat, because no one can guarantee that Ukraine won’t be totally abandoned in the future. Moscow will have successfully gained territory through force of arms, and even if the cost is extreme, in Putin’s system that will be billed as a triumph.
This is not an ideal situation. It’s all but guaranteed to explode at the worst possible moment, just like the Middle East always does.
That’s why I’m not nearly as bothered by Trump’s victory as most of the 60% or so of West Coast voters who rejected him again. We’ve got state’s rights on our side and governors with a mandate to resist Trump’s nonsense when it harms our people. And abroad, Trump’s own self-interest along with Putin’s inability to seriously negotiate all but guarantees that Europe will step up. I’ll briefly cover that and the American situation more broadly in the third part.
The Past Week On The Fronts 1
On the Northern Theater, Kharkiv continues to play second fiddle to Kursk. Small unit actions continue along the line of contact northeast of Kharkiv, but neither side has mustered enough reserves to power a major push. With the mud season beginning, a breakthrough by either side here is doubtful in the short term.
The dismal failure of the orc offensive here back in spring marked a critical turning point. Instead of absorbing a similar ruscist push in the Sumy area, Ukraine chose to fight on the russian side of the border. In doing so, the Kharkiv offensive was relegated to a side show, eliminating a real threat of a ruscist breakthrough threatening Kupiansk from the west.
Aside from the strategic benefit of demonstrating Putin’s weakness and lack of willingness to use nuclear weapons even to defend home turf, the Kursk campaign also flanked and mostly halted the Kharkiv offensive. That being said, the Kursk Campaign has now been underway for over three months, and sources in and out of Ukraine are suggesting that a new orc counteroffensive wave has begun. It might be time to call time on Kursk. We’ll see how the initial fighting goes in the coming week.
At present, orc attention is centered on Malaya Loknya. It’s a crossroads fifteen kilometers north of Sudzha that lies in a more rugged upland area some fifty to sixty meters higher than the approaches to Sudzha proper.
For several weeks Moscow has been trying to drive from Korenevo to Malaya Loknya, and lately has added an axis pushing south at Pogrebki. To the east of Sudzha ruscist combat power has been building up, but so far the enemy has not attempted sustained intensive assaults, possibly because they’d have to push uphill over a water barrier.
However, with the weather getting worse and Moscow appearing to have slowly forged something resembling a coherent command structure, it is unclear how effectively Ukrainian troops can hold the existing perimeter. Since the Kursk Campaign began I’ve suspected that Ukraine’s primary operational objective is to make a small breakthrough that threatens worse but never leave it overstretched. That’s why I wrote so much this summer about the potential for Ukraine to take Rylsk and Glushkovo - not because this was necessarily wise, but because it was a threat Moscow had to consider.
I expect that this helped delay the onset of a more intensive ruscist effort to kick Ukraine out of Sudzha, something Moscow has been able to threaten during the entire incursion because the reaction of forces east of the town was substantially more professional than elsewhere. Enough personnel were scrambled to prevent Ukraine from pushing towards the Belgorod region that early on Ukrainian forces had to stabilize the line from Martynovka to Plekhovo instead of, say, Belaya to Bol’shoe Soldatskoe.
Provided that Ukrainian troops are able to hold the uplands north of Sudzha, it should be straightforward to prevent a breakthrough from Liubimovka to Sudzha past Novoivanovka in the lowlands. Assuming the flank east of Sudzha holds, even being slowly forced south from Malaya Loknya won’t spell disaster, only a further consolidation of the perimeter around Sudzha.
The cost of fighting for ground is always the key question. As Moscow’s forces in the area have become more numerous and better organized, if I were in Syrskyi’s boots I’d be looking hard at a phased withdrawal right about now even if commanders on the ground are confident the line can hold.
