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But could the current level of Western support actually be maintained if it falls out of the news? It seems that the Western leadership may be stuck riding the tiger of public opinion here - they have to keep people sufficiently engaged and enraged that redirecting those resources elsewhere does not become a winning proposition, but not so much so that escalation and making a more serious effort to hand Russia a resounding defeat does. Even in the cynical environment of this forum, carefully maintaining the meat grinder at sous-vide temperature seems to be a position that it pains people to endorse - and there is always the question of Ukrainian morale, which may not in fact be in infinite supply.
This conflict really rhymes quite well with Vietnam (before the US came in), where at some point the motley coalition of inept French, decadent Southern leadership, genuine anti-Communist locals and peasants that were tentatively accepting the proposition that they will have a better life under the West started fraying as 2 and 4 were only willing to give so much for 1 and 3 and the US faced the choice between full commitment and humiliation.
Well, yes, I'm not saying this war was good, but if Russia was hell-bent on capturing Ukraine anyway, making it as incredibly high cost yet still as drawn out and miserable as possible without giving them any rousing good story for using nukes is a good, relatively safe card to play.
Peter Zeihan, a global strategist, argues that Russia's victory in Ukraine may lead them to march on Poland and threaten nukes there if we don't acquiesce. I don't quite understand why we would but that's not a great escalation if they feel emboldened from winning in Ukraine and using Ukrainian territory and resources and people as cannon fodder. Again, this would have happened either way I guess.
I don't know, I read some of Zeihan's books ("Disunited Nations" and "The Accidental Superpower") before this conflict and found them to consist more of riveting just-so tales than compelling reasoning. The idea that Russia will attack Poland next seems like another just-so story, which just happens to be very convenient for the current American agenda ("Why should you pour money and participate in sanctions to defend this unrelated country? Because if you let Russia win, they will come for you next!"). Do you, or does Zeihan, have a persuasive argument as to why Russia would do that?
The colourful "Ukrainians as cannon fodder" detail seems to go even further in that direction ("...and by the way, if any Ukrainian readers think that you should just stop fighting and make an arrangement with Russia because better red than dead, let it be known that the Russians will kill you anyway"). As of right now, even RFERL does not seem to go beyond the claim that people in already-captured territories are incentivised to enlist voluntarily. An implicit claim that they are pretending and the mask will come off once/if we let them win is basically unfalsifiable.
His rationale is that Russia is paranoid about being invaded by land and they sense the future of their state power is waning and this is their last chance to really build some buffer states. He says it's not really sane because the odds of the West invading Russia are nil but not exactly a guarantee that this can never happen in the future. I don't know how much I believe it but... it explains invading Ukraine better than anything else? Especially if they thought conquering Ukraine would be easy.
I simply meant that a pro-tracted war with Ukraine would bleed Russia dry if they didn't succeed. But if they do succeed they could add an entire nation to its balance sheet. A successful conquest of Ukraine makes them more dangerous in a lot of ways.
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I don't agree with the Zeihan-style argument of mass-conscripting the Ukrainians, but I will note the RFERL isn't making the more relevant point of volunteers in the occupied Donbas.
Namely, that conscription was already used significantly in the separatist statelets, to a degree that various pre-war analysis indicated they were functionally bled white in having already conscripted the most relevant males, and that was in a far more favorable environment than trying to mass-conscript the more recently occupied territories. 2022 was a major shock to the Russians on the Ukrainian mentality, and so while there's been relatively low-scale conscription / coerced labor (including of POWs), the bigger deterent is honestly political reliability / trust. If someone volunteers, they probably won't frag the officers, but conscription is risky in a different way. Even at their 'best', the separatist forces in 2022 summer offensive were notably less enthused / proactive when tasked to fronts outside of their immediate home turf. Political reliability of the forces is a significant thing on the Russian side in Ukraine.
