It’s been a month since I started writing on the current war, so it’s time to look again at what’s happening both in Ukraine & in America. Do read my description of post-Soviet Russia, looking at the three men who have led the country through various crises to the current war. I believe Americans need to learn to look at other countries as people there, but especially elites there, look at themselves, or else our diplomacy is bound to be very difficult & our media mad. Do also read my essay on our psychopathic elites looking for acts of war against Russia, which, happily, the Biden administration has resisted throughout. I believe Americans also need to learn to fear our elites & get rid of them as quickly as convenient. (If you want an example of this media psychopathy, I have a post on that too.) For there to be conservatism, or any kind of right-wing politics in America, we have to start from the observation that most of the world is & has always been unlike us; it might stay that way.
First, a summary of the battlefield. Russian forces seem to have failed in their attempt to encircle & capture Kiev, the Ukrainian capital on the Dnieper river which bisects the country into a Western half (which was historically part of Poland, including religiously) & an Eastern half (far more Russian until the 20th c.). Russian forces, indeed, seem to be withdrawing from that battle; the losses they have incurred seem severe. Elsewhere, Russian successes are quite serious & occasionally horrifying—they have mostly destroyed the Eastern city of Mariupol. They might yet conquer Ukraine East of the Dnieper, which seems to me the major objective of the war. Of course, they still hold Crimea. The news suggests Odessa, the last major Black Sea port in Western Ukraine may be under attack.
I have waited a month to write more on the war for two reasons; first, the media propaganda (Putin = Hitler) seems to me almost impossible to break through &, while I regret how confused & even clueless conservatives are on this issue, my opinion has been required only in private; secondly, I believed, as I wrote, that the war would drag on for quite a while. I do not hazard guesses as to how long, but I will say, I have not read anything that makes me think a decisive point has been reached or seems it will be reached. I only write now for the benefit of people who realize we’re in for something quite troubling & yet do not know how to think about the strategic problem we’re facing.
Now, the briefest statement on the Russian war objectives & how they may be secured. I believe Mr. Putin will not tolerate a EU- or NATO-member Ukraine. I believe he wanted Ukraine to become a part of Russia or at least a close ally; if he cannot have the whole, he will have the Eastern half, possibly, the Black Sea littoral as well. I believe he is likely now to pursue a strategy of depopulation: Ukrainians have fled the country by the millions, mostly to Poland, but also to Slovakia, Hungary, & Romania, the countries on Ukraine’s Western border; a small minority of these will be resettled & probably make lives for themselves in richer countries to the West, like Germany. Will these millions be able or willing to return to Ukraine? Certainly not this year. If this process of exodus continues, Ukraine will lose the war by losing its population; it’s already the country with the worst demographics in Europe & the utter misery created by its corrupt oligarchs & politicians had already led many millions of younger, more ambitious Ukrainians to flee the country before the war. Since fighting-age men are banned from leaving the country, the vast majority of refugees is women & children. The future of Ukraine is no longer in Ukraine. This seems to me the likeliest result of a war of attrition, though I cannot say how likely a war of attrition is.
The news has included a number of shocking allegations of “war crimes,” a childish phrase we use for the evils that must always attend on war. They are not war crimes—they are acts of war. Their cruelty or destruction is nothing, of course, compared to 20th c. wars, but I have little faith that they will not become worse. The horrors mount, as I said they would, when I dared to say an obvious truth that most of our media is too moralistic & deceptious to admit. Russian forces did worse to Chechnya in the Yeltsin years, where they also pursued a strategy of depopulation in face of fierce local resistance. I hope this will not happen in Ukraine, but I don’t see persuasive evidence. Russian forces have so far not become more humane or more moderate by incurring loses or failing to secure their objectives. That Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom is admirable—that they stand any chance of winning that freedom is a very different matter, which requires an art of politics, including an art of war, which no free country now possesses; perhaps nobody possesses it.
Finally, some notes on American strategy in this war. So far, elite media & everyone aspiring to share their prestige have been incredibly moralistic. Championing Ukraine on Twitter, even claiming Ukraine is winning the war, while deploring Russian evils & threatening the destruction of the entire Russian economy—all this without any war strategy, more or less empty gloating about NATO, democracy, & liberalism. Liberal madness, alternating between calling their enemies evil & incompetent, has habituated our elites to avoid having to learn anything about politics, much less facing the limits of American power. The help we can offer Ukraine, while avoiding a larger war with Russia, might be good, but we can only know that really after the fact, once we see whether it leads to freedom or slavery. We can only trust our media if our authorities give us a plausible plan for success in this war. Everything else is propaganda, exploiting our love of freedom, or our compassion for victims—trying to hide that our knowledge of politics is simply inadequate to the task.
