I have been watching and reading – with horror! – the denouement of the Western war against Russia that’s been taking place in the Ukraine. As the Ukrainians slowly and belatedly try to escape the “cauldron” of Bakhmut, a city highly contested, they have been slaughtered. I suppose all slaughter, by definition, is brutal, but this one seems particularly horrifying. Any humane commander would have pulled his poorly trained men out of this losing scenario months ago, but pride and the fear of losing face, motivated Ukrainian President Zelensky to keep sending more men to their certain death.
The youngest Ukrainian men died months ago. Now, the average age of a dead Ukrainian soldier is forty-seven. These, untrained, middle-age men should never be on the front line. To place them there is to sign their death warrants. Yet this is what’s being done daily. Endlessly. Cruelly.
It’s well known among those who study this war that the attrition rate of the Ukrainians is about six or seven times that of Russians. In part this is due to the fact that the Ukrainians blew through an army’s worth military armament and supplies at the beginning of the war and now, mostly depleted, Western countries are unable to resupply them. This is not a question of will – America is frantically scrounging to find military stuff … so is Western Europe. The problem is that this stuff doesn’t exist in the West. Furthermore, the stupid de-industrialization policies of the “greenies” in the West have so devastated the working class along with their places of employment, that it will be years, not months, before military supplies can be topped off or enlarged. In short, the West doesn’t have very much to fight with and isn’t able to make more.
From my simple perspective, this is fatal. No country can expect to win a war without ammo, missiles and that sort of stuff, particularly if they don’t have the capacity to make more of it. The West, thus, has lost the war against Russia. It took Russia many months to retool and regroup, to get their army fitted and out on the field, but the fact is that Russia, unlike the West, now has the capacity as well as the will to fully arm their military. We, on the other hand, do not have that capacity. We cannot win wars anymore.
We have lost the war in Ukraine. Our past follies and current characters sealed this loss. We callously off-shored thousands of jobs, mocking the devastated working class (remember this: “learn to code”) and depleted our over-paid, politicized military. The rest of the world mocks, not admires, our values. We’re just a paper tiger. A spent force. Internally weakened … fatally so.
Our government kowtows to the neo-liberal ideology that caused this war, one that didn’t need to be fought and can’t be won, though neolibs didn’t know this at the time. Now some of them do, the reality-based ones. They may not acknowledge the root cause – a disorientated and spineless moral character that led to a distorted self-appraisal and false ideologies – but at least they see the proximate cause – deindustrialization, political failure and military weakness. So, are they willing to accept this loss? Can they swallow their pride and admit failure? Will they switch their secular ideology for another ideology, perhaps something less stridently anti-Christian?
I doubt it. They’re too proud to cede. Too morally disorientated to find their bearings. Too blinded by ideology to accept reality.
So, the wars will go on until their defeat is so thorough and devastating that they have no choice but to exit the platform, stage left. They walked away from Afghanistan rather than admit defeat. They’ll try to walk away from the Ukraine, too, rather than admit defeat. Right now, they’ve got their eyes manically focused on China which, if they try to go to war there, will surely defeat them. I don’t think the Ukraine will be the devastating blow the West deserves and must have, but do think China, if they’re so stupid to take it on, will devastate our military and perhaps our countries.
If they were smart, they’d quickly negotiate some sort of pride-saving negotiation with Russia over the Ukraine. But they’re not smart … well, they are, but their smartness is too clouded by hubris to be clear-headedly effective. Since they’re still under the delusion they can win, that all they need is a few more bullets and missiles, they’ll keep fighting and in doing so destroy their negotiating position in the future.
The West needs a serious reality check. Now. They need to see themselves as they really are as well as see themselves through other country’s eyes. Of course, Western powers are still just that – powerful – but they’re not as powerful as they were, say, in 1991 when the Berlin wall fell, or even at the turn of the century. The sort era of hegemony has ended. With every passing year the West’s policies and character weaken it further. As time passes, the bargaining position of the West gets weaker. The Ukraine war wasn’t the beginning of the decline and fall of the West, but it did accelerate it.
We are in a weak spot. After Russia kills enough Ukrainians and Westerners, we will be coming to the negotiating table with very little to offer except puffed up egos and a lot of hot air. We’ll pontificate but no one will pay attention to our empty words and promises. We’re seen as a spent force because we are.
So, how to get out of this? No one asked me but I’ll spill my $0.02 here.
First, negotiate now. The longer negotiations are delayed, the weaker is our negotiating position.
Second, accept emotionally defeat. We lost the war in the Ukraine. We are coming to the table as the war’s losers, not victors.
Third, listen to Russia. They were serious when they said they felt threatened by the ever-encroaching NATO. They still feel this way. The solution is simple – restore NATO to its original charter as a defensive organization, not an offensive one, and pull it back to the 1991 countries in which it was originally conceived as defending.
Fourth, admit that Russia’s claim to ethnic Russian areas of the Ukraine are legitimate. They won an overwhelming vote in the Donbass, too. I don’t know where to draw the lines, but the Crimea and all of the Donbass are the minimum requirement for Russia. Remember, Russia won and they call the tune. Frankly, I’d be surprised if Russia didn’t demand all of the land east of the Dneiper River and Odessa. To the victor goes the spoils.
Fifth, if Russia, as a condition of its own security, demands that the Ukraine be broken up and parceled out to neighboring countries, we in the West have no clout to prevent this. There’s nothing more politically sacred about Ukrainian borders than those in Yugoslavia, for example. If it breaks up, so be it. This may be the toll paid to Russia to make it return to its bear cave, angry but mollified.
Sixth, deal with the fact that the West’s hubristic, arrogant demands on the ROW (rest of the world) have been rejected. The Western hegemonic party that lasted from from 1991 to 2023 is over. We cannot order the ROW around anymore. We cannot inform other countries that our values are superior and demand they accept them. We cannot cram the dollar down their throats. We cannot invade and pacify countries which have minerals and oil. We cannot demand that other countries prefer the secular green religion to their indigenous faiths. We’re no longer the big guy on the world’s playground. We’re one of many; the West is made of sovereign countries with a shared cultural history among other sovereign countries with their cultural histories.
Seventh, from now on, we must compete on a level playing field. We can do this, of course, though our leaders don’t believe in their own citizens. We don’t need a rigged field to succeed. We can make things and ideas that others are willing to pay for. We can make quality with abundance BUT will not be able to do this unless our supposed leaders get out of our way. We can kick China’s butt … if they’d stop making it impossible for us to do so.
They think they’re the ones that make our country great. They’re wrong. Dead wrong. The leadership of the West has weakened us, not enabled us. Their values are not ours. They’re a dirty, heavy blanket over a society that doesn’t want them. It is we — the people of the West — who have made Western powers great, not our leaders.
Our leaders need to resign, get out of the way, stop making wars and go hang out on some Greek island and lick their wounds. We don’t need them. Rather, we need to elevate leaders that actually represent the people – such a novel idea! These leaders will liberalize the economic system, protect our borders and make it possible to actually create and make money. I still think the Western economic system is superior to that of Russia and China, but only if it’s set free from the onerous and ridiculous tax and regulatory burdens the government has placed on us. The government is not the solution, as Reagan once said, but the problem.
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My father is dying, as you know. He’s calling me now so I have no time to finish this and no time to edit.
Later.
