Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 4 of 16

Ukraine Has Lost & A Negotiated Peace Is The Only Sane & Humane Solution

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On August 7, 2023

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OK, I’m on the record from the start saying Ukraine would lose the war militarily. The counteroffensive has failed. NATO equipped and trained an entire army for Ukraine and it didn’t even get to the main defensive lines.

The Americans told the Ukrainians to charge entrenched, mined positions without air superiority and in the face of an enemy with more artillery than them.

That went about as you’d expect.

The Ukrainians are not taking back the territory they have lost, let alone Crimea, which was always a ludicrous fantasy.

Ukrainians are dying like flies and I am firmly on the side that says that their casualty numbers have to be higher than the Russians, because the Russians are launching a ton more artillery shells and have air superiority. Meanwhile six million refugees have moved to the EU, and I’ll bet most of them will never return to Ukraine, which was a depressed and extremely corrupt nation even before the war.

Russia has not been squeezed out by sanctions and is not going to be. China will not let it happen and most of Africa and Latin America are on their side, while India wants more trade with them. The nation hurt most by sanctions is probably Germany, which is losing much of its energy price sensitive industries (very important industries that have been world leaders for over 100 years in many cases.) Since Germany is the industrial heartland of the EU (and cemented that by using the EURO and enforced austerity to devastate other EU countries industrial base), this will hit the EU hard.

Russia, meanwhile, is churning out ammunition and weapons and buying them from North Korea and Iran, who don’t care at all about US sanctions, for obvious reasons. In the West, weapons warehouses are bare and we don’t have the capacity to restore them, nor are we ramping up production quickly.

So Russia has a larger population and army, and more weapons and equipment than the Ukrainians. They have air and artillery superiority.

The only road forward for anyone who isn’t a horrific bastard is a negotiated peace. Russia (sorry) is going to get the Russian parts of Ukraine, and Ukraine is just going to have to suck it up. If the war continues, Russia may attempt to grab the entire coastline and that would make Ukraine a land-locked country.

The longer the war goes on, the worse for Ukrainians. The war is lost and a negotiated peace will save tens of thousands of lives and make it so that Ukraine is less of a complete basket-case after the war.

There will be a guerilla war after any peace. It could be won by the Ukrainians, but I doubt it. Eastern Ukraine is flat and occupied mostly by Russian speaking sympathizers who want to be in Russia.

Sometimes you lose the war on the ground. Russia will not get everything it wanted, but they will get some of what they wanted and so will Ukraine, in the sense that they may get real security guarantees or NATO membership after the war is over.

But Ukraine has lost. Pretending it hasn’t is ridiculous and monstrous. Throwing more hastily conscripted soldiers into the meat grinder is stupid and evil.

The best possible end at this point is a negotiated peace.

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Preparing For Collapse During Collapse

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On August 1, 2023

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As regular readers know my judgment is that we are now into civilization collapse. It’s slow right now, and it will be stop and start, but it will continue and pick up speed over time.

That means that you should be preparing for collapse to get worse, including climate change and ecological collapse.

Civilizations rise and fall, that’s normal, and ecological collapse commonly happens at the same time, but what’s unusual right now is that we have a world system which is global, and thus is collapsing all at once, and we have a global ecological collapse.

So it’s going to be bad. Very bad.

Still, there are things to be done.

The most important thing is to make and sustain social ties. The people who do best in collapses are those whom other people like and need. Join a church if you can stomach it (and there are churches which come with little theological baggage, for atheists.) Make friends with your neighbours and join groups. Be liked.

If you have family you can stand or good friends, consider communal living. An extended household will often do better than a person alone or a nuclear family, being both cheaper and having more ability to take care of itself and its members.

Get some skills: basic maintainence abilities will be worth a lot: electrical, plumbing, minor repairs, etc…

Figure out a way to grow some of your own food, or set up a relationship with local farmers, ideally one that is a trade of your abilities for their food. Back in the Great Depression one friend’s father was a lawyer, and he did the legal work for a lot of farms and they kept  him fed.

Gardens are so-so. Climate change is going to make outdoor gardening very uncertain. If you can, create something with climate control, ideally a green house and figure out a way to keep it cooled when necessary. You can do this in your house too, by replacing some walls and part of the roof with a transparent material, ideally with some form of shutters. If you have a flat roof, and it’s load bearing, you can put your green house up there.

