Ukraine War: Putin's Autumn Spoiling Campaign
With major offensive efforts constantly coming up short, Putin's orc generals are fighting to prevent Ukraine from gaining an edge heading into 2025. Delay and pray is Putin's last, best hope.
Two parts to this weekly Ukraine War update. The first half is a broad look at what’s happened on the front lines in Ukraine over the past week, the second a systems based evaluation of what recent events have taught the world about how international relations really operates.
Summed up: it’s worse than anarchy out there. Anarchy is the absence of imposed order, and that would be better than the predatory situation which entraps most people on the planet. We inhabit a lethal battlefield structured by warring oligarchs intent on forging a neo-feudal order. In this perverse dystopia, nobody’s lives matter - unless they happen to be friends with a billionaire or someone in control of a few nuclear weapons.
I was re-reading the foreword to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga this week, and it struck me how appropriate it is that Ukrainians call their enemy orcs. They mean it in the exact same sense Tolkien did, which is not at all what most Americans are led to believe. Most actively ignore Tolkien’s own words about interpreting his work as an allegory of World War Two, which I take the liberty of quoting:
“The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.”
A group of would-be oligarchs emerged triumphant at the end of the Second World War. They see us all as no better than slaves, some choosing to dispense kinder treatment, others preferring the lash, and through poisoned ideology strive to keep us unfree. Ukraine’s defense represents not the rise of a new oligarchy - yet - but a chance for something different to emerge. That’s why so many powerful people are afraid of Ukraine winning the fight.
Tolkien was not writing an allegory of his time, but of the human condition in general. The Ring is the will to power that drives elites everywhere.
Their orcs are the abused and destroyed folk forced to suffer for their masters’ ambitions. Monsters made, they must be defeated all the same - and in the real world, to no longer be orcs all they’ve got to do is go home and leave folk alone. That’s what orc means - it’s an old English linguistic root meaning monster, which in every human culture amounts to “violent invader.”
As for their masters, well, we Hobbits have drones, now. Some even breathe fire: the dragons are on our side. Oligarchs everywhere should watch the sky.
Weekly Overview1
It is increasingly clear that Putin’s war effort is slowly but surely grinding to a pathetic end, barring access to a lot of new resources soon. A mighty glacier’s advance might be inexorable, but it isn’t fast enough to overrun all of Ukraine before the climate finally shifts, to torture the metaphor.
The failure of Putin’s generals to break through in Kharkiv this May and June or reverse Ukraine’s Kursk Campaign in August and September heralds the end of the threat of the orcs generating a steamroller sufficient to break Ukraine’s defenses in a strategic sense. Battles remain difficult on many fronts, and Moscow can still move forward, but overall there is little coherence between Moscow’s pushes beyond the desire to tax Ukraine as much as possible. That rarely works: it’s almost the very absence of strategy.
Putin is being forced to convert the war into a gigantic replay of the fighting on the old line of contact, hoping political winds turn his way and China boosts support. He’s bluffing that russia can do this forever, relying on acolytes abroad to spread the message that russia is “good at war” and can tolerate limitless losses. This is stale propaganda designed to give the craven an excuse to propose surrender when russia makes demands.
Note how Trump also just started implying that Ukraine’s fight undermines Israel’s. The only half-hidden Netanyahu-Putin-Trump pact is hard at work.
By provoking conflicts around the world, from both sides if he can, Putin aims to isolate Ukraine from multiple angles. By giving US bureaucrats an excuse to hoard weapons in case there’s a new contingency, Putin prevents Ukraine’s military from fully reforming. Making nuclear threats is part of the play, as is allies abroad suggesting that anyone who disregards Putin’s bluster is a covert warmonger or irresponsible. Talking up giving the Houthis better missiles is too.
30-40,000 ruscist soldiers are killed or wounded every month all so Putin can pretend that he can’t lose long enough for his enemies to finally hand him a ceasefire. It won’t hold, and if one were signed he’d be right back to insisting that it’s Ukraine refusing to honor the deal, making Ukrainian efforts to defend their own remaining look like they’re risking what semblance of peace has been restored. He also has to throw his people away - also equipment that’s getting older and less available all the time - to drain Ukraine’s combat power as much as possible before 2025.