Persuasive is a load-bearing word here- basically a caveat that retreats to the motte of subjectivity, and most people wouldn't and didn't find the argument that Russia would invade Ukraine three years ago persuasive- but there is an argument for Russia continuing forward, which is that if it is in an ability to do so in the next two years, that is likely it's best chance to do anything in Europe vis-a-vis the next 20, and that if it wants to seriously overturn the European security architecture vis-a-vis NATO it's best chance is now.
The basic short version of why in ideological terms is that Russia's invasion in Ukraine wasn't cast in terms unique to Ukraine, but in framings / justifications that applied to much of the former Soviet Pact as well. In so much that the Russian position can be trusted to signal intent (the 'why'), the reasons Russia used for Ukraine are as valid for places like Estonia or Lithuania too. Oppressed russian minority narrative, former territories of the Russian empire improperly released by the Soviets, culturally divergent Russians, and so on. Russia was demanding a retraction of all post-Cold War NATO forces from eastern european members who joined after the Soviet Union, not just demands about Ukraine.
The short version in opportunity terms is that if Russia is in a position to make any move against NATO countries in the next two years, it's (a) because it somehow managed to beat Ukraine into some form of submission (or else the war would still go on), and (b) did so because it was able to do so before the European military-industrial recapitalization outproduced Russia on an economic level. Russia won't be able to economically compete with the European recapitalization in the longer term due to economies of scale, but in this hypothetical it will still have on hand the military mobilization that beat the immature European/NATO support in the immediate term, meaning there is a window of opportunity in which Russia can act with advantage. As Russia's mobilized 'victorious' army is dependent on cold-war reactivated systems, with extremely limited capabilities vis-a-vis potential European outputs, this period of advantage is limited, and thus a use-or-lose prospect.
The short version in the locational terms are the Baltics or the Balkans. In the Baltics, the old form is that the Russians could blitz the northern Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) due to them bordering Russia (direct mobilization) or Belarus (which let Russia use it for the Ukraine invasion), and seize them fast enough to force a fait accompli by threatening nuclear deterrence card and prevent a major NATO reinforcement/counter-attack. (This has gotten considerably harder with Finland and Sweden entering NATO, but it's not impossible).
Alternatively- and this would depend on a Russian victory over Ukraine that allows Russian forces to move through, which was a goal of the original Russian coup de main objective of the entire country- would be an incursion into the Balkans. If you get into western Ukraine, then you have the separatists in Moldova (which Russia tried to coup a few years ago), start setting conditions to intervene in Serbia, and otherwise have a variety of options to throw the Balkans into a messy chaos to distract NATO, especially if you can bribe/support/whatever Orban and Hungary for an even bigger wrench. Note here that a direct NATO-Russia conflict isn't even necessary, just a Russia-EU conflict, as the Balkans have a number of points where the Americans would not be treaty-obligated to get involved, and the Balkan-politics being what they are offer a lot of ways to ruin fragile EU consensus issues.
Ultimately, whether it's the Russian's own casus belli rationalizations for Ukraine, or ways for Putin to try and destabilize the NATO/European Union which he's viewed himself in conflict with, a victorious Russia in Ukraine would, by extension, have capabilities that have a limited viability lifespan, and they'd be at the behest of a generally aggressive Putin who will have just come off of a war he won with all the leader self-validation of opinion that brings.
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I'd compare it more to Afghanistan after 1979: a conflict where the West was never going to intervene and expected a simple Soviet assimilation, but found that it was possible to bleed the Soviets and wear down their will to fight, without losing any Western troops. Of course, Ukraine is not a guerilla conflict, but it is also one where Russia has been frustrated militarily and faces accelerating costs. When Putin dies/retires/becomes senile, there might also be a similar period of instability to the USSR in the 1980s, since there is no young, popular, and competent successor.
I don't know, what you said seems more like an aspirational comparison (you hope that it will have the same effect on Russia as Afghanistan had on the USSR) than one that identifies particularly many parallels between present-day details. There are many ways in which this conflict resembles colonial Vietnam and doesn't resemble Afghanistan, though I understand that someone who sympathises with the Ukrainian position might find this comparison pejorative simply on the basis of the Vietnam war's known outcome. For what it's worth, I'm not meaning to imply that an American intervention in Ukraine would end like the American intervention in Vietnam - the differences that become relevant there are too many, including lack of appetite for genuine guerrilla warfare and the presence of the "everybody who really cares about not surrendering to UA just escapes to mainland Russia" option that had no counterpart in the cornered beast that was north Vietnam.