Do something about water. Lack of water will kill you faster than anything but temperature and lack of oxygen. Some sort of storage system and ability to gather rain water is one possibility. If you’re somewhere humid, dehumidifiers of the right type can produce enough water for drinking. Get some sort of purification system, something simple.

Power is going to be an issue. Solar panels have a limited lifespan and so do batteries, but they’re better than nothing. You want to be able to provide power for a couple weeks and/or during brown outs — if power will be out hours every day due to rationing, you need to be able to handle that. Some form of non-panel solar is a good idea: research heat engines and see if you can figure out how to store energy mechanically by raising water or physical objects or some other way.

Temperature control is another obvious issue, and figuring out  how to stay cool is important. As heat rises, public power will become less reliable at exactly the times you need it, so the power equation above is important.

If there are local violent authories, whether government (police/military) or non-government (gangs) make sure they like you. Become friends with their leaders if possible. As civilization breaks down, be part of whatever replaces them in certain areas. (Like in Iraq, where various militias and mosques took over.

In general, though, understand that supply chains are going to become more and more unreliable. Get the tech you need as soon as possible, and make it tech that is durable and/or easy to maintain. Buy spare parts and take training so that you can fix your own equipment, which will also make you valuable to your neighbours.

Learn how to make certain simple medicines if you can: basic antibiotics are not hard to make and the same is true of the sulfa drugs. If you can do this, you’re golden, because you’ll be able to help other people and you will be valuable to them.

Medical systems, especially public ones will become more and more unreliable and less and less available to people who aren’t on the inside. Take care of as many medical issues as you can right now. I like to joke that it’s a good thing I got cancer now, because in 10 years I’m not sure I’d have gotten care soon enough. You can’t schedule something like cancer, but you can make sure whatever problems  you have now are dealt with.

Taper off drugs you use all the time if that’s possible. For some, like insulin, you’re out of luck (but should look into how to get an alternative supply), but for many other drugs, tapering now rather than being forced to go cold turkey is advisable IF it’s medically appropriate.

Take action as soon as possible. The more money you have, of course, the easier this will be, but if you don’t have money there are still things you can do, like joining local maker clubs, churches and organizations. If you have extra money do use some of your money to prepare: money will become less valuable as time goes by.

We’re on the downward slope now. If you want to survive, or to have a decent life, take whatever steps you can.

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The Distributed Nature Of Collapse

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On July 26, 2023

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When the western world sanctioned Russia they expected Russia to collapse. It didn’t. The first reason is that most of the non-western world didn’t cooperate with the sanctions, but the second is simple: Russia has a food and fuel and mineral surplus.

The world as it stands now is every inter-dependent. The supply networks are dizzyingly complex and a final item like a car is made up of materials and parts extracted, made and assembled in dozens of locations.

The world isn’t always this way: it was like this in the late 19th, but after WWI that changed and the era of free trade ended, collapsing in particular during the Great Depression. The world did not become as “free trade” as it was before WWI again till the early 21st century.

But we are in a period of collapse. The peak, I would guess, will be seen to have been 2020, though different parts of the world economy will peak at different points (peak conventional oil was 2005, fracking and shale oil is not as good.) There will be water peaks, food peaks, peaks for various minerals like copper and so on. There will be a population peak, which will occur after a lot of other peaks. One model, which has been pretty accurate in general terms, is the Limits of Growth model, which regular readers will be familiar with:

Now the thing to understand is that as resources become genuinely scarce rather than simply distributionally scarce (we have more than enough food and have for a long time but people still go hungry) countries will stop trading away what they need and will move to more restricted trade. “We have excess food, you have excess minerals, we will trade with you for this, but we are not selling food generally on the world market to just anyone.”

In periods of genuine shortages, countries stop trading indiscriminately. Food riots are one of the main causes of government collapse and elites losing their lives. Running out of heating or cooling fuel or fuel to run the distribution network (diesel is probably near peak) can lead to fast internal collapse, and so on.

So when there isn’t enough, you stop playing around. You don’t trade unless you’re getting something concrete you need. If you need something, don’t have enough of it and either can’t or would rather not trade for it and still can run your military, you send your military to go get it. (This will become harder and harder though, as modern militaries are resource hogs.)

We’ve had a world economy for a long time now: most of the world since 45, virtually all of the world since the collapse of the USSR (and even before that the USSR, which had food shortages and petroleum to sell, was in the world market.)

