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Difficult for me to see how Ukraine keeps Kharkiv and its eastern forces in position. I’m less confident on Kiev, but still expecting it to go down.
My somewhat wilder prediction is a stalemate with a frontline at Kiev and the Dnieper (minus the Black Sea coast and Kherson/nearby cities, which would be Russia-controlled) becoming the de facto international border.
Good stuff Tanner. My humble additions would be foreign perspectives on the conflict.
1) An Indian perspective from S. Talukdar (broadly right of center foreign-policy focused commentator), who goes over a lot of things, but ends basically by stating that India is currently shackled to a corpse, and needs to break free from dependence on Russia. Also worth noting that he focuses a lot on the plight of Indian medical students stuck in Ukraine. This is a topic that Indians have been watching like a hawk, but which got basically zero Western coverage.
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2) An Armenian perspective from B. Poghosyan. He is justly pessimistic on what this conflict means for Armenia. Aside from the deleterious economic effects, it will have increased difficulty turning towards the West as it had tentatively done so. (Poghosyan’s political leanings are not known to me).
I don’t know about that. Guerilla warfare against a great power is tough. It requires a large supply of young men with few/no other options. Ukraine actually has a relatively old population (an average age of 40-41), and its population has the wherewithal to leave Ukraine (and many of them are already doing so). The ingredients for a pitched insurgency just aren’t there, and I fear that attempting it would lead to horrific slaughters.
That said, I can see some hardline groups in West Ukraine attempting bombings and assassinations.
“The best explanation I have seen for Ukrainian resolve: the Ukr has been drafting soldiers to fight in Donbas for the last five years; a far larger % of the Ukrainian armed forces are combat veterans. The Russians, in contrast, are more green overall and less prepared for the realities of war.”
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Agree with this. I think another factor is that the Ukrainian national project is finally bearing fruit. One contributor to this is long-term Ukrainization, buttressed by multiple bottom-up bursts of popular energy (Orange Revolution, Revolution of Dignity). Another contributor is the Donbas political machine (Yanukovych et al) collapsing after 2014. I think that for the Ukrainian nationalist project, losing Crimea and Donetsk/Luhansk are a blessing in disguise, as it means the more Russophile parts don’t get to stymie their plans.
“Russians can overcome the tactical flaws of the last few days with the sheer weight of numbers that the Ukrainians just do not have. The range of possible outcomes are weighted towards the fall of Kiev and the defeat of Ukrainians Eastern armies.”
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Agree with this. I’d be very surprised if Kiev didn’t fall and Russia didn’t sweep its way to the Dnieper.
Reading this, and following along with Rob Lee and Michael Kofman and Alperovitch, I’m much less bullish than before about Russia winning a total victory.
https://danielberman.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-ukraine-march-1?s=r
But if this is what Berman believes about Russia’s military potential, then might be looking at a de facto partition. Surprised nobody is talking about this possibility or its sequelae.
“What I would like to see more thought on, but have seen precious little thusfar, is the end game. What outcomes could we accept in exchange for ending sanctions? What does war termination look like?”
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I don’t think I could posit an answer here without sounding amateurish. I would say that America’s options are constrained, there’s just so much fervor for hardline policies now. Russia is probably similarly constrained, any perceived drawdown might cause political instability or be hazardous to Putin’s career or life.
Good thing I’m not a betting man.
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“Does anybody have any idea what Putin’s endgame could be?”
Probably he’ll set up a puppet regime, that will promptly be recognized by his other allies and satellites (Belarus, Armenia, Syria, etc).
What happens after that, I honestly have no idea.
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“Pretty sure that this will push Europe toward greater military integration, whether with NATO or with a European military force (or both).”
I don’t know about this. Germany is basically out to lunch. Spain and Italy aren’t major factors. France has never truly marched to the beat of our drummer.
I think we’ll see the Anglo-American contingent backing the Eastern European states that actually want to stand up to Russia. But sadly, the other parts of NATO won’t be too interested.
Of course, I was wrong about this topic already, and I may be wrong again.
What I’ve read over this month:
Lawrence, Mark Atwood. *The Vietnam War: A Concise International History*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Basically what it says in the title. Short and easy read on the Vietnam War, good for an educated layperson. Coming from an American perspective, I appreciated how Lawrence contextualized the war within Vietnamese history, and gave some insight into the (surprisingly nuanced) decision-making processes of the DRV (North Vietnam).
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Hahn, Steven. *A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910.* New York: Penguin Books, 2017.
This is a lengthy volume that covers the stated time period of American history, primarily from the perspective of people on its margins. Basically Howard Zinn on steroids, an unremittingly pessimistic take on America.
