PUTIN PUT HIMSELF AT RISK; THOUGH HE EXPOSED THE WEST IN THE PROCESS!
For this reason, I imagined that Valdimir Putin would not enter Ukraine, because there is no good ending to such a scenario:
- 1. If he entered Donbass alone, he could use mercenaries already in Donbass, without risking Russian troops, and at minimal costs
- 2. This would allow him to control Donbass, but deny a Russian invasion
- 3. The downside is - if the rationale is to prevent a NATO footing at the Russian border, NATO would still have such a footing in the rest of Ukraine
- 4. Even if Russia held all of Ukraine, NATO would still be on his border in Poland and other Baltic states.
Second, there is even a midway strategy: If Putin has kept his soldiers on the Ukrainian border…then activated and deployed the Russian mercenaries already in Donbass (as above)…then, used short range missiles to destroy Ukrainian military installations and infrastructure…he could still plausibly, though not convincingly claim not to have invaded, yet still have the same effect of an invasion, without the costs.
Third, if Putin moved into non-Russian dominated regions toward the West and Northwest of Ukraine, another set of issues emerge:
- 1. The costs of holding such a large area is beyond Russia’s capacity
- 2. The risk of holding such a large area is unintended consequences that could brew from an insurgency
- 3. The downside of holding such a large area is once the costs become too great, withdrawal is humiliating; as was Russia’s and the US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in utter defeat
I have zero feeling one way or the other about Superpowers dominating their regions of the world - as America has done and has done far beyond its region. Emotional and hysterical reactions will not help the Ukrainian people; as it did not help the Greek states, nor the Roman vassal states, nor the Chinese tributary states. As a general mode, I’d rather the Ukrainians had peace…but there is nothing new in their condition, unless one has failed to read basic histories.
Four, the invasion of Ukraine has nothing to do with Ukraine or NATO directly. Rather, it should be obvious that this is a test of American and European hegemony and resolve.
Neither China, nor Russia, nor Pakistan have condemned Putin’s Russia, and obviously, neither has Iran. That’s nearly 40% of the world’s population that is not feeding brainlessly on American media; the same media that exhilarated in the invasion of Iraq under a fat tissue of lies…an Iraq that’s 6,900 plus miles from America!
Speaking in diplomatic terms: one can only be shocked at the utter incompetence of today’s “diplomats”. The impetuous sophomore appointed by President Biden as Secretary of State flits around the world threatening and hyperventilating rather than proposing deals to solve crisises. This is hardly in the tradition of Professor Henry Kissinger or the sheer gravitas of General Colin Powell or the elegant James Baker…who, between them, understood the world as it was and tried to solve problems rather than save souls.
THEREFORE WHERE ARE WE:
- 1. Sanctions will not work because sanctions do not work on people who are prepared to do anything to survive: Putin offset those with China-Russia trade deals over the last two years and developed a ‘war chest’ (puns intended), to offset any funding issues from sanctions
- 2. Sanctions are likely to hurt Americans and Europeans more than Russia, for instance, Russian assets in the west are likely to go unleased and western banks will bear the brunt of the loss of income, together with staffs and co-investors.
- 3. Fuel prices have risen already and in a state of pandemic induced supply chain crunches and falling demand, sanctions reduce demand without preventing the behaviours for which they were intended, as if Russian leaders ever cared whether the Russian people starved
- 4. The West has no moral leg to stand on: The US has a Monroe Doctrine that says to other nations, DON’T ENTER THE AMERICAN SPARE. The US fought Britain and Spain under the same rubric as Putin now uses for Ukraine. France still has 14 African nations whose reserves it steals. Britain was handmaiden to every unwarranted invasion in the 20th century and with its European partners have ‘blood on their hands’ in the disintegration of Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda, Liberia and Sudan and bloodlust in Syria, Libya and Iraq.
The proper posture of a scholar is to see things clearly and to posit a system of the world in his or her response to worldly phenomena, by first rejecting his or her own feelings, allowing the raw facts to stand in their full propensities and in blunt isolation.
- 1. Putin has over reached as the first two scenarios would have been measured and would have achieved his objectives without the costs, and with plausible deniability of an actual invasion
- 2. The West’s reaction has been callow, hysterical and hypocritical: it has opted for lazy measures that will not help Ukraine, together with empty gestures that makes the West feel good about itself as it leaves Ukrainians in the lurch
- 3. NATO has been exposed as ineffectual and morally crippled.
- 4. This situation cannot end well for any nation in the world, and the unskilled Western reaction has proven the thesis of rising/retuning powers that the age of the West is dead.
For those who wish to see the forest above the trees: this moment is most alike to the pre-World War I moment, in which incompetence, foolish high sanctimonious rhetoric and unmitigated hubris saw the world stumble into a world war. Yet, mere gown up maturity would have had sufficient diplomacy to have prevented this situation.