Ukraine is building up a wave of counteroffensives that should reach a crescendo next year, isolating Crimea and hopefully surrounding urban Donbas. If necessary, Ukrainian offensives will press into russia, bringing military facilities in Belgorod and Rostov-on-Don under temporary occupation. Slowly but surely, much like the Union did to the Confederacy in the American Civil War, Ukrainian forces will split the enemy’s armies apart and, once isolated, reduce them one by one.
It’s a long road ahead, and the first essential step is grinding Moscow’s latest round of assaults to a halt. When the leaves are off the trees in a month or two, a combination of improved Ukrainian counter-drone activity targeting Moscow’s eyes over the battlefield and Ukraine’s own attack drones could allow Ukrainian troops to systematically overwhelm enemy positions in swift mechanized assaults.
Wheeled vehicles definitely become difficult to use in the mud, but tracks are okay if it’s not too bad. If Ukraine can perfect the technique it appears to be using to grind down the orcs in Kursk and Kharkiv, then make sudden local punches to displace the enemy more broadly, it could be possible to mount a slow but highly effective campaign throughout the fall and winter. But when weather intersects with technology, it’s hard to make reliable forecasts.
Kursk has been relatively quiet over the past week, though in the past couple days it appears this has started to change. Last week it was already clear that Moscow’s first big counteroffensive push was failing, and the orcs seem to have taken a breather to reset before trying again - while bombing everything they think might shelter Ukrainians with glide bombs.
The ruscist plan appears to be about what you’d expect an FSB type to come up with. It looks like it’s following a textbook diagram, but fails to take into consideration the nuances of the terrain. The orc in charge wants to put Ukrainian troops north of Sudzha into a pocket by cutting off the incursion beyond the frontier at its base. Ukraine anticipated this, which is why it didn’t march too far into enemy territory before turning to secure the flanks and set up a series of defensive barriers on the high ground north of Sudzha.
Moscow has not abandoned the push on Ukraine’s west flank from Korenovo despite Ukrainian troops now patrolling the edge of Glushkovo, to their rear. Another Ukrainian airstrike hit a pontoon bridge over the Seim, with hundreds of orcs still reportedly basically cut off from supplies. Overall Ukraine appears content with fending off enemy counterattacks while slowly bleeding ruscist combat power that would otherwise reinforce operations in occupied Ukraine.
Something essential to keep in mind is that each front is assigned operational reserves, while Moscow is supposed to also maintain a strategic reserve capable of opening a new front or rapidly reinforcing one in crisis. By having to draw from other fronts’ operational reserves to hold in Kursk, Moscow is forced to end offensive efforts in weakened areas sooner than would otherwise be the case. It won’t stop advancing everywhere, but it can’t attack just anywhere.
In addition, the quality of reserves varies from front to front. Kharkiv, for example, is apparently still allocated substantially more soldiers than Kursk. But Moscow has been stuck here for weeks, the recent liberation of an aggregate plant in Vovchansk leaving the orcs with only the town’s northern fringes. They’re not having better luck in Lyptsi. While Kharkiv might serve as a source of reserves for Kursk, if their quality is low that might not matter.
East of Kharkiv, the Kupiansk front is under more pressure lately, mainly from a salient Moscow has been steadily wedging between Pischane and Senkove along the Oskil. Granted it’s taken five months to move ten kilometers, but it is progress. Moscow will likely reach the Oskil here in a few weeks.
The orcs have made a real slog of this one, first entering Pischane by advancing through a valley between two Ukrainian-held slopes. We’re talking fifty meters of elevation gain over two kilometers, meaning that Ukrainian soldiers with machine guns and mortars can hit orcs from two directions at once. Naturally, Moscow has only begun making noticeable progress beyond the town after assaulting the slopes on either side.
77th Airmobile, 115th Mechanized, 110 Territorial, 1st Offensive Guard, and likely elements of several other brigades are working to contain the orc advance, but the expectation appears to be that Moscow will reach the Oskil here eventually. This isn’t a huge problem, with the Ukrainian bridgehead east of the Oskil substantial and well connected to Kupiansk, but any front Moscow can hold with fewer troops, like the line of a reservoir, it probably badly needs to stop a future Ukrainian counteroffensive towards Svatove.
South of the Kupiansk front, a renewed ruscist push near the sector formerly held by 21st Mechanized Brigade north of Terny has managed to reach the Zherebets river, fully securing Makiivka and entering Nevske. This is another area where Moscow appears determined to eliminate a bridgehead that could be used as a jumping off point for a Ukrainian offensive - the orcs appear to lack the power to get to Terny, moving scarcely two kilometers in weeks of heavy fighting.