Increasingly we will not. Some of this is driven, right now, by competition between the West (which includes S. Korea, Japan and Taiwan) and China, but even much of that is, I suspect, shortages in drag. Soon it will just be “there isn’t enough, who is going to get it?”

Take a good hard look at where you live and what it can make and grow and dig up itself, and how well it can be defended. Because that is going to matter even more in the not-so-far future.

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The January 6th Fools & Basic Coup Lessons

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On July 5, 2023

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The January 6th invasion of Congress included people with zip ties and paramilitary equipment. While there were a lot of idiots there, there was a core which had a plan of capturing important people like Pelosi, and they came fairly close. There’s no question that Trump abetted it, but the Secret Service refused to drive him to the capital and the effort failed.

As it happens, I know and like someone who was there, though obviously they have different politics than I do. I talked to them briefly about it and one thing was clear.

They genuinely believed and believe the election was stolen. Now both sides cheat, though as far as I can tell the Republicans do so more, and Democratic election finangling is primarily meant to exclude progressives and left-wing populists from running. But the point is that if you believe an election was stolen, and you take steps, even violent steps, to fix that you, consider yourself a patriot trying to save democracy.

Now, of course, the people who encouraged the occupation of Congress may well not have believed that the election was stolen (we’ll leave Trump out, he’s delusional and there’s no way to know what he really thinks.) But a lot of the people who were there genuinely believed it was.

These people didn’t understand Trump. The main thing I pointed out to my acquaintance, was that Trump betrayed them. He could have pardoned them before he left, and he didn’t. They were loyal to him, and he was not loyal to them. He was also a fool, because if he had pardoned them, they’d be there for him in his next attempt, and most of them now won’t be, in large part because most of them are going to prison.

You come for the king, you’d best win. If you’re going to invade Congress, well, you’d better succeed. These people didn’t think things thru, and neither did Trump. As I wrote early in Trump’s reign, he might want to do a coup, but he was too incompetent to pull it off, and so it was. The only chance of it happening is if it was run by someone more competent under him, but Trump had a habit of getting rid of his most able lackeys, like Bannon.

There needed to be a plan to call in paramilitary forces who would have wanted another Trump term, and a chance to reform America. The most (dis)loyal of these are the border guards, who are brutal brownshirt thugs and there needed to be more doubt about the election to give cover to politicians and business leaders.

Some work has been done on this since 2001. A lot of electoral officers were replaced by Trump loyalists who will certify based on politics, not vote counts, and judges, likewise, have been systematically replaced when possible.

But bottom line, Trump didn’t have enough enforcer class or elite backing, and he didn’t have enough right wing radical support either. There should have been much more simultaneous action at the state level. The goal would be to force the issue to a supreme court controlled by Republicans and get some legitimacy, as was done in 2000 (which, according to the numbers I saw and ran back in the day, was a Democratic victory.)

Trump’s a boob in many ways. He has (non moral) virtues, but he’s fundamentally scattered and somewhat stupid. That doesn’t mean he isn’t effective, however, and thinking that smart and effective a synonyms is a mistake too many people continue to make.

You don’t need a majority to succeed at a coup, 70% of the population can be against you, but you do need a chunk of the enforcer class on your side with the rest unwilling to stop you or so much of a minority they can be crushed. You do need support from an elite faction, and you do need about 30% of the population on your side.

I leave it to readers to decide what the risk is in the US.

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France Isn’t In A Civil War Yet, But It Is Close

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On July 4, 2023

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So, the main police unions in France put out this rather deranged statement:

Now that’s enough…

Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!

Restoring the republican order and putting the apprehended beyond the capacity to harm should be the only political signals to give.

In the face of such exactions, the police family must stand together.

Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities.

The time is not for union action, but for combat against these “pests”. Surrendering, capitulating, and pleasing them by laying down arms are not the solutions in light of the gravity of the situation.

All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible.

Once restored, we already know that we will relive this mess that we have been enduring for decades.

For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will take their responsibilities and warn the government from now on that at the end, we will be in action and without concrete measures for the legal protection of the Police, an appropriate penal response, significant means provided, the police will judge the extent of the consideration given.

Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.”

So. The bolded part is important: it’s a declaration that the police unions won’t obey the orders of the government if they don’t agree. This is something I’ve been expecting (and seeing) for a while. During the Trucker Convoy in Canada, the police refused to enforce the law and arrest the protestors. That’s why, in the end, the government froze the bank accounts of protestors, because they couldn’t get the cops to enforce the law against people they liked and agreed with.