Casualties on the orc side are reportedly over twenty thousand, with another forty to fifty thousand committed to push Ukraine out. Ukraine has rotated fresher troops in a couple times now; this along with the ongoing orc offensive in Donbas probably explains where Ukraine’s reserve built up this summer wound up. The Kursk op has done its job, and I suspect that now it’s best to slowly pull back towards the border, forcing the orcs to demolish Sudzha block by block the way they did Vovchansk.
A sudden shift back to the Kharkiv front could also possible, with a ridge just north of the international border between Vovchansk and Shebekino being an attractive target for a localized offensive. A small campaign over winter could kick the orcs out and secure a buffer between Kharkiv and Belgorod on ruscist turf.
On the other side of Ukraine, the Southern Theater from around Velyka Novosilka to the mouth of the Dnipro remains stable, a few scattered orc probes being easily repelled at various points every day. Of greater concern are the periodic small-scale missile attacks on Odesa, Zaporizhizhia, and towns between. An ongoing orc game of hunting civilians in Kherson with drones is also worth noting. Crimea has been unusually quiet lately, something I think can be partly attributed to Ukraine trying not to create a crisis during the election. We’ll see what happens as November deepens.
It’s the Eastern Theater that Moscow is determined not to let wind down, despite the delay this has caused in reclaiming Kursk. In Donbas, the Kurakhove area has drawn around a hundred attacks each day over the past week, almost half of all orc activity. 79th Air Assault’s sector in particular has witnessed what might be a record number of engagements during the entire war.
The 79th and adjacent 33rd Mechanized along with attached units are putting up an incredibly stubborn defense southeast of Kurakhove, holding the essential barrier line of the Sukhi Yali river from Antonivka through Uspenivka. It’s interesting to see how effectively Ukrainian battalions can hold a particular location when they really want or need to.
So far the fighting on the Kurakove front is going about as predicted. These two experienced brigades, along with the tough 46th Airmobile guarding the approaches to Kurakhove proper, are out at the edge of Ukraine’s logistics tether with little to no air support. Yet they’re making the orcs pay for every tree line and block.
How much this is costing the Ukrainians is unknown, but when Ukrainian troops defeat an attack these days it usually means at least several orcs were hunted down by drones. A couple hundred casualties a day adds up fast, and is why orc fronts routinely go quiet as replacements are shipped in to make good losses with fresh meat.
My forecast for this sector over the next few weeks remains the same: Moscow will push Ukraine back towards Kurakhove and try to bypass it, eventually reverting to frontal assaults. Over the next six weeks Ukraine should be able to slowly pull back while inflicting extreme casualties, eventually retiring to a line near Kostyantynopil.
The creeping orc push north of the Vovcha will make it difficult to hold Kurakhove over the long term. Breaching the defense of Kurakhove from the north also gets a lot easier if the enemy pushes past Shevchenko, at the confluence of the Solona and Vovcha. A dam at the Kurakhove reservoir was blown up this weekend, leading to some flooding downstream that should result in lower water levels to the west in a few weeks. It appears that Moscow wants to settle the Kurakhove front before unleashing a new assault on Pokrovsk, so the news that Ukraine is dispatching reinforcements comes as no surprise.
The southern flank of the Pokrovsk front is presently all about trying to form a northern pincer to eliminate the Ukrainian salient at Kurakhove. Ukraine appears to be withdrawing behind the Solona and Strashnyi rivers, and once away from the settlements between Pokrosk and the Vovcha that Moscow has taken over the past few months, here too the orcs will have to cross a twenty-kilometer drone killzone to get at Ukrainian lines. Assuming that rear area fortification work is more efficient than it was a year ago, Moscow’s efforts on this front should hit a brick wall in a few weeks as they have elsewhere.
Though Moscow is launching numerous attacks at key points along the length of front stretching up to the international border beyond Kupiansk, over the past week there just hasn’t been a lot of progress to speak of. A tree line here and here has been won - sometimes lost, along the Pokrovsk, Toretsk, Chasiv Yar, Siversk, Lyman, and Kupiansk fronts, but nothing of major operational significance.