I think the parallels are better:
(1) The more powerful and invading force is Russia/the USSR in both cases. Putin's view of the world was formed in the latter days of the USSR, during the Soviet-Afghan War. The US intervention in Vietnam was led by a very different generation of leaders from the US today, with an overarching view of the world (early Cold War anticommunism) that has no applicability in the Russia-Ukraine war.
(2) Afghanistan did not have a clear political, cultural, and geographic division akin to Vietnam, with a narrow border between them. The same is true of the parts of Ukraine that the Russians have been invading since 2022, though not the parts where they intervened in 2014-2022.
(3) North Vietnam is not analogous with Russia, obviously. The US is not going to start bombing missions over Moscow because of Ukraine. The same was true in the Soviet-Afghan War: the US was never going to attack the Soviet Union because of Afghanistan, let alone a land intervention analogous to North Vietnam.
(4) As with the Afghan War, Russia has local allies that have popularity and legitimacy over a certain area (the Donbas + Crimea / Kabul) but lack an insurgency over the area of their enemy. In contrast, the Viet Cong provided both a powerful insurgency in South Vietnam AND a useful device to prevent escalation ("We North Vietnamese aren't invading you, oh no, so it would be escalation for you to invade us!").
(5) In Afghanistan, the US was in a position of funding people fighting its major enemy. In the Vietnam War, in the early phases, the US was funding the South Vietnam government against an insurgency supported by the North Vietnamese supported by the Soviets. So the link between US actions and frustrating Soviet interests was much stronger in the case of Afghanistan. It is obvious that the Russia-Ukraine War is more similar to the Soviet-Afghan War in this important respect.
(6) In Afghanistan, the US had extremely useful support from Pakistan, while Iran was neutral and successful in remaining neutral. In the Vietnam War, Cambodia was theoretically neutral but unable to be useful for the US, for a variety of reasons. South Vietnam had to worry about both its border with North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with no adjacent land allies. In the Russia-Ukraine War, the US has a chain of adjacent allies from Romania/Hungary/Poland/Slovakia/Poland to the Atlantic.
(7) In Western opinion, the South Vietnamese were a colonial remnant. The North Vietnamese were commies, but they were anti-colonial commies, and as anti-communism faded, support for the Vietnam War faded. In the Soviet-Afghan War, this was reversed. In Western opinion, the Russia-Ukraine War is seen as closer to the Soviet-Afghan War. You might disagree, but I'm talking about opinion, not truth.
(8) The Ukrainians were expected to do much worse than they have, just like the Soviets were expected to swallow up Afghanistan - maybe even make it an SSR. I don't know of any parallel with the Vietnam War, where the best case scenario for the US was always a frozen conflict akin to Korea.
The most important points here are (3-5). The US is not going to attack Russia over Ukraine, it is in a position of hurting Russia across multiple dimensions of power without losing a single US soldier, and there is no parallel to the Viet Cong insurgency.
The most important disanalogy is that the Russia-Ukraine War is not a guerilla conflict. However, this is a disanalogy with both the Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. Instead, we have a position were Russia - due to a mix of lack of public support, economic weakness, and military incompetence - is making slow progress at best against a conventional enemy.
Not that I'm not predicting the outcome, except that whatever happens it will be far less costly to US power and prestige than the Vietnam War.
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Funnily enough, the latest round of Kreminology of Putin's cabinet reshuffle last week was the point that a new generation of 'Princelings'- the children of Putin allies- are being brought up into the government, creating a younger future-leadership generation. Succession planning isn't in per see, but deepening the bench into the younger demographics appears to be occuring.
Now, whether they will be competent remains to be seen.
Stranger things have happened, I suppose. Even Incitatus made some good calls, when the right answer was "Nay."
Okay, I smiled at that one.
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