The same sort of thing happens over and over in the US, where right wing protestors aren’t arrested, often even when they commit violence, but are protected by the police.

Now the riots in France are largely Muslim, though not entirely. The Muslim immigrants have been pushed into suburbs and left to rot, with no effective way to move up in society, and at the same time social services have been repeatedly cut and money has, in France, as in all neoliberal nations, been funneled to the top. This bleeding ulcer is old, about 50 years old, and everyone has noted that it was bound to cause problems. These aren’t the first riots, they’re just the worst.

France has had a lot of riots and protests over the past few years, notably related to Macron’s increase of the pension age and rules, which means that many people will have to work into their 70s. (Theoretically one can retire before then, but for most people, the pension will not be enough without more years of work.) Those protests and riots were mostly white.

One of the topic categories on this blog is “the age of war and revolution”. I put it up in 2000, to indicate what was to come.

The current riots will be defeated. They’re large, but not serious. The rioters are not marching on the government and government officials, which is what would be required to actually overthrow the government. It isn’t a civil war.

But the police indicating they won’t accept legal orders, not just by passive resistance (as in Canada) but in outright defiance of the government is a very dangerous sign. The usual requirements for a successful revolution are an elite faction in support, a popular protest and the defection of at least some of the enforcer class.

France is very close to meeting those requirements: part of the elite agrees with the cops, there is a right wing primarily white conservative populist movement and the police are now showing clear defiance.

So, France isn’t in a civil war yet, but it could be soon.

As for the left, this is a fulcrum point. They need to strike and strike hard as soon as possible, because France’s Fifth Republic appears to be on its last legs. If the right overthrows it, the left will be in exile for at least two generations. It’s the right or the left, and right now the right seems most likely.

More on this and the general situation soon.

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What’s The Good Future Look Like In Environmental Collapse?

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On June 26, 2023

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There are a few possible answers to this question, but one comes out of a conversation I just had with a friend. He observed that replies suggest westerners don’t like the idea of arcologies:

My answer? “No. Well, it doesn’t really matter. Soon enough it will be “Arcologies, bitches, or you all die.”

A bit of exaggeration for effect, but what people don’t get about climate change is that the real problem isn’t “it’s getting hotter” but ecological collapse and that these numbers are looking closer and closer than the standard models suggested. (Which regular readers will know is what I’ve said for years.)

It’s all about tipping points and self-reinforcing “doom-loops”.

So, there will be war, revolution, lots of violence, massive famines, huge refugee crises and so on. This will all happen sooner than people really expect.

Any solution set is going to require a lot of re-wilding. And that means, at the least, the end of suburbs and exurbs and probably the end of most farms as we know them. We are going to have to figure out how to make very high density farming work, whether that’s highly curated food forests and regenerative agriculture, or its vertical farms and massive vertical greenhouses, or it’s underwater farms (high pressure atmospheres leads to extremely fast growth). Or, more realistically all of these and more.

As for humans, a lucky few, maybe one or two percent will get to live in the new wilderness in exchange for taking care of it and everyone else is going to get crammed into high density. Well, that or we reduce the population to about a billion people, a process which will involve a lot of blood.

If people want out of the high density, they will simply have to prove that they increase biodiversity. If they make there be more animals and plants and bugs and microbes and so on with their presence, they can be wherever that is true. If not, arcologies or very high density urban.

There’s a bunch of other stuff, like the end to planned obsolesence. Creating something that is meant to break and isn’t biodegradable and made from actual renewable resources will have to be treated like we do serial killers today, minus the romanticization.

But basically, you can’t live with nature if you don’t strengthen the ecology. Otherwise, into the arcology.

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Pax Americana Is A Zombie

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On June 23, 2023

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On May 16th 2022 I wrote an article on who would win and lose from the Ukraine war. Summarizing, the big loser was obviously Ukraine. Even if they “win” they’ve lost millions of population who are never coming back and odds are they’re going to lose a chunk of their country on top of that.

Europe loses because of the economic effects: industry fleeing Europe to the US. They get some increased unity, but in a world where Europe is already in decline, this is a loss.

Russia I said would be about a draw: they’ll get some land, but Sweden and Finland joining NATO and the EU firmly set in place as US satrapies isn’t good for them.

The US—, well, I’ll quote myself.