Any one of these could easily turn into a crisis over the coming weeks, as each front goes through its own cycle of buildup, push, dwindling, and stagnation. But a thread connecting all is the steady depletion of combat power that is forcing Moscow to focus its efforts on one or two fronts at a time. Attacks come in sequence, allowing Ukrainian forces to catch their breath.
This dynamic isn’t getting a lot of press lately, with most of the media content to tell a story of Ukrainians clinging on for dear life as the front starts to crumble everywhere. The reality is very different: Ukraine has entered a phase where the optimal strategy is to minimize losses and prepare for the enemy’s overstretch rendering major formations vulnerable. That’s not a front collapsing in disorder, but a fist winding up for a punch.
It won’t look like this from the ground level - that’s the nature of military operations. But just as Kursk revealed that Ukraine had quietly built up power before unleashing it at a critical moment, so will its future counteroffensives seem to come out of nowhere - if they’re done right, anyway.
Skyward, Moscow continues to harry Ukraine with regular drone attacks but is still holding off from massive missile strikes. The intent is likely to build up stocks for a winter campaign, but it is possible that Moscow has been holding back in a bid to appear ready for serious negotiations.
There is now also the very real prospect of Ukraine retaliating in kind; with Ukraine having prepared decentralized heating points powered by gas and able to import electricity from Europe, Putin’s empire may be more vulnerable to strategic bombardment than Ukraine. Also, Ukraine is now manufacturing ten to twenty cruise and ballistic missiles every month, and if augmented by domestic drones as well as more high-end NATO weapons with the freedom to hit targets inside russia proper, there’s a lot of potential pain to inflict.
On the orc side, weekly strikes with a hundred missiles hasn’t worked as hoped, nor has more frequent but less intensive bombardments aimed at places Ukraine lacks air defenses. A sustained campaign lasting several days is what would be needed to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses and get at critical targets, but at this point Ukraine has at least a dozen F-16 pilots and aircraft for them to fly, substantially enhancing its capabilities.
With the Black Sea Fleet neutered, Moscow’s ground fight dangerous but wildly inefficient, and strategic bombardment incapable of delivering a decisive result, right now the linchpin holding the entire ruscist war effort together is tactical airpower. Glide bombs make it impossible to hold intensively fortified positions indefinitely, and without these Ukrainian forces on the zero line can be worn down by endless suicidal orc meat wave attacks. It’s also nearly impossible to mass forces sufficient for a major offensive operation when glide bombs can strike tens of kilometers behind the front line.
The only answer is better air defenses, both ground and air based, as well as strikes on orc aviation infrastructure. This key piece of the puzzle is still under construction, and everything which can accelerate the race to effective modern aviation capabilities in force must be a priority for Ukraine’s partners.
As I’ll write more about in the near future, interceptor drones could evolve into another potent counter. Speaking of drones, Ukraine’s latest hits include the outskirts of Moscow and the base of the Caspian flotilla in the Caucasus. That last one sends a nice message to Iran with respect to the safety of shipments to Moscow. North Koreans may start receiving gifts during their training in support of their leader’s new buddy.
Getting the drone mix right is the secret to combined arms warfare in the Network Age. Ukraine’s 2025 counteroffensive can be expected to make full use of their capabilities. The shape of the thing is, I think, now possible to perceive.
Ukraine’s Natural Path To Victory2
Putin’s is a system ruled by opportunism and fear. Nothing holds it together but the ability of the ruling elite to impose consequences on dissenters.
Crimea was the first target of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine because it holds the key to Ukraine’s economic independence. Missiles and drones in Crimea can shut down most of the Black Sea, and the difficulty of attacking it makes the peninsula a prize that has been fought over by empires for generations.
Once Moscow’s power no longer runs in a place, people don’t fight for the regime. There is no insurgency or resistance. Wagner’s revolt proved that too. Ordinary russians were happy to sit by and watch because the regime may change, but Moscow never does. Cutting off military logistics to Crimea and Donbas effectively wins the war for Ukraine.
