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Have western elites ever been able to formulate a war plan?
Afghanistan was a war without a goal after the first few months. There wasn't much more than slogans as war aims and no real negotiations could be made. Taliban are pure evil, are motivated by nothing but evil, have no legitimate concerns or demands. Those who fight the taliban may rape children and sell drugs but they are still the good guys.
Iraq was mission accomplished without a real plan.
The plan in Ukraine seems to be built entirely on slogans, an extreme sense of moralism in which the western elites are seen as a self evident good and Putin as a completely illegitimate evil.
The people running the west are effectively campaign staff addicted to social media. There is no serious group of people to negotiate with. There is no plan. There is just slogans and polling data on what will yield the most traction as well as whatever the donors are pushing for. Nobody is going to have a serious conversation about eastern Europe's security architecture. Nobody is going to have a sensible discussion about what can be achieved. There will just be virtue signalling on twitter.
Politicians will be allowed to say all sorts of crazy slogans such as "we need to bring down Putin!" and no journalist will ask follow up questions.
We have another forever war with no plan, budget, war aims or leaders that will be held responsible. A war lead by people who will never go any where near the front themselves and who are more interested in the perception of the war than the war itself.
Wars like that don't tend to end with nice treaties.
I mean welcome to decline era Western politics. We have cookies. It’s been my frustration on all levels of modern western politics and one of the things that draws me to Moldbug. We’ve been so dominant on all fronts throughout the period from the 1960s to the 2010s that we really didn’t have to take political issues seriously (as in being practical and focused on real facts and real political goals) for most of the last century. I’m convinced that most politicians have no idea how to actually identify, study, and solve problems in the real world. And now that we have given away most of our manufacturing base to other countries, reduced our education system to basically a joke, haven’t modernized any infrastructure really (given the state of the roads, we aren’t really maintaining infrastructure either). We run on slogans and propaganda while our nation crumbles around us. Is it any wonder that the West truly believes that wars can be fought and won on the basis of “well, Russia was big mean by invading, therefore they’re destined to fail, and the plucky Ukrainian military run by a former comedian can win a war against a former KGB agent.”
The setup for this war is the worst of all worlds. A vibe based conflict with a nuclear power in which we have no plan to win, no strategy, no strategic reason to think that Ukraine itself is value to anyone (it’s an agricultural country, and mostly exports gains).
I don't think they ever should or did. Since you mention Moldbug, it's not like the King was meant to personally be an expert in infrastructure or coinage or agriculture. A few were, no doubt, but I think the job of politicians is largely to select the right folks to advise him, to choose wisely amongst their counsels and to mediate accountability to the public will.
And yet.
The idea wasn’t that the King would literally know how to do everything. The idea was that the king would have full control over the state and thus could set a vision or set of visions for what success looks like. And while the King might not know all the details, they’d have their entire youth up until taking the throne to learn how to actually run a state. But having full control, knowing the basics of how things work, and having a vision of what he wants the state to look like by the end of his reign gives him a leg up to actually getting those things done. It’s a lot easier to get the administrative system to approve more nuclear plants if the king knows that nuclear is fairly safe, provides a lot of energy, etc. and with a vision of better energy independence and efficiency and a plan to get there, chances are you’ll get there.
Modern democracy encourages people to learn how to run for office with very little knowledge of how to run things once they actually get there. I think democracy does work most of the time, I just think good statecraft is much more important to a functioning state than the details of how the decisions are made. We lack this in both parties. It’s a campaign of clowns with no serious ideas about how the United States should move into the twenty first century. Our foreign policy is based mostly on vibes. Our plan for education is basically to bandage over the failures of universities and do nothing to improve K-12. Our infrastructure plan appears to be “fix potholes”. Health care is still a mess. And general health is terrible as Americans are pretty much obese at this point.
Ah ok, phrased this way I agree with the sentiment. I must have misread your previous post.