On the west side of the Zherebets river Ukrainian troops perch on top of a nice steep slope that should, in conjunction with the moat provided by the river, prove difficult for Moscow to cross if it tries. The economization factor can cut two ways. The hazard of maintaining bridgeheads as Ukraine has tended to is that these usually require a substantial investment of combat power. In Ukraine’s position, I’d tend to follow Moscow’s lead in shutting down fronts to reduce my personnel strain and focus on delivering a surprise punch on a front of middling importance that Moscow has chosen to neglect.
At this point, Ukraine has to square the circle of hoarding as much combat power as possible for next summer, when continuous, large-scale operations should be possible thanks to better air support, while constantly forcing Moscow to move troops around to defend vulnerable fronts in the meantime. Moscow’s offensive operations will continue to dwindle heading into winter, and though they won’t fully cease there will come a point where Ukraine has visibly gained a step on the enemy.
Moving south from Terny, the Siversk sector has been stable, a few orc assaults attempted, most of them repelled by 10th Mountain, 81st Airmobile, 4th Offensive Guard, 54th Mechanized, and 118 Territorial Defense. Up in the Serebryanskyi Forest area, both sides seem to have pulled back from a long and under-reported slog after fires began burning down whole tracts.
South of Siversk, beyond Bakhmut, Ukrainian troops from between eight to ten brigades continue to hold the line at Chasiv Yar. The orcs have managed to throw troops across the Siverski Donets-Donbas canal that forms the eastern frontier of the Ukrainian front. But at both shallow bridgeheads Ukrainian counterattacks have so far bogged down the orc attackers and prevented them from accumulating in numbers sufficient to advance further.
Toretsk remains a hot spot, but despite the orcs managing to enter the central district they maintain only a foothold among the tower blocks that constitute Ukraine’s citadel here. Most have met bad ends, the luckiest taken prisoner, one especially stupid orc actually trying to climb down the ruined front of an apartment complex. Five to six stories is a lethal fall, especially when you’re wearing body armor, and it ended as it had to after the poor fool dangled like a villain in some old time movie.
Some Ukrainian sources are suggesting that Toretsk, like Vuhledar, will fall in the short run. The latter I can see, but until Moscow is able to systematically demolish all the concrete structures with glide bombs, progress seems liable to go pretty slow. Unfortunately, the arrival of rain probably impacts urban warfare less than rural, so of the three towns I recently said though Moscow would take only one of in the near term, Toretsk is likely it, with Chasiv Yar after. Pokrovsk though? Doubtful.
Pokrovsk continues to be the focal point of the most aggressive ruscist advances, but here too the orcs are once again back to creeping forward at extreme cost. Attempts have been made to advance along the northern flank of the Pokrovsk front now that the orcs hold Hrodivka, but Ukrainian troops here sit on a ridge and can take shelter in Myrnohrad, where there should be many basements to hide in. The straight road to Pokrovsk appears to be covered by 151st Mechanized and 71st Jager, with 14th Chervona Kalyna and possibly the new 152nd Jager offering support.
On the southern flank of Pokrovsk the defense of Selidove continues, however the orcs have finally managed to seize most of the ridge to the south, compromising the defense. 15th Kara-Dag has done an admirable job of blocking the orcs from getting into Selydove, a town I figured would go before Ukrainsk to the south did, and the weary 25th Airborne is doing a good job on the ridge to the north. But the orcs appear to be hitting 68th Jager hard on the southern flank, a pattern that goes back to the early days of the march west of Avdiivka. This brigade isn’t as well equipped as 47th Mechanized but has fought about as long and well, so almost certainly needs a break too.
Not to step on the toes of the Ukrainian general staff, but as I’ll get into when I find time during an unusually busy week to finish a post on training better leaders, it’s becoming painfully clear to a lot of Ukrainian soldiers that senior officers in Kyiv are not adapting to the degree they should. Ukraine’s got plenty of experienced and effective company and battalion level leaders, but brigade and above is an extremely mixed bag. Ukrainian and russian bloggers increasingly find that they have to point out patterns that someone ought to explain in the hopes that helps clear some blockages in the chain of command.