I quit this book at 45 pages in. Don’t get me wrong, it’s thorough and instructive, and even in that short duration I learned things about Seminoles, Comanches, slave rebellions, etc.
Back to Zinn for a second: when I read him in high school (mid-2000s), my friends and I saw him as a Prometheus-like figure, a freethinker bringing us the fire of truth, in a world that fed us lies about American exceptionalism and triumphalism while the Iraq War turned to shambles.
We do not live in the 2000s anymore. We live in a much more cynical time, a time after Zinn and his acolytes won the war for the narrative of American history. And that is why I do not have the patience to sit through Hahn’s work: his point has been made already. Time to move on to happier things.
@Vingilote,
“These considerations do matter in a tactical sense but the overarching driving reason for the current buildup is a desire on the part of Putin to undo at least in part “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.”
I agree with you that this is an overarching Russian goal (regardless of who rules the Kremlin). Where I disagree is that Putin will gamble everything to get here. I read him more as a pragmatic siloviki than a nationalist hardliner. If he was more hardline, he would probably made a move on Kharkiv in 2014 (where there was abortive pro-Russian unrest at that time).
Since I wrote my post, it looks like both sides have armed and prepared themselves even further. Good thing I’m not a betting man! I honestly can’t say how this will go.
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“I do not think that a successful Russian invasion of Ukraine, whether to forcibly separate Donbas, topple the government of Zelensky, annex the whole country, what have you, in itself would fracture NATO…”
I don’t think NATO will fracture or dissolve. But I think the differences between its constituents are becoming unignorable. First there was Turkey buying S400s, now there’s Germany (and to a lesser extent Croatia)…
If I was a betting man:
The two sides back down without significant violence after Ukraine acquiesces to a new status quo that is unfavorable to it.
NATO is irreversibly weakened as a meaningful entity.
Thank you for the link! I read it in full and found it informative. I had no idea Deng had been that bullish on the Manchurian oil deposits.
“With regards to economics, I don’t think Xi felt like he was running out of time in the early days. I think he thought he had time, but that there was much to do…”
This sort of reminds me of Miller’s book. He mentions Gorbachev saw himself as a man turning around a system that had some strengths and some flaws, not as a man dealing with a raging dumpster fire.
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“…they lose their stomach for this fight, they realize they’re not entirely prepared to follow through, and they fall back to allowing credit to keep flowing. That’s one example.”
This is another issue the USSR ran into in the late-1980s, they had ambitious goals for reforms, but the entrenched complex of interests ensured that any reform would be a half-measure or a proof of concept at best.
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From Miller,
“So long as they dominated the Communist Party, and so long as the party controlled the state, these groups’ shared interests overwhelmed any tactical alliance Gorbachev could have conceivably offered.”
And only after the USSR went down, you saw dramatic cuts to agricultural and military subsidies, and to a much lesser extent to industrial and extractive interests.
What I wonder is if China has (or will have?) its own nexus of partocrats and industrialists that will reflexively fight any reform and create a sclerotic system that eventually reaches a crisis. It might not happen. But I don’t think “crazy growth till $30K per capita GDP” is necessarily going to happen either. I guess I agree with this part:
“I don’t feel so sure that things are just going to be a normal linear trajectory from our mental map of where China has been over the past four decades…I also think the fairly flat linear trajectory narrative we have of, “This last decade will be a little bit like this decade” doesn’t fit that reality.
I will never figure out how you can read so much. I felt proud for reading 5 full nonfiction books this year lol.
I would not put further acts of electoral malfeasance past Trump, he’s exactly the kind of man to attempt such things if the outcome is close (and given the level of political polarization we have, it will be close). Fortunately, he doesn’t really have much to work with aside from relatively small angry mobs. Given that as you said, the military and bureaucracies are not going to join him, I don’t think we have much to fear in terms of a violent or protracted fight.
I rate America’s prospects for having a civil war fairly low. I see (and admittedly, have made) some glib comments on Twitter about how civil wars are impossible when the potential warriors’ BMIs are over 30. There’s something to that argument, our per capita GDP is orders of magnitude higher than places that have had civil wars.
But I think another part of it is, as Kenez says in “The History of the Soviet Union,” civil wars are struggles of weak against weaker. They typically entail an absence of centralized authority, a vacuum that various factions try to fill. America is pretty far from that state.
@SignalField420: I think the people you are talking to, if animated by nostalgia and revulsion, are already on the Right. The may engage in preference falsification. But if they hold the views and dispositions you attribute to them, then they don’t need the problem explained to them, they don’t need to be converted to the Right…they already are on it! Thus, Dreher’s translated speech would have missed the mark even more.
For people 80-100% on the Right, the messaging should be on how to come together, build organizations, actions to take, etc.