Meanwhile, we are in a terrible new situation. Our elites have done something tremendous in this war—threatening & to some extent acting on the threat of shutting out Russia from the global economy. Global capitalism is therefore over—no major power which has witnessed events will allow itself to be vulnerable to a similar attack; all regional powers that can will look for ways to defend themselves against American economic warfare from now, & that includes a new interest in a Chinese alliance. Perhaps the single most ominous strategic fact is India’s silence on the war. India has refused to vote against Russia in the famous, if perhaps futile UN vote condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month. India has also refused to end its military or economic connections to Russia. India is, however, of the utmost necessity to any American policy to contain China, Russia’s most important ally. I believe our elites will soon prove how little they understand or respect India. More & more, our elites are talking of something like a liberal crusade, “Democracies v. Autocracies,” liberalism against everything that has ever happened in world history, trying to summon the 20th c.’s World Wars. Well, the situation has changed in the last century, precisely as a consequence of the cowardly arrogance of the liberals now pretending to be oh, so warlike—the crusaders are much fewer, all told poorer, & also significantly older than their chosen enemies. Worse, our regimes are decadent & our elites psychopathic. Putin has turned tyrant, as has Xi, as will others, & they suffer from decadence as well, if in different ways than we do—but that does not guarantee liberal victory; it comes with some advantages & other disadvantages to us. Further, the last time democracies waged World Wars, they welcomed any non-democratic ally they could get, including Soviet Russia. Prudence, indeed, advised that they should have welcomed more such allies earlier. To my mind, the incautious liberals of our time are suicidal rather than heroic. But, I’m sorry to say, I don’t see conservatives offering anything likely to persuade politicians & electorates.
A competent populist-conservative analyst of India would be worth his or her weight in gold right now. We need guidance as to think about the BJP story, which has some ugly chapters indeed. The truth about current Indian (Hindu) nationalism is not as on-balance-happy, I think, as the truth about Hungarian Orban-led nationalism really is. But we gotta have India as an ally, and not simply for the China-containment reasons, but also for cause-of-civilized-democracy in-the-world reasons, dealing with Islam reasons, English-language reasons, so many reasons.
If anyone knows of someone we should be reading on this, please let us know!
Carl, you're of course right, 21st c. politics will depend on the India-China dyad to a significant extent, involving many things we hold dear, if we know how to hold anything anymore.
I believe many things in India will be thought through anew--I mean thousands of years of history. The Muslim & British empires, certainly; but everything going back to the Aryan invasion & the Bhagavad Gita.
For the first time, it seems technologically feasible & at the same time politically necessary to unite India. Already, Modi's BJP has introduced digital identity & bank accounts, so you can imagine some of the consequences, if you put this together with the techno-commercial institutions in IT in India. Somehow, the billionaires & millionaires will have to be subsumed politically, to mention only one problem. On the other hand, digital communications will spread Hindi in a way that was neither possible nor very much desired before. Hindu nationalism will spread, too, including, one fears, violence against Muslims. We'll see whether there's any other basis for political community... In the short term--PM Modi, the most successful Indian politician in a long time, one hesitates to say how long, has already turned 70. A problem of succession comes & therefore what Hindu nationalism can offer in terms of a party to govern the country & in terms of fostering elites equal to the challenge of digital politics. This must mean the end of democracy as Americans understand it. The demands of a powerful military to withstand China, drawing from the nation's strength & helping in turn new technology, & the demands of unifying the nation for political & commercial purposes both--all of these point to Hindu nationalism, i.e. what's distinctive about India among the powers & what can justify the vast inequalities between castes, tiers of cities, regions, states...
P.S. America, I think, has made a serious strategic mistake in Ukraine--the wrong kind of defense, the wrong kind of war, the mad rhetoric, the deceptious elites. We will see in our lifetimes not only China humiliating American elites in Taiwan; but India in Kashmir, I fear. Of course, that's also tied up with the Chinese invasion of that part of India in 1962; China doesn't recognize Indian rule in Kashmir officially even today--in recent years, China has forced border clashes again. Then there's the trouble with Pakistan over the split of Kashmir...