Since I don’t even know for sure how the command structure works on this front, I hesitate to even mention a particular brigade. But the 68th has appeared in more than one media piece over the past few months, and Moscow is absolutely targeting brigades that appear tired. The danger here is acute because an unexpected orc thrust south from the Selydove area to the Kurakhove reservoir - just ten kilometers, about the distance the breakthrough past Prohres swiftly achieved - could cut off the Hirnyk-Kurakhivka area.
At least one brigade, possibly up to three, are in this sector after falling back from the east bank of the Vovcha. I don’t see the chances as high, but the risk is one Ukraine has to keep in mind. Fortunately in an emergency Ukrainian units should be able to evacuate along a road passing along the reservoir, covered by 46th Airmobile’s positions in the town itself - the reservoir is about 2km wide and crossed by a couple bridges, though these could be destroyed by orc Iskander strikes.
Finally, the Vuhledar front looks to be the place where Putin can hope to score a win, though hardly one worth the cost. With the orcs attacking on three sides, the weary but unbowed 72nd’s withdrawal looks like a matter of time. The reality is that while Vuhledar was a viable fortress in 2023, glide bomb attacks allow Moscow to systematically pulverize the reinforce concrete buildings that make it such a potent site.
Ultimately, Ukraine will be able to continue decimating ruscist attacks in this sector from the Bohoyavlenka-Novoukrainka line using drones and artillery. The southern flank of Kurakhove should hold out for a long time, likely until the rains bring enough mud to make massive armored attacks of the kind Moscow still requires to make progress in this largely flat, open country nearly impossible.
The story on all the fronts is, then, largely the same: increasingly tired Ukrainian brigades are holding out against slowly weakening attacks by the even more exhausted orc legions. On the back end, Ukraine is (or had better be) actively building up fresh brigades, hopefully by surrounding a core of veterans with young recruits sent to train abroad and equipped with modern gear.
Force generation connects all the operations underway on the many fronts to the strategic level. It’s the challenge that presently vexes Ukraine more than any other issue, because it’s developing the right counters to the few advantages Moscow has left that Ukraine’s hopes depend on.
That we’re almost three years into the all-out phase of the conflict and a decade into Putin’s aggression and Ukraine still operates fewer than a dozen modern jets is just absurd. If the entire Western World is unable to figure out a better solution given the time and resources available, it’s toast against China and fully deserves to be.
Ukrainian soldiers, in interview after interview, report that glide bombs are the one threat they’re truly afraid of. Almost every other hazard on the battlefield has a solution that the average soldier can call in. If there’s one thing that my military training taught me it’s that tanks and helicopters are just another kind of prey to the properly equipped and hidden fire team. Drones make their situation even worse.
But there’s nothing you can do about a bomb weighing a ton dropped from a jet too far away to see, not even dig. The US is acting as if expanding the number of F-16 pilot training slots allocated to Ukraine in 2024 from single digits to maybe twenty is some kind of big deal - what a joke. If American F-16 and F-18 pilots were allowed to volunteer to join a training squadron in Ukraine that also had the right to shoot down incoming cruise missiles, dozens would have joined long ago. I’m sure more than a few would volunteer for even more dangerous ops.
International affairs experts pretend that this or that action constitutes material involvement and risks escalation, but the average bureaucrat will tell you anything to avoid doing more work. And that’s what the people who speak from on high about foreign affairs are in the Western World: bureaucrats paid to say what their oligarch masters want to hear.
Any excuse to not actually let Ukraine win will be taken, no matter how craven the US appears as a result. What matters most is looking in control, even when that means ignoring rational arguments and simple science. Politicians did it during the pandemic too, and so hundreds of thousands of people died who should have survived and likely would have if swifter action had been taken.
The solution to the glide bombs is far simpler than beating a pandemic. Missiles have to be supplied with the license to hit airfields in russia in force. Even more, though, Ukraine badly needs more jets and pilots, however these can be obtained. They’ve also got to have AWACS support - more than just two aircraft - and long-range Meteor or AIM-120D AMRAAM missiles. There has to be enough jets and pilots to maintain round the clock patrols on several fronts at once.
By next summer, any orc jet coming within 100km of Ukraine has to be subject to swift punishment. The glide bomb threat will soon fade, and all of a sudden the fight on the ground will be a whole different story. Especially if Ukraine’s got enough properly equipped and trained brigades to take advantage.
That demands leadership on the diplomatic side. Sadly, it looks as if nothing will happen until this cursed American election is finally over with.