For people 40-60% on the Right, the messaging should focus on issues that can get them to 60-80%. I suggested some up above, but I’m sure there are many others.
The problem with this speech is that it tries to be a 40-60% speech given to the 80-100% crowd. It doesn’t hit the things that 40-60%ers worry about, and it doesn’t give anything actionable to 80-100%ers.
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@Everybody: I went to get a sandwich, and got some new thoughts while getting it. I think some Righties misdiagnose the issue by presenting it as a continued fight against radical activists and their acolytes. I will use the following article as a case study.
I’m not doing this to dunk on Mr. Sibarium, he is a man who I respect greatly. But this is an arena in which I have experience, and can offer some corrections. Anyways, this sentence stood out to me:
“That ideological injection has been administered by an incestuous network of nonprofits that supply and legitimize the language of activist physicians.”
The “White Coats for Black Lives” organization, pretty self-explanatory in what it’s after, was founded in 2014 shortly after the events in Ferguson (when I was a second year). The usual social justice crusaders loved it of course, but everybody else brushed it off at the time. Wokification accelerated as the 2010s went on, and by the time George Floyd happened, they had an army of supporters in medicine backing them.
My point is that the activist networks have been around for a while. The difference is that now, they have the sympathies of the masses. The conservative approach consequently needs to be different than it would be if they were just facing the “tenured radicals.”
“What can be done to help boomercons like Rod to understand where the country is actually at, and what sort of messages might work for them?”
Speaking only for mildly right-of-center people I work with, two concerns that came up unsolicited were 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) The permanence of Coronavirus restrictions (masks/travel, NOT vaccines). Throw in the recent inflation spikes and economic issues, and you have the makings of a platform.
This is not revelatory stuff, but it will be a bitter pill to swallow for the Boomercons and Trumpists, and even moreso for the Franco/Salazar fanboys. But let me be clear to them: the next 20+ years will be ones of Left dominance, where the Right has to fight on hostile ground and focus on bread-and-butter issues, checking leftist overreach, and creating space for new conservative ideas that will shine later. Indulging in ideas of lost paradise, a rabid personality cult, or Catholic dictatorship, is a road to nowhere. The reality is that the Left won, and we’re living and growing up in their world.
Now that you mention it, I think there is. I would describe it as so: the written pieces sound like they’re going to war, the spoken persona sounds like they know, in their heart of hearts, that they’ve lost the war. I remember one podcast where they were making fun of some woke book or whatever, they joked that progressive tech elites would put it onto every iPhone “like the U2 album.” Was a fun joke, but it embedded a truth that they were just going to be targets for new woke salvos. None of the can-do attitude of the articles you linked to.
I have honestly not been too impressed with American Mind on an intellectual level. I listen to them on my drives mainly because I feel their sensibility matches mine. We are all ideologically dissident Millennials from the West Coast, after all.
@SignField 420: I feel that there is a more prosaic reason for the Sinophilia that we see among the dissident right. It’s that in their position, being a small ideological minority derided by the regnant American ideology, it’s really hard for them to be patriotic. Throw in China’s gangbusters economic growth and impressive handling of the pandemic, season with an overall trend towards cynicism and anti-militarism, and you can see why they’re reacting as they are.
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@Greer: I agree with most of your post, except for this:
“it is very hard to look at someone like Dick Cheney or Rumsfeld or even third tier folsk like D. Feither and not have this strong sense of the energy you know find, at, say American Mind.”
I find it interesting that you assess American Mind in this way. I listen to their podcast periodically and I find that they do exhibit the bellicosity you describe, but also a good amount of detached cynicism. This perhaps shines better by contrast, so compare them to Ben Shapiro, who fires on all cylinders throughout his entire podcast, even when he’s trying to sell you mattresses. In contrast, the American Mind guys shift their gears a lot.
Their *political program* may indeed by tough-minded, but their energy is not. Perhaps because if we’re right of center, it’s difficult to maintain that kind of energy in this political environment. It’s one of the reasons that I find Shapiro intolerable to listen to.
“What do you think folks? See any similarities I’ve missed? Or are the differences…”
I think there’s one interesting parallel you missed: the anti-p*rn campaigns then and now. This article is a few years old, but I found interesting the discussion of Bush, Ashcroft, Focus on the Family, etc and the anti-p*rn initiatives of the early Bush era.
There is of course a surging anti-p*rn movement now. But it has no Evangelical base to draw on, and it presents its case in terms of self-empowerment, renewal of masculinity and sexuality, etc. I cannot say if its proponents are as fired up as the Evangelicals were, but from what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem like it. Perhaps another example of how passionate advocacy has given way to detached cynicism on the Right.