The strain of supplying upward of a million personnel - a third combat - in and around occupied Ukraine automatically splits the ruscist logistics network into sections each feeding a given Theater. Critical nodes in the network, particularly rail junctions, are what allow Moscow to move resources. Paralyze this system and Moscow’s war degenerates into a series of competing campaigns to an even greater extent than is presently the case.
There are two essential hinge points aside from the Kerch Strait connection that must be destroyed: Valuyki and Volnovakha. Moscow is determined to push Ukrainian forces away from these nodes, because their loss will expose huge swaths of ruscist-held territory to liberation.
I’m not saying that taking Volnovakha and Valuyki wins Ukraine the war immediately, but subsequent operations to isolate the occupied territories will become dramatically easier. Volnovakha in the south is probably harder to reach, though Ukraine holding positions between Huliaipole and Velyka Novosilka means that it’s still in range. Valuyki is closer to the front, but seizing it only means that ruscist forces around Svatove will have to fight for rail capacity with the rest of Donbas - then Ukraine has to march to Starobilsk, which would be a push too far.
If Ukraine were to break through occupied Luhansk in a serious way, though, it could go all the way to the international border and even a bit beyond, seizing Millerovo. Achieve this, and Moscow’s entire war effort in occupied Ukraine then depends on rail lines that pass through Volgograd and Rostov-on-Don.
That’s where Volnovakha is key. Any Ukrainian counteroffensive effort that can make it into the Azov highlands will render all orcs to the west and in Crimea dependent on the Kerch Strait connection, which is already weakened and incapable of meeting all demand. If Ukraine manages to achieve major success near Mariupol, Rostov-on-Don is vulnerable. Between it and Millerovo lie the entire logistics network supplying occupied Donbas.
Once faced with the hard choice of nuclear escalation to salvage the situation or honest negotiations, Putin will very likely fall. Real, honest negotiations can begin with a successor or successors. Ukraine will be in a position to demand the peaceful demilitarization and return of the occupied territories.
Ukraine needs the war to end as quickly as possible, but only if the result is conclusive. That means exploiting the metabolic crisis that Moscow’s system is marching into. About six months from now, Ukraine needs to have a couple dozen fully staffed, trained, and equipped brigades ready to go on the attack in a sustained way. This means roughly six hundred tanks, twice as many IFVs, and as many APCs and armored trucks, plus an improved logistics and command structure.
It’s also got to have a couple squadrons of modern fighters to ward off the Sukhois and cover the Soviet-era aircraft that are proving excellent guided bomb trucks. Ukraine’s ability to offer close air support has been slowly improving, allowing it to take out tougher targets near the front line than drones can manage. The glide bombers have got to be stopped, though.
The enemy is adept at going to ground and holding out as long as food and water can be found or delivered by drone. It takes time to conduct effective clearing operations. To create the necessary space, Ukrainian forces have to attack the enemy’s logistics at two levels: out to about 20km from the zero line, and 100km-300km back. The first can be reached by drones and jets dropping powered glide bombs; the second demands drones, jets, and long-range missiles like ATACMS, Storm Shadow, and Taurus.
Depots, headquarters, repair yards, bridges, and anything else of value that attempts to set up near the front has to be held at risk. Hitting manufacturing centers is useful too - anything to slow the throughput of supplies reaching orcs on the front line. If they can’t muster combat power in a timely manner, they won’t be able to stop Ukraine from isolating groups and starving them out.
Ukraine’s campaigns won’t involving slashing hundred-kilometer dashes, but the steady application of such intense pressure on a few select sectors that the enemy proves unable to resist. In a sense, it’s the orcs’ own tactics turned around on them and done right. Instead of waves of human bodies, drones will wear them down.
Of course, Ukraine has to actually get the gear it needs to execute. Although production of modern equipment in Ukraine has begun, it will take years to ramp up to required levels. NATO stocks have to move while they still can.