Strategic Brief2
It was a very intense week on the diplomatic side of things, with Zelensky’s latest visit to the United States apparently a mixed bag. He’s heading home saying it was a success, and privately perhaps it was, but publicly Zelensky was yanked hard into the partisanship of it all with dangerous implications. It’s pretty clear that he was forced to publicly align himself with the Democrats, who are naturally getting exceptionally tense as November looms and the swing state polls remain statistically tied again.
That predictably generated a furious - and almost certainly pre-planned - Republican response, which while not the end of the world puts the onus on Ukraine to prove to them at every stage why it deserves further support. Oh, and Hillary Clinton just doddered out to warn of an October Surprise, right on schedule - man, if there’s anyone on the planet who could be replaced by a robot, it’s got to be either of the Clintons. They just can’t help but make everything about themselves in the most predictably boring way.
I’ve already written more than I care to about American politics, mainly because most of my audience is international and so I figure might be interested in an alternative view from a resident observer. All that stands to be repeated now is that the election stands on the edge of a knife, and going forward that probably forebodes laughable dysfunction at best, outright chaos at worst.
If Trump does win dirty, by getting the Supreme Court and Congress to intervene, I don’t think there will be as much hell to pay as the scenario where he narrowly loses, though. Democrats will be happy to play Vichy even if the country were to fall to an actual fascist coup. They’d still have their donor base, after all, and able to feel smugly superior, so mission accomplished. A lot of the Vance-Musk voters will be talking about secession or worse.
I honestly don’t think it matters that much as far as international affairs go, though. Based on the USA’s behavior in Ukraine and the Middle East, my standing forecast is that the leadership has already decided not to fight for Taiwan if it comes to it. And if I’m wrong, odds are they’ll stumble into a fight they aren’t ready for and get smashed.
Israel continues to serve as a case study in why the entire field of international relations is trash - a topic I’ll return to in a dedicated post. Natural experiments like Israel killing Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, don’t come often. Their rarity makes them invaluable in producing scientific assessments of how the world really works - they test theories, which can then be revised.
Long story short: Israel either touched off a massive war that will kill a lot of Israeli civilians for unclear real gains… or Israel’s claims to be menaced by enemies committed to its destruction have been phony for half a century. It’s rare that a case produces such strong binary result - well done, Bibi!
Some of Israel’s enemies would like to wipe it out, of course, but it’s apparent that none ever stood a chance of actually getting the job done - and more importantly, the main groups never really wanted to. The Hamas assault on Israel last year would have gone a lot differently had it represented a truly existential physical threat on the order of the Egyptian-Syrian assault half a century before. They were after hostages, not the extermination of Israel. There is still no evidence to support Israel’s claim that Hezbollah and Iran planned to join in but backed out.
Israel fans are very good at distorting language and preying on emotions to shape the narrative battlefield. They always start the story of Israel by insisting millions of Arabs are just waiting to rush in and kill everyone, neglecting to mention the near total lack of demonstrated desire by the vast majority of people in the Middle East to actually fight Israel. Or the fact that the one time a few thousand Arabs did launch a pogrom in modern Israel, the Israeli state managed to be asleep at the wheel. That is what best explains the mostly senseless brutality of Israel’s actions since.
Yes, there are groups that pretend they’re standing up for Palestinians by attacking Israel. The government of Israel adores them, using them as compelling evidence of a pressing need for Israelis and allies to let Israel’s leaders do whatever they want.
This is how systems work - as Niklas Luhmann argued, systems are real. They’re not just scientific models - we create these to try and understand why real world systems produce certain outcomes. A model may be flawed, but a material system is physical. To understand a system and build good models you look at actual material connections like political rhetoric and military deployments, evaluating changes over time. This helps generate a map of the universe of possible scenarios as well as chains of causality that are necessary to bring them about.
Managing a complex system is about steering it as you can, not preventing collapses or trying to make a particular configuration resilient forever but exploiting the inevitability of change. The goal is always to nudge the system onto an improving trajectory towards the more desirable end states, remaining keenly aware of the fact that there are no utopias.
If someone wants to pay me to do a PhD or - better yet - build a body of practical knowledge sufficient to train other people to understand and manage dynamic strategic systems, get in touch. I’ve spent years trying to figure out what scholar out there has already put together all the essential pieces of a nifty paradigm, but so far haven’t found anyone with the right range of experience and skills. Happy to try my hand at getting some neat software developed.