The final major effect for the US is that freezing Russian reserves and encouraging the massive level of sanctions, is seen by most of the world as evidence it’s not safe to keep money in the US lead banking system, or even to trade with them. This has accelerated de-dollarization and I suspect will be seen as the precipitating event of losing reserve status for the American dollar. The world will split into two financial blocs, one centered around China-Russia, the other around the US-EU. The US receives huge benefits from reserve status and from being at the center of the world financial system, and as with Britain after WWI, it will suffer mightily when it loses this position.

My evaluation is that what the US will likely gain from the Ukraine war is less than it has or will lose: dollar hegemony and being the financial center of the world are a big deal, and confirming Russia as a junior Chinese ally makes their main geopolitical rival far stronger.

It’s clear this is happening. Multiple nations joining the BRICS; ASEAN creating its own trading currency; oil being sold in Yuan, and so on.

The US and the West in general had a BIG GUN. That big gun was going all out on sanctions, using their central position in the world monetary and trade system as a weapon. The US had been using this position coercively ever since WWII, but it really ramped up under Clinton and each President thereafter doubled down. Nations were genuinely scared of this power, seeing what it did Iran and Cuba and Venezuela and so on.

But the world changed. China became the most powerful manufacturing power. Russia recovered somewhat and became a huge net resource producer, including of food. The late USSR couldn’t feed itself, Russia can. China became the main trading partner for almost every nation in South America and Africa. The US declared China its main enemy, and China looked at the US and saw it was vulnerable to a blockade.

And so the sanctions failed, because China and most of the non-Western world, including India, didn’t cooperate.

The BIG GUN had been fired. The one everyone was scared of. And not only didn’t it work, the blowback damaged Europe.

It did damage Russia somewhat, but by not taking Russia out it showed that one could leave the system without being destroyed. And so that’s what’s happening.

Meanwhile, as inflation (largely from Covid, but much from the war) shuddered through the West, the US raised interest rates massively. This caused all the countries who owed money in US dollars extreme harm.

Being exposed to the US dollar was clearly a liability. A big one. Going off the dollar used to seem insurmountable but Russia had gone off it and while it lost a bit of GDP, basically done OK, because China and other countries supported it.

And if Russia could do it, well, so could other nations.

And so they are.

As for America, it reminds me of a 60 year old who still thinks he’s 40 and in training. “I can take him!” This isn’t the America of 1950, or 1990 or even 2000. This is a weak America, visibly become weaker.

Nobody likes America. Not even the Brits (outside their elites, who like America the way a poodle likes its owner.) Everybody was terrified of America.

Now a lot of them are only scared. And when you’re only scared, not terrified, you take action to protect yourself against whomever you’re scared by.

So, I have to say that I’m moving America from the “slight loss” column over to the big loss. It’ll take longer than Ukraine to be obvious, but the train is in motion and it isn’t stopping. Pax Americana is a zombie; it’s still shuffling along, but it’s functionally dead and only waiting for decay to reduce it to a shambling heap.

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Bruno Macaes On Putin And The World Order

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On May 31, 2023

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Macaes was a Portuguese minister and is now a member of the European Council of Foreign relations. He’s written a few books and at least two of them, on the Belt and Road and on Eurasia in general are insightful, though Bruno is definitely a Eurocrat who sometimes struggles to see the world without Eurocrat lenses. This is particularly true when it comes to Russia (remembering that these books were written before Ukraine, which he did not predict) but there are some points where Macaes “gets it.”

This is primarily when it comes to Putin’s views of the international order:

Putin doesn’t think along national lines. In thinks in terms of larger blocs, and ultimately, in terms of the world order… You cannot resist the pressures that come from the world order. So either the world order will come to mirror some elements of the contemporary Russian regime or Russia will mirror the liberal, Western political order.

Notice how Russia is called a regime. It’s a small tell, but a tell.

Later, on, the European view (where Macaes is an insider):

The Brussels bureaucracy has a very simple theory of the world. States are captured by special interests, but they may reform if there is pressure from the outside. If they do, they will certainly prosper.

Obviously the Europeans see the “outside” as them, with an assist, perhaps, from the US. They don’t seem to have noticed that Europe has been in economic stagnation for some time, or consider that perhaps they are captured by special interests also. Macaes does later on touch on European subjugation to the US, but never really deals with it squarely.

But bottom line this is “we are the reasonable people with the right laws and regulations and way of doing things and you all should do what we say, and we will pressure you to do so.”

Europe knows best.