I think I was a bit unclear. But the criticism of the west that always stuck with me was Xi Diengpeng saying that we are an unserious people. To be honest, he’s absolutely right about our leadership. And I think Moldbug is right in his diagnosis of the problem even if I think absolute monarchy is probably not a solution. If you read about how statesmen of the past thought about governance, it’s not anything like what we talk about in governance. You can read the Republic and the Laws and Cicero is talking about laws being aimed at the common good. Confucius talks about rulers and ministers having a duty to study and understand the issues. It was seen as an art and a science of making the state prosperous and powerful. I just don’t see those kinds of serious pragmatic leaders coming forward.
Some of this is just incentives. The person who can win the election is the one who can pander best. The ones who can promise what sounds good on TV as a sound bite of less than 10 seconds. If you are drawn to solving problems and fixing things, then I can’t imagine the need to go on TV and give interviews where you do your best to give non answers for an hour. You’d probably rather build a business or financial empire or rocket ships or something.
I think what you're describing resides within the civil service. Even Confucius understood that the Emperor is not likely to be the sharpest crayon on every topic and has to rely on ministers and advisors. The art of statecraft that he has to learn is very much more about how to lead that service, keep them in check and point them in the right direction. The art and science of how to actually do things is somewhat less useful at this.
Maybe what I mean is that governance is a meta-skill. And I think modern leaders are failing at it because they are optimized too much on electioneering (as you say), but I think I differ a bit in that I want them to be serious people about employing and empowering the right folks while curbing abuses of a civil service that has been left to fend for itself because the folks that are meant to be overseeing it are AWOL.
Boy do I have a good story for you that I need to create as a top level post.
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Change "Western" to American and there's no way to view this other than a colossal victory for the elites who planned it.
They have massively bled a once powerful enemy at a cost of zero lives and with economic damage entirely concentrated in Europe, which has the added bonus of pushing European states into greater reliance on American natural resources, and the destruction of the nordstream pipelines will prevent any quick recovery in economic relations. They have perhaps permanently cut off diplomatic ties between Europe and Russia, driving Europe further towards America and bringing yet more nations into NATO, further encircling Russia.
Other than the fantasy scenarios of liberal Russians rising up to remove Putin and fully embrace the West, what more could the US military want to achieve?
What did they win? A client state much bigger in France that is going to be an endless black hole for resources? They have the worst demographic pyramid in recorded history and infrastructure in shambles. They have a military 2.5 the USMC that is going to have to be rebuilt and retrained from ruins once this is over at an enormous cost. Propping up Afghanistan was pricey, this is just next level.
Empires don't fall because they get steamrolled, they fall because they have too many issues going on at the same time. Project Ukraine managed not only to send interest rate soaring while the US pays its interest with new loans, it also became a big black hole for weapons. As for Russia they have managed to ramp up arms production several times over.
The US isn't going to be able to handle a militarized Russia, colonial projects in the middle east and trying to defend Taiwan.
The best the US could hope for is learning what the Romans did at setting up sensible and easily defensible borders.
You don't understand the US government - they like spending money. The prospect of pouring ten trillion dollars into a Ukraine-shaped hole in the ground gives them unimaginable pleasure, just as it pleases them to squander billions of dollars on missiles to destroy antique Russian tanks. Americans don't want to be rich, though they are - they want to feel rich.
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Why does any of this matter to the US? Sounds like a Ukraine problem. Maybe if Russia had actually achieved any military objectives, instead of being embarrassed over and over.
The influences on international finance hit the globe equally, this isn't just a US issue. Forget about interest and arms production and just look at the economies. The US remains a hegemon with unparalleled economic power; if they wanted they could sink Russia in materiel but what would be the point when they're already achieving their aims? Russia is already militarized and is failing to make any noticeable headway in, as you say, a next-level Afghanistan. It's a funny comparison actually, since Ukraine sinking the Russians just as Afghanistan did looks quite likely.
Your province your problem unless you are starting to let the empire fall apart. If you don't rebuild their massive military your empire has nothing defending that front.
Except much of the world doesn''t sanction Russia and many countries are buying products for bellow the rate sold in the west.
China has more manufacturing capacity than the US by a long shot and BRICS has a higher GDP by PPP than G7. China alone outcompetes NATO when it comes to military ship building.
The point is that they can't find Russia, colonize the middle east and fight China.