Geopolitics In A Second Trump Term3
The most important thing to keep in mind about American politics is that our politicians lie, just like everyone else’s. Literally nothing Trump said during the campaign will bind him, especially because this is his final term in office.
Trump isn’t isolationist, he just doesn’t like wars that don’t benefit him. The anti-war sentiment he exploits is tied to the anger rural folks felt watching their kids get sent to bleed in Iraq while suburbanites who were better at passing standardized tests went to Harvard and Yale.
That’s why I have to forecast a hot conflict with Iran in 2025 unless Tehran goes nuclear in a hurry. A significant chunk of Trump’s wealthy donor base - the people he actually caters to because they can do things for him and he enjoys making them bend the knee - remains convinced that the USA is invincible, only its leaders keep choosing the wrong wars. The correct ones in their eyes are those Israel wages - and of course there’s big scary China, the White Whale of Yankee and Rust Belt Americans on both partisan teams.
Regardless of what Trump actually tries, he’ll have serious trouble pushing his legislative agenda through a government this closely divided. What Biden ran into during his brief stint at cosplaying as FDR, Trump will soon get to experience in his turn. America’s institutions are not fixable by fiat.
The Democrats’ natural survival strategy will depend on leveraging filibuster power, strategically reaching out to Republicans elected in swing districts to block culture war legislation, and embracing state’s rights to the max to stall everything Trump tries. Once 2026 rolls around, the upcoming Midterms will freeze most legislation in the House.
Unfortunately, Kyiv simply can’t count on any new US funding. On the other hand, this won’t matter if it receives frozen russian assets and a few thousand American armored vehicles by the end of January. The hundreds of billions of dollars Ukraine could receive from orc assets far exceeds the fraction of a single year of Pentagon spending the US has contributed to this point.
In something of a paradox, Biden’s lame duck status and having much of his own legacy in shambles could wind up being hugely beneficial to Ukraine. The Sullivan-Blinken-Burns group’s strategy is in shambles, so now would be the time to correct course while Biden can.
Releasing restrictions on contractor deployments to Ukraine was a good first step. Now, get Ukraine a few hundred M1A1 Abrams tanks and as close to a thousand M2 Bradleys along with as many M-113s and Strykers! Look, if it doesn’t have an active protection system and electronic warfare gear, it’s an obsolete death trap that no US soldier should ever be sent to war in anyway.
For Ukrainians in the field, even old American kit beats Soviet - and definitely none at all. More gear in inventory also means more troops who can ethically be pulled into uniform. Another two hundreds Strykers were included in a recent aid package, which is a good start, but still only enough to partially outfit two brigades.
Going forward, if Trump is made to understand that abandoning Ukraine will make him look laughably weak, he’ll avoid walking away no matter what he posts on social media. Ukraine in fact holds the real trump card in this situation: the more Ukraine does to make it difficult for Putin to negotiate, the more Trump will be sucked into a losing battle trying to effect even a brief ceasefire. Anybody who paid any attention at all from 2015 through 2021 knows how quickly an incident somewhere along the line of contact will escalate.
Zelensky’s recent public flattery of Trump is tactically correct, though he’ll soon pay for it in the US media, I expect. But the American pundit class was already visibly moving on from Ukraine anyway, so their disinterest might not be much of a loss, especially with European backing mattering so much more from here on out.
Trump’s election is actually the best possible outcome imaginable for Europe. It is the kick in the teeth that appears set to finally force the continent’s leaders to get their act together. No longer will European leaders be able to get away with presuming that America is always riding to help them.
Germany’s ruling coalition - led by Biden’s failed clone, Olaf Scholz - just collapsed. With any luck, a truly pro-Ukraine government will emerge in Berlin next spring. Germany is a multi-party democracy where coalitions are the rule and traditional center-right conservatives can and will work with left-leaning parties to block the far-right AfD. With a centrist party within his coalition openly rejecting Scholz’ stance on withholding Taurus cruise missiles and the center-right CDU opposition in full agreement with the need to send them to Ukraine, it’s conceivable that a new German governing coalition could play a decisive role in the fight against Putin.