Back to Russia (somewhat paraphrased)

1) There are no neutral, universal rules. Neutrality is only a pretnse aimed at deceiving others. The benefits of globalization are unevenly distributed because rules are made by those with power to make them.

2) International politics is an arena of permanent rivalry and conflict.

This is, of course, similar to the first quote. The “rule based” international order is just the set of rules and institutions set up by those who had the most power, and the rules were set up to benefit those who had the power.

I don’t see how any of this could be controversial, though there are limits to it. The US did deliberately offshore its industry, for example, and this started after WWII to build up Europe, Japan and South Korea as strategic allies. When neoliberalism came to power, they then started offshoring it to what more clear-eyed people saw was a potential rival: China, because elites wanted short term profits.

But generally speaking the rules of the world order benefit the US and its satrapies like Japan, the EU nations, Canada, Australia, South Korea and so on. This was intentional and intended and anyone who thinks otherwise is nearly a candidate for an insane asylum their denial of reality is so strong.

It is the Europeans who are living in a fool’s paradise, thinking, forgive the expression, that their shit doesn’t stink and that they are mostly driven by pure motives: that their system works and is a universal model and that they have the right and duty to force it on others.

One could say the same for the Americans, except that more of the smarter ones know they’re hypocrites.

This nonsense was epitomized by Fukuyama’s “The End of History” which anyone with a lick of sense and the most minimal knowledge of history knew was absolute bullshit. But it was the bullshit that Western elites wanted to hear: they had won, their victory was eternal and everyone else would inevitably, in a pseudo-Marxist historical inevitability way, become like them.

So you could give the Chinese your industry and get filthy rich doing so and it wouldn’t matter because they were going to become a liberal capitalist democracy. There would only be one elite, a transnational one, and its enemy was its own population, not other members of the elite, no matter where they lived.

Now to be fair to Macaes he’s clearly anti-Fukuyama and by the time he wrote these books he could clearly see that obviously Capitalism and Democracy were not the same thing.

But this isn’t really about Macaes, it’s about differing views of the world order.

The West thinks, or among the more self-aware elites pretends to think that they have created a neutral world order they just happened to win, or, in more sophisticated terms, in which they had a first mover advantage, but which is basically fair.

Putin, and though it’s not dealt with here, China, plus most of the developing world see this as absolute bullshit: the world order is just the rules made by the strongest and enforced by them with their financial, economic and military might.

This is why Russia has often said that any real negotiations must be with the US. Not the Ukraine, not even with the EU, but with the US, because they are the ones who make the rules and they are the ones who decide on NATO policy. It is why the real negotiations have included the Chinese, because the Chinese are the coming superpower. It’s why China was able to make peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia: again, because China is genuinely powerful.

Putin, at least in relation to international politics, lives in the real world, not in some Fukuyama fairy-land. Seen from that point of view his actions become more understandable: to let the West continue to push NATO towards Russia and to succeed in its color revolutions and coups, is to acquiesce to a world in which Russia must be second rate at best, because none of Russia’s preferences for how the world order is set up are not implemented. Russia doesn’t need almost everything, nor does Putin believe Russia can get everything: if you want that you have to be as powerful as the US after the fall of the USSR or like the British empire at its peak.

But if Russia can’t get even the things that are most important to it, like Ukraine neutral and not in NATO, then the negotiations have to be changed: they have to become kinetic, to use the modern speak. A test of power is necessary: is the West powerful enough to impose its will or not?

And that is what is being determined in the Ukraine: can the US still just force Russia to accept what the US wants or not? Does the US still run the world order? It’s one reason why the Chinese, ultimately, are supporting Russia, because they agree about the shape of the world order. And it’s why the US and the EU have spent so much supporting Ukraine. Because this is a test and neither side feels it can afford to lose, for if it does, its preferences for world order take a huge hit: it shows that it doesn’t actually have enough power to enforce its will to the extent it desires.

For the US that is that Russia be a “gas station with nukes” at most and preferably be broken up, “de-colonized.” For Russia it is that a military alliance aimed at it can’t push further against its borders, and that its allies or satrapies can’t just be taken away (as Libya and Ukraine were) without great cost.

In the real world you get what you have the power to get. It shouldn’t be that way, but that’s how it is, at least for the time being. Perhaps we’ll change that at some point in our history, but it is the way the US and Europe have lived, it is how they rose to power and it is how they have retained their power. To say “no more war now that we’ve won the major wars and made the world in our image” is laughable.

Putin is just playing their game, because it’s the only game.

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