They managed to create a giant resource sink for NATO that is going to be impossible to fill with other commitments. For example Ukraine is consuming SAM at a far higher rate than they are produced. Meanwhile China has the most advanced missiles in the world and is producing them at the highest rate.
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I don't disagree with the take on who geopolitically benefits, but I'm to this day still surprised by how many of those developments described occurred over US opposition rather than as a result of US design.
If the NATO-expansionist wings had had their way, if there was a Ukraine War in the first place, it would be one with the US lives being lost in great numbers.
If the American warnings of the dangers of Russian energy dependence had been heeded, Europe could have built the LNG import terminals years or even decades in advance and had long-term stable contracts from globally distributed providers rather than relying on the US and American-influencable allies to surge export capacity to unanticipated demand.
If the American pivot from Europea and the Middle East to Asia had gone forth as desired, the Europeans would likely have disengaged to prioritize economic interests over a conflict they had no military capacity to contribute to, allowing Russia a premium opportunity to divide the European-American alliance at a time fewer and fewer Americans saw a moral remain invested.
I guess this is just the nature of a democracy. To the extent that there was a consistent long term strategy involving Russia and Ukraine, it would have come from Generals/DoD/CIA/etc. Senators, Congressmen, think tanks and the like might all have their own opinions without necessarily having any power to influence strategy, which can give the appearance of confusion, particularly compared to authoritarian and very foreign nations like Russia and China. This is perhaps the steelman of the "deep state", in that it allows democracies to execute long term strategic plans even in the face of changing opposition and a multitude of opinions.
The problems with Europe is just a reflection of having to manage a coalition of nations instead of just one. America ultimately cannot force European countries to align with their objectives.
You make it sound like a failure but this all sounds like a success from the perspective of US policymakers. Europe is the way they want them - poor, dependent. Russians are dying. They get to spend lots of money. What exactly is the problem?
My original comment was suggesting that this was a policy success for the US, sorry if that wasn't clear
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I agree with the later, but would disagree(?) that there was a consistent long-term strategy involving Russia and Ukraine.
From my perspective of having watched EU eastern expansion from the 2000s onward, Ukraine has been far less a US-strategy point and more a context of German post-cold-war strategy that reached a point the Americans supported but the Germans were unprepared / unwilling to lead, and then it transitioned into an American national security premise post-2014 Crimea invasion when Russia interjected a military rather than economic-political issue.
It's generally forgotten / glossed over now, but post-Cold War Germany not only had a major focus on re-integrating Eastern Germany, but all of Eastern Europe. Germany took relatively systemic efforts to execute influence-expanding investments across the region, ranging from the overwhelming ownership of Polish media to Baltic incorporation into German supply chains to Russian energy. These efforts were general and broad, aligned with the European (and especially French) efforts at trying to integrate eastern europe and even Russia into the European Union economize zone (where Russia was a potential counter-balance to the Americans), and Ukraine was not exempted even as it was fertile soil. While the Americans generally supported the Europeans in EU expansion (for a variety of reasons, from the ideological benefits of spreading democracy to the willing to economic interest to strategy in watering down German/French influence over the EU), the cultural dynamics of EU-positivity and democratic liberalism that sparked Maidan was fundamentally EU, and German, driven and funded.
The strategic handoff came with that while the Germans were interest in the eastern expansion in general, they weren't interested in doing so at the expense of their Russian economic relations under Merkel, and so Putin made Russia EU/Eurasian Union alignment a massive issue, Germany entered a strategic paralysis as the factors it had encouraged and sympathized and in some cases funded grew, but the government's interest was not to lead. So the Germans didn't, and without the Germans who had been the institutional leaders the EUropeans floundered, and into that western power vacuum stepped the US. Many forget now due to the Nuland conspiracy theory that Nuland debating opposition members for inclusion into Yanukovich's government after his invitation for such was proof of a coup against Yanukovich, but Nuland's infamous transcript was initially a scandal for its impolitic language on the Europeans.