Europe has problems, but there are aspects of the EU’s federation that are proving superior to the USA’s - or at least more flexible. It should be possible to create a defense grouping within NATO empowered to directly partner with democratic countries in the Pacific and bypass the troublesome members that cozy up to Putin. Technology sharing, industrial cooperation, and even some joint deployments are entirely in the realm of possibility.
Collectively, the strong democracies in NATO and the Pacific have a bigger economy than the USA. Japan should see a strong benefit in bypassing the need for building up certain aspects of its defense capabilities if it contributed, say, 1% of its annual GDP to an international defense coalition. With North Korean troops on the ground in Kursk, South Korea now has a vested interest in Ukraine’s victory, too, and its arsenal runs deep.
A hard truth that US leaders will have to learn is that the world can actually get along just fine without America. The adjustment process will be difficult, but after a pandemic and wars breaking out across the world, the old way of doing things has visibly failed anyway. America’s national debt has hit dangerous levels. High interest rates in the US made the Dollar such an attractive asset that the US economy has been effectively cannibalizing the rest of the world. Inflation was held in check in large part because of immigration.
Eventually the combination of domestic political dysfunction, predatory American corporate practices, and geopolitical uncertainty will impact the Dollar. If large-scale capital outflows anything like the inflows during the high interest years materialize, watch out, USA. Even if interest rates don’t fall far, the stock market sugar rush of Trump’s election will wear off, and soon things should get interesting.
Trump will come to regret taking office again in the middle of global chaos. He won not because he, Vance, or Musk have actually got any effective policy solutions or mobilized millions of new voters, but because the Democrats so outrageously refused to empathize with the average American that ten million Biden voters from 2020 stayed home - even more than I predicted.
Good luck actually accomplishing anything, Trump people, if you do gut the federal bureaucracy and fill it with unqualified loyalists. By the time your new appointees have figured out where their hind ends are an onslaught of lawsuits will have bound their hands. And if Trump really does try to sell out Ukraine, he’ll find a slew of European leaders ready to step up and fill the void just like governors of states like California are now the the national Democratic Party is in deserved shambles.
That’s just the laws of political markets in action. Nature abhors a power vacuum.
Thanks to the coming reboot, America is set to lose its main leverage over Europe and other allies. Now that foreign bureaucrats can no longer pretend that Trump is a fluke, the spell of the savage Pax Americana messiah is broken forever. And if Trump really does act like a dictator, he could easily wind up causing the country to physically divide.
That outcome is highly unlikely in the short run thanks to the election result being sufficiently conclusive. But in a strange way, Trump is a mirror of poor old Gorbachev. Instead of glastnost and perestroika Americans will get tariffs and idiotic laws targeting transgender people, because American “traditional values” adore nothing more than victimizing a small group lacking any serious power.
It’s the very fact that the USA’s power is so dependent on international connections that makes the policies Trump has promised effectively suicidal for the USA. The whole effort is likely to implode, driving a need to find an external threat to slay. Best to watch out for a spasm of violence directed against a convenient enemy like Iran or even Venezuela. The latter is a lot less likely to deploy a nuclear weapon before spring.
Still, Trump has nothing to gain from Ukraine’s defeat and a lot to lose because the USA has zero real material interest in seeing russia get stronger. Putin’s fall would not empower China, as I’ve seen some suggest. Instead, Ukraine’s collapse would offer Beijing a powerful incentive to swiftly settle affairs on the Pacific front before turning to grapple with the danger of a resurgent Moscow dominating Europe.
A defeated russia, by contrast, almost certainly implodes. And this happy outcome doesn’t lead to loose nukes or a lengthy civil war: instead regions centered on large urban areas will become autonomous of Moscow, working directly with foreign partners to maintain stability. There’s opportunity in that world for plenty of oligarchs.