Looking at Israel specifically, the simple dance that has defined Netanyahyu’s political career is exploiting the trap Israelis and Arabs are in for personal gain. Nobody seems to want to talk about it now, but he would probably be jailed on corruption charges if he hadn’t sold his soul to the Greater Israel crowd, which wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank, in order to stay Prime Minister.
I could throw around fancy terms like Principle-Agent Problem and Moral Hazard, but there’s little point. The same is true of going into detail about the infinite nuances of the Arab-Israeli conflict. I’ve done a good bit of contract academic research looking at this part of the world, but let’s be honest: Israel fans back Israel no matter what.
The past few years of policy failure around the globe have revealed the truth of how deeply world institutions have been captured by oligarchs. Israel has a lot of powerful friends, so excuses will be made for anything Israel does. Awareness of this allows Israel and the USA to play a game that has shredded the international credibility of both. Israel does what American leaders wish they could get away with, D.C. pretending to be pushing for de-escalation while always managing to shield Israel from material consequences.
Where the US adamantly refuses to defend Ukrainian civilians, it will happily step in to do exactly that for Israel. As D.C. dithers over how many missiles to let Kyiv have and what targets they can strike, the bunker-busting bombs used to wipe out an apartment block and kill Nasrallah in the command center underneath might have been shipped to Israel in the past few months for this express purpose, even as American leaders talk up ceasefires.
This has been a raw exercise in the use of power regardless of the implications for nice ideas like international law. Israel’s killing of Nasrallah cements the hard reality that this simply doesn’t exist. There are no meaningful laws of warfare, responsibility to protect civilians, purely humanitarian interventions, or international class solidarity. There’s just regimes and their interests.
Sovereignty doesn’t matter and borders have no meaning, being only a figment of everyone’s imagination too, not a force of nature. Leaders like Putin can and will decide where they are, and the only way to prevent this determination from going against you is the hard military power required to fend an attacker off. Agreements to handle conflicts without violence are rational and so often negotiated, but no one can take for granted that they won’t be betrayed, not when the cost is so high.
Some might jump to the conclusion that I’m adopting what international relations professors call realism, but that’s not at all the case. Idealism has of course proven itself a sham, another way to claim that “our” violence is okay, but “theirs” evil. So-called “realists” are no different - most are outright liars.
The essence of realism has always been the sanctity of borders and sovereign rights, but only as defined by European oligarchs. Proponents falsely claim that anarchy exists in the absence of a leviathan State, but it is in fact the State itself that generates the very anarchy it claims to restrain. All realism has ever posited is the right of a few European empires to dominate the world by force - this is the root of Mearsheimer, Walz, and others of this set presuming russia is eternal and advocating for Ukraine’s surrender.
States view the people living in their domain as expendable subjects. States are like mob families, vital institutions controlled by a select few who have a material incentive to provoke conflict, anxiety, and fear. Most of the governments of the Western World do not in fact root their legitimacy in the rights or health of their citizens, but the power of the State. Those with power do what they will, while those without suffer what they must - which is the definition of oligarchy, not anarchy. Oligarchs just pay people to lie about ideas they fear.
Israel’s oligarchy is why Netanyahu can so freely risk the lives of ordinary Israeli citizens, soldiers and civilians alike. His entire career has been predicated on escalating conflicts with anyone who has land that Israeli settlers might one day want. He cultivated a forever war with Hamas and Hezbollah that involved periodic bombardments to “mow the grass” which kept tensions permanently high and allowed him to invoke security whenever he needed to.
Killing Nasrallah probably guaranteed that hundreds if not thousands of Israelis are going to die in the future. This is simply the default planning assumption that a competent policy professional has to use under these circumstances. Israel went ahead anyway.
Numbers tell the tale. Hezbollah has tens of thousands of rockets capable of reaching into Israel and thousands of rockets and drones able to cover upwards of half of the country. While Israel is trying to destroy as many as it can, and no doubt hopes that control of the rockets is so tightly held that decapitation strikes will leave the arsenal paralyzed, even knocking out half leaves way, way too many to reliably intercept. There are only so many Iron Dome shots, and their rate of fire is limited.