The transitions have faded with time and popular memory, but US/western military interest in Ukraine was never a consistent interest, and in many respects quite late. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, you had the Clinton Era in the 90s where there was no particular interet beyond nuclear proliferation, you had the Bush era in which NATO expansion was an interest as a part of general NATO expansion sympathies but Bush was decisively curtailed by the 2006 European vetos, and then you had the Obama era in which Ukrainian NATO was not a topic of pursuit. US military aid / training / assistance to Ukraine only started after the occupation of Crimea and the Russian intervention after the failed Nova Russia campaign, which was also the first time the Ukrainian body politic started to come to a military security consensus on Russia being the threat.
A lot of this probably comes down to how you would define "Long-term" and "consistent". I would imagine that military aims for Ukraine were practically non-existent up until 2014, with the ousting of Yanukovich and invasion of Crimea opening up the possibility. Most likely, Euromaiden was led by CIA and CIA linked assets, but any further military goals coming from that would be opportunistic. Could you call this a consistent strategy? And 2014 means <10 year, is this long-term?
I think if you're talking long-term and consistent, then it would be the aim of expanding NATO membership to fully encircle Russia. Ukraine would just be one part of this, up until the relatively recent events brought it much more to the fore.
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I think Dwight D Eisenhower and Golda Myer would both like a word.
They have both been dead for about 50 years now so that might be difficult.
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I would argue that western, and especially American, elites have been "winning" everything ever since the end of WW2. We have the richest country the world has ever seen, which is also blessed with an enormous amount of land and natural resources. We also control a huge amount of the world's most valuable IP. We don't need to "win a war" like the Mongolians or the Romans did, where we invade some far-off land to take their resources. We already have everything we could possibly want right here at home. "Winning" just means maintaining the status quo, basically, and they've done an amazing job at that. Nobody really cares whether Russia or Ukraine controls the Donbas region, they just want to prevent a nuclear WW3.
We are blessed with natural resources but we are extremely dependent on Chinese manufacturing. We make very little of what we consume. Hell, we even send fish that are caught in American waters to Asia for processing.
True, but that seems to mostly benefit us. It certainly benefits the elites anyway, even if some old factory workers lose their jobs. What are we supposed to do about it, invade China to get their manufacturing? "Free trade" is an ideal that both parties have been pushing very hard ever since WW2.
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Western elites don’t give two shits about Ukraine’s sovereignty. The war in Ukraine from a western perspective is based on the idea that 1) Russia is an enemy and 2) it’s much cheaper for Ukrainian Nazis to kill Russians than to potentially have to do it ourselves. That’s not the kind of war that needs a ‘plan’. It just needs a checkbook and some CIA operatives.
No doubt Germany would like the war to end, but they don’t call the shots. For sure Poland wants to keep the Russian losses coming.
The issue is that they hyped it up so massively that there is no easy way of pulling out. They lost Afghanistan in 2021, now they have spent three years talking up Ukraine and have wasted enormous resources on it and are losing. Not only has the cost been in the trillions counting the inflation, higher interest rates, and higher energy prices. But the US is constrained in weapons manufacturing. NATO suffers from a lack of hardware, old hardware and low production rates. At the worst possible time a sizeable portion of the stockpiles have been shipped off to Ukraine.
To make matters worse the US will have to reconstitute a military about 30% of the size of the US military. It simply isn't sustainable.
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I’m starting to believe that they honestly didn’t expect Russia to go for it. They thought they could just keep slowly boiling the frog and by 2030 Ukraine would safely be in NATO and Russia wouldn’t be able to do anything other than cope and seeth or start World War III. After Russia did go for it, I think the State Department backup plan is just to turn Ukraine into a disposable speed bump to keep the Russians out of anything important. Like the Baltic States. Or Poland.
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I can definitely think of a few wars won by Western powers. Unless your claim is that those wars weren't run by elites?
For all it's overwhelming firepower, the U.S. seems to have very few clean victories in the post-WWII error.
The Gulf War is of course the notable exception. But that success was responsible for our subsequent debacles in the Middle East so it has to be counted as a strategic failure even so.
Nearly every post-WWII conflict has been a miserable failure because, when the stakes are low, the US or its allies are not willing to commit horrific acts of violence like they did in Tokyo and Dresden. So we invade and and try to convince the people to like us which works about as well as you can expect.
Even now, we're not really trying to win in Ukraine because that would result in a nuclear war.
...