China and Europe will be forced to embark on a generation-long and terribly expensive reconstruction effort to secure their hinterlands that American companies will undoubtedly profit from. This will help the USA and its Pacific allies keep Taiwan secure, with Beijing unable to risk a costly and uncertain war on one frontier while instability reigns on another.
I don’t expect Trump or his team to see reason, of course - my forecast rests on the simple assumption that he’s exactly the man his critics insist. His own self-interest will chain him to a course of action that either secures Ukraine’s victory or shatters American power to such a degree that Europe is forced to go its own way.
Conclusion
The neat thing about a free and fair democratic election is that a decisive results sends an unambiguous signal. Trump’s repeated ability to defy the conventional wisdom in such a predictable way suggests that standing academic theories about power politics are flawed across the board.
Contrary to the claims of its high priests, the Western World is far less rational than most politicians, pundits, and professors admit. A fatal bias has crept into the heart of the project, the thing now little better than a religious order cosplaying as a continuation of a mythic vision of ancient Greece and Rome.
Leaders responsible for managing a complex, chaotic world system have lost their way. Deluded fools like Putin run wild because they recognize and can exploit the flaws in Western thought. Better science will beat them; Ukrainian drone operators are proving that every day.
The story is in fact very old, well-covered in Thomas Kuhn’s famous book about scientific revolutions, but also sources as old as the Norse Eddas. Though the process of collapse and reorganization is painful, it is also the fount of adaptation.
Early in the twentieth century, in large part thanks to the fires of the World Wars that consumed the European imperial order, a scientific revolution began, rooted in a holistic vision of science as a tool, not a servant of anyone’s dogma. Sadly, in the Western World and its mutant Soviet offspring, this systems revolution was largely transformed into a complex machine of social control like the one George Orwell poignantly described in 1984.
We’re living through the final stages of the terminal collapse of the last two world empires - that’s what superpower has always meant. The essential trick in Western society is to rename anything that gains a negative connotation and pretend this makes it inherently different. That works about as well in the long run as claiming that you care about human rights while the way Israel wages its wars, but media cycles move on in a matter of weeks.
Now that nearly all the votes have been counted after the 2024 elections, it is clear that, while there are numerous better choices the Democrats could have made, the Blue Wall could have held and given Harris 270 Electoral College votes had it not been for voters angry about Gaza. This issue became, for an important chunk of the Democratic Party’s base, as potent a symbol of the leadership’s callous hypocrisy as the failure to fully back Ukraine.
At the heart of the issue in both cases is simple chauvinism: Israel is ranked higher in the American social hierarchy thanks to decades of intensive marketing. Ukraine, on the other hand, is a newer concern, and also one that Putin has done everything he could to associate with the risk of nuclear apocalypse.
Ukraine has been treated with relentless cruelty by the Biden Administration even as it and so many pundits spent the past two years insisting US benevolence was all that is saving Ukraine from oblivion. As a result, a war that should have been over long before now has dragged in North Korea, making this a truly global conflict.
The thing will get worse before it gets better: Trump, regardless of his rhetoric, has no effective plan and is set to quickly discover the limits of American power. In 2017 he could get away with playing crazy when the media insisted this was true and that the adults would return in 2021 to make everything right. But Trump has taken too many deliberate, rational steps on his way back to the White House for anyone to fall for this again. The default response when Trump starts to bluster and threaten will be prove it, tough guy - and possibly not even that polite.
Time and again the people who have been arguing for more aid sent faster to Ukraine have been proven right and the escalation-fearing experts wrong. The pattern is identical across one field of applied science after another, from the pandemic to inflation to the outbreak of a global war: too little action taken too late.
Yet there is a silver lining: the first step to a better strategy is unambiguous proof that the old one has failed. This opens the door to enough people realizing the mistake and building institutions to correct it.
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