Hope of Hezbollah holding back now depends on the new leader both being more moderate than Nasrallah and able to maintain control of his subordinates. But the history of killing the leaders of armed groups does not bode well for this strategy. Typically, extreme elements that have always called for more aggressive action are empowered, whether by taking over entirely or splintering off and seizing important assets.
It’s vital to keep in mind that Nasrallah, by failing to launch a significant portion of his arsenal already despite unprecedented provocations, was already facing serious questions about where Hezbollah’s red lines truly were. Israel’s escalating assassination campaign had already gone well past what every sober analyst thought was the threshold where Hezbollah and probably Iran had to respond with force.
Evidence was starting to point to Hezbollah having become largely tamed by the need to participate in Lebanon’s fractured political system. Its rocket barrages in support of Hamas were calculated to be small enough for Israel to intercept most of the incoming.
Yes, it’s unacceptable for Israelis to be pushed out of their homes, but even Israel’s bombardment of Hezbollah the past few weeks will still need a ground assault and long-term occupation of parts of Lebanon to sufficiently tamp down the danger of mass short-range strikes. Long-range weapons will remain a threat long into the future, Hezbollah just like the Houthis able to keep enough hidden to keep launching attacks.
Nasrallah clearly thought the rules of the game were different, otherwise he’d not have been so sloppy with his security. Israel fans will almost certainly try to say the pager attacks made this possible, but that’s nonsense. Nasrallah apparently drove right up to a meeting with an Iranian Republican Guard Corps official and was spotted entering the area. If Israel’s tracking is that good at a moment when Hezbollah should be extra cautious, it’s almost certain that there have been plenty of opportunities to off him before. And who inside Hezbollah might see gain in Nasrallah’s removal? I doubt very much that it’s any moderate.
The logical conclusion is that Iran and Hezbollah have never been serious about their fight with Israel. Iran just wanted proxies to hold Israel at risk in case it goes after Iran’s nuclear program. Unfortunately, this is exactly why whoever is in control of Hezbollah’s arsenal right now has a strong incentive to lash out as hard as they can while they can.
What’s the point in holding back if your weapons are going to be slowly destroyed? Why have them if you won’t actually go all-out anyway? Every signal Israel is sending right now suggests that Netanyahu is going to, as I’ve been warning for months, keep right on going after every enemy he can find. The guy’s got every personal incentive to choose this path and no real restraints because the USA’s own leaders apparently endorse Israel’s approach. Even though everyone probably knows full well this will blow up in a bad way, they’re scoring what political points they can.
Hezbollah now faces the same choice an American presidential administration would if word came that several hundred russian nukes were in the air, heading for the USA’s ICBM silos in the Great Plains. Do you fire back right away to avoid your arsenal being wasted, at the cost of probably forcing an even wider and more devastating general exchange? Or absorb the blast and see where things stand?
Worse for the Middle East, Iran faces the exact same question. Its own leadership is hiding in bunkers right now, unsure of how far Israel will go. In the end, deterrence depends on the other side knowing that you can hurt them if they hurt you. If you take a bad hit but don’t strike back, the appearance of weakness will invite more attacks and empower hardliners in your ranks.
Weeks ago I was already convinced that Iran and Hezbollah pretty much had to escalate, hitting an Israeli airfield or other military site. They didn’t, demonstrating their real posture. Emboldened, now Israel is killing leaders regardless of the consequences you would logically expect. If Israel’s avowed enemies don’t use their supposedly mighty arsenals now, when will they ever? Dangerous questions like that can overwhelm a desire to avoid a bigger fight.
Israel had better hope Hezbollah is swiftly absorbed by Iran, because Tehran might still try to keep the game going as long as it can, relying on the new alliance with Putin to compensate for the loss of its foothold in Lebanon. Iran’s leaders are always trying to have it both ways: on the one hand they want to insist that they’re the One True Islamic Republic, beyond ethnicity but on the other they positively adore falling back on tropes about Persians being all strategic and patient.
To outsiders, that looks more like cowardice than wisdom. If Hezbollah suspects it stands to be betrayed, it has even more of a reason to lash out before it’s too late then revert to being a guerilla force as Israel invades.
Again, this is a blog focused on the Ukraine War, not the Middle East or American politics, but the intersection of these separate tragedies is front and center right now. Ukraine really has been scheduled for total liquidation by a vicious neighbor, with the attempt ongoing. And the Western World still just won’t step up to do what it must to let Ukraine win. This offers compelling proof of the simple fact that “Western Civilization” has always been nothing more than a cruel oligarchy determined to imitate the Roman Empire. Democracy, the U.S. Constitution - they mean nothing to oligarchs.