I guess Grenada was a good war...
That’s what happens when you gerrymander the definition of a victory to exclude everything we’ve achieved! Might as well say we didn’t really win WWII because we only got half of Germany, didn’t win the Civil War because today’s politics still align vaguely North vs. South, and must not have won the Revolutionary War, since it was really just inviting the War of 1812.
We’ve proven ourselves very good at dismantling state-level resistance. This discourages enemies from picking such fights. Between that dynamic, economic dependence, and the Big Red Button, we managed spend the rest of the 20th century achieving policy goals without state-on-state warfare. Europe couldn’t go twenty-five years without a continent-spanning war. Now it’s been three times that. When deterrence works, it’s almost as if nothing happened at all. When it doesn’t, you see the long tail of problems too thorny to solve with our considerable toolbox. And even then, what’s the damage? Four to five thousand deaths in the entire Iraq war, half that of the Battle of the Bulge alone.
I think you’re also mistaken to treat the civilian firebombings as decisive. Germany maintained a will to fight long after we made it quite miserable for them. What they couldn’t maintain were trucks and aircraft and all the other necessities of modern war. There’s a better case for Japan, but I’d argue the nuclear advantage deserves special consideration.
Conversely, we’ve still shown a distressing willingness to 1) commit war crimes and 2) level entire regions. Neither of those won Vietnam, because resistance in Vietnam was not organized along the same principles as Germany or Japan. That’s the same reason invading and occupying didn’t work like it did after WWII.
If you disagree, then what actions do you think the U.S. should have taken to win in Afghanistan? In Vietnam? I don’t believe finding larger population centers to bomb would have brought us any closer to our strategic goals.
In Afghanistan, the US should have not invaded Iraq. It's as a result of divided attention that OBL escaped to Pakistan. Once OBL was captured and executed, government should have been left in the hands of the various Talibans. AQ was the enemy, not the rest of the country.
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This should be obvious.
None.
Afghanistan and Vietnam were immoral conflicts because the price of victory was too high. We should have simply done nothing. (Or, at most, limited intelligence actions similar to what Israel does).
Sanctions would have been enough to deal with the Ukrainian situation. Instead we're going to have 1 million dead Ukrainians and 5-10 million displaced and we're still going to lose most likely. Even a victory condition now ends with Ukraine permanently de-peopled. With friends like these...
Yes, you made it very clear last time we talked about this.
I’m asking why you think another Dresden or Tokyo would improve the situation.
It wouldn’t. Sometimes you just have to take the L.
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Is this to imply that WW2 was a clean victory?
WW2- which saw the rise of a US-enabled strategic competitor who would dominate not only half of Europe but win China, a shattering of the global order which led to decades of peasant rebellions and revolutionary ideology, a demonstration and rush for weapons of mass destruction, major militarization and social upheaval that resulted from the macroeconomic disruptions?
Is 'clean' a reasonable frame here, or is it an unreasonable standard that's dismissing victories that are very rarely clean even when done by the most competent of people?
Good point. Wars are almost always negative for all parties.
And bad ceasefires can lead to worse. C'est la vie.
I’m struggling to think of examples of bad cease fires.
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People die and are replaced by other people.
What's the most recent you can think of that actually resulted in a strategic victory? Especially ones that involved another GP.
In my book you get the First Gulf War, a successful limited defensive operation, and that's about it. Then you have to go back almost a century to WW2.
The Cold War?
Obviously, that’s not total industrial war, either. The planet hasn’t seen such a conflict since the development of nuclear weapons. War has changed, and “limited defensive operations” are always preferable to all-in ideological struggles for the fate of continents. That’s why Russia is chipping away at Ukraine rather than lunging for the Fulda Gap.
I don't think the West won the Cold War so much as the Soviets elites just committed suicide for unrelated reasons that surprised even the CIA.
You can make a good argument it was a propaganda or economic win I suppose.
Though probably the former since the West completely fumbled the Russian economy right after being given control. Lest the 90s were intentional destruction which I don't believe.
Soviet elites saw that grocery stores for average Americans were better and gave more choice than even shops for Soviet nomenklatura. No, seriously this. USSR economics and life expectancy were stangating for about since early 1960ths
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I was about to say the Ukraine War, but then you said it had to involve another Great Power.
Cheek aside, this is just categorical gerrymandering. It's a subjective answer which hinges on the conception of a great power is (it would be definitionally impossible for western elites to win a great strategic victory against great powers if all the great powers are on the same team), what a strategic victory entails, and then adding a qualifier of power disparities that basically applies to no one (the Russians / Chinese haven't been in a war against a great power since WW2 either) but is treated as a mark of failure to only some (the lack of a victory over a GP is evidence of western elite failure) even though the same metric could be used as evidence of competence / succession (western elites successfully accomplished goals without needing a direct GP war).
Technically, the USA, the USSR and the PRC have all been in a war against a great power since WWII - the Korean War, in which the USA directly fought the USSR and PRC (the USSR's combat forces pretended to be Chinese, but they still fought). Of course, nobody really won that one, and it's only slightly more recent.
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If there is something I hate it's people who try to avoid answering real questions by showing how it's possible to game the answer.
I don't care if you're clever enough to make untrue things appear true Protagoras, what I care about is if Western Elites can produce strategic results when genuinely challenged.
Then stop trying to make true things appear untrue by introducing weasel words or dismissing challenges as genuine, Antigoras.
In the answer you hate on grounds of avoiding answering a real question, you had a real answer in Ukraine- a country with no right to be able to resist what a few years ago was believed to be a top-3-in-the world army. This was a war which started in the context of a Russian attempt to push back NATO and deepen Germany energy dependence... which has seen NATO expand and close a previously competitive theater, seen the Europeans execute real and expensive energy transition, and maintain a multi-national coalition of backers by parties that half a decade ago were actively selling arms to the Russians.
Is this to be dismissed because the Americans or Europeans aren't directly involved? Because Russia is not a great power? Because, three years after a three day special military operation, there may be some less-than-maximally-desirable ceasefire conditions for a country that demonstrated the military advantage of American aid against far stronger parties?
Strategic challenges aren't necessarily military threats either, so tying one to the other is begging the conclusion. You may take it for granted that ISIS's caliphate was crushed / the Korean DMZ is boring / that Iran limits itself to asymmetric and proxy groups rather than direct expansion / that the South China Sea remains a place of coast guard disputes rather than gunboat diplomacy, but these are all strategic challenges well beyond the capacity of most states, and these are all places where the status quo is an example of strategic results being achieved. In some of our lives, Iran in living memory had a very real expansionist potential of directly annexing parts of Iraq on co-religionist grounds- and now it's 'just' competing with the US for influence over local politicians.
I don't know how you can complain about weasel words and deliver this whopper in the same post... Less than maximally desirable ceasefire conditions? Has the war situation developed not necessarily to Ukraine's advantage? I recall you saying things like 'oh the April '22 ceasefire talks were a dead end since the Ukrainians couldn't accept the demilitarization/no NATO terms'.
What kind of ceasefire terms are they looking at now, compared to then? How much more lost land are they looking at? How much of the country has left, never to return?
The military advantage of American aid is that you lose hundreds of thousands of men in a meatgrinder, get your whole country intensively bombed and depopulated and finally lose more land than you would've without it? And the biggest gamechanger, the most important weapon in Ukraine's arsenal is the DJI Mavic and other Chinese drones/electronic parts?
The sanctions on Russia have had no significant impact on military capacity or state stability. In fact Russia, Iran and North Korea have somehow managed to outproduce the West in munitions while China has both a qualitative and quantitative lead in drones. US ISR has been pretty effective but that's about it.
The US goal has been clear, to restore Ukraine's pre-2014 borders and prop up the old world order by bringing Ukraine into NATO. This clearly hasn't worked. Ukraine's borders and territorial control are looking pretty patchy. The mirage of NATO membership is as distant as ever. The war situation is not reassuring for not-quite-treaty allies of the US. Reframing the goal to 'at least things haven't yet gotten catastrophically worse' is not sufficient, especially since the disasters are nearly all self-inflicted.