Sorry to break the news, Greco-Roman fans, but both were nightmare societies powered by hereditary slavery, Mordors just like russia where a person’s worth was defined by their assets and connections. Part of the reason today’s pathetic Western leaders won’t let Ukraine win is that Ukraine’s resistance represents a true democratic uprising against a foreign colonizer. This frightens them more than a nuclear holocaust.
Though Ukraine is a country at war, it has not been wholly captured by the machine of the State. Left weak and vulnerable by its Soviet legacy, Ukraine as a result of this war is becoming something special, almost unique, a country that has successfully chained its State to the will of the people under a democratic regime. Ukraine’s is a People’s War, and that’s why it terrifies a lot of powerful people.
As a Ukrainian veteran of the first hours of Putin’s all-out assault put it in a recent Ukrinform interview, for the first eight hours Ukraine’s defenders everywhere were all alone. But they felt that if they held out long enough for the country to mobilize, Ukraine stood a chance. What they couldn’t know was whether anyone else would join them. Hundreds of thousands did, and not because their government told them to.
Just as most people during the Covid-19 pandemic started isolating at home well before most governments stopped downplaying what was about to happen, forcing leaders to finally act when the economy threatened to collapse, in Ukraine people rose up of their own accord. It was they who set the terms of the fight. Ukraine fights on not because Zelensky declares it must, but because most Ukrainians know the stakes.
The world lost the fight against the last pandemic - and a relatively weak one at that, a brisk breeze compared to the hurricane of the right novel influenza strain - for the same reason the West is doing all it can to lose in Ukraine. Very few governments now in existence actually care about their people. If you study science policy at a doctoral level for any length of time, the painful truth is hard to miss: our elected officials serve an oligarchy structured to make a few families very rich, whatever the cost to the rest of us.
I operate under a personal guiding ethic drawn from Buddhist philosophy: minimize suffering. Fear of suffering drives most of the evils that afflict the world, so if you have a choice, always try to pick the option that drops the suffering quotient.
This does not excuse perpetrators of bad deeds, it merely explains their behavior. If you want to hunt a creature that is responsible for inflicting suffering without need, it pays to have a close understanding of its ways.
One of the greatest threats to Ukraine’s victory is the hypocrisy that drives too many of its allies. Thousands of armored vehicles better than anything Soviet languish in warehouses under the assumption that they might be needed in some future war. Putin’s nuclear threats are taken seriously even when they represent nothing more than a slight shift in rhetoric, reminding everyone that the West won’t fight if you can harm its leaders or their investments.
This will likely lead to a tragic global conflict by way of a mistake. The Second World War went down like it did because Hitler was appeased over and over again, convincing him that France and Britain wouldn’t fight even if he invaded Poland. And though they declared war soon after the assault began, they then more or less sat back and let Poland die. Hitler still came for them, and despite rearming they weren’t ready.
Americans like to scold Europeans for not stopping Hitler sooner, but in the US isolationist sentiments ruled and quite a few people in the country were pro-Nazi. The League of Nations failed to respond to Italy’s colonial adventures in Africa while condemning Japan’s squabbles with China in Asia, ultimately making it as laughable as the United Nations appears today.
Leaders sat back and calculated their interests until everything blew up in their faces. They can and will do it again because the incentives that drive them are not what they claim.
Concluding Thoughts
Looking ahead, I expect that the weeks ahead in Ukraine are set to be intense. Putin’s spoiling campaign will drag on while Ukraine begins a series of smaller offensives aimed at maintaining the pace at which the orcs are losing strength.
US policy appears unlikely to change until November, at which point an imminent second Trump term might unlock a sudden flood of aid to Ukraine. Ironically, it could be this scenario that gives Ukraine the best chance of securing everything it needs, as a Harris administration stands to be a continuation of Biden’s in all respects based on her rhetoric.
Regardless, going forward Ukraine’s fight will depend more and more on forming a kind of mini-NATO of its own. As much as Ukraine can produce at home, it must, with supply chains insulated from contingencies in the Middle East and USA to the degree possible.
If there’s one thing to count on now, it’s more shocks to come. A world full of oligarchs all looking at the future and concluding that not all will survive is a dangerous place to live.
To Overview Section
To Strategic Section