The DMZ was fairly calm before the whole Axis of Evil/pre-emptive strike idea which was rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. Iran's influence was limited and there were opportunities to work with them before the US started hacking away at MENA, rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. Now there are a host of Iraqi militias fighting for Iran, they've achieved something close to Sun Tzu's ideal of perfection in turning a major enemy into an ally without fighting. We did that for them, at great expense.
How could ISIS have emerged if Saddam wasn't dethroned and Syria wasn't destabilized?
Russia's military threat was minimal before the 'all of Russia's neighbours should be brought into NATO' policy, rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. There was a moment where Russia was cooperating with us on anti-terrorism and energy but that was thrown away.
China would be vastly easier to deal with if it weren't for all the other crises and about 15 years where naval modernization was on the backburner compared to fooling around in MENA and now Europe. And it's still happening. China may well orchestrate some disaster in the Middle East before they move, knowing the US will pull carrier groups away to defend their highest priority, Israel.
China simply isn’t a civilizational foe of the United States. I don’t care about Taiwan and neither should you. Xi Jinping does not seek to invade and subjugate the Japanese (let alone the Americans), something even most extremely online Chinese ultranationalists don’t care for. China is a distraction, and the US has - if anything - a lot to learn from the successes of Chinese civilization.
All the Chinese want to do is control their own backyard, something they will always find difficult due to the vast majority of their neighbors hating them. Their economy is fragile, and their demographic trajectory / aging population is the stuff of nightmares. The Chinese have never sought a global empire, have rarely even sought to spread their ideology.
Russia is always going to be more of a civilizational threat to Europe and European civilization than China. Not that it has to be, of course, and not that that threat is great or immediate or terrifying (it isn’t). But China is even less of an issue.
Germany never sought a global empire until it did. America never sought a global empire until it did. China has global interests due to its size and power. Power and world hegemony is seductive for anyone.
China's backyard is extremely valuable real estate: South Korea and Taiwan are vital for chipmaking. Intel is a laughing stock, knocking out Taiwan would rip out the spinal cord of the US economy. There'd be an instantaneous economic crisis in the USA, China supplies America with enormous amounts of goods. Not just cheap plastic, everything from medical precursors, machinery for ports and microelectronics for missiles comes from China. Everyone keeps going on about the fragility of the Chinese economy, I think it's the complete inverse of reality. In manufacturing they produce about as much as the US, Germany and Japan combined. They have the biggest trade surplus in the world because their economy is productive, not because it is fragile and weak.
And it's the same with demographics. The second most births in the world behind India, more than double the US birth rate? A population as large or larger than all Western civilization combined? Absolute size is what's important, not proportions.
If China wins a convincing victory in Asia, they can brain-drain the remnants of TSMC, subordinate South Korean industry and secure first place in high technology. The world would be their oyster. I agree that we have much to learn from China but their competence is precisely why they are threatening.
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I appreciate your pre-emptive concession of your lack of ability, which was certainly well warranted by what followed.
I hope that made you feel better.
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I don't like using ongoing conflicts to judge the competence of leaders because the consequences of actions can take a while to play out. And people always seem to blinders on about the present.
You could have held the same triumph for Afghanistan in the 00s for instance. Some did, and we all know how that ended.
The only question that matter strategically speaking is whether or not the West is in a better position than before this war. Your listings of tactical victories are irrelevant.
I find success difficult to argue in terms of stockpiles, economic stability, political stability and diplomatic standing. If I had to pick between the western alliance before or after this war to fight China over Taiwan, I pick before every time.
Well, yes. Willfully ignoring the effects of the western powers on the first non-western great power war of the last quarter century while making a lack of effecting great power wars in the last quarter century a basis of criticism would be blinders.
And we also all know that it didn't end due to the nature of the 01 invasion, but on two decades of nation-building failure after the military delivered initial effects, which are different types of issues that shouldn't be conflated (and do not disqualify 01 from meeting your requirements of strategic effect).
Unless you intend to argue that the nature of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan inevitably, inherently led to the 2021 withdrawal dynamic, and that the intervening 20-odd years had no opportunities / ability / responsibility to matter, appealing to 2021 would be an anachronistic way to dismissing 2001 regardless of whether 2001 was done well or wisely or not.
You think the US strategic position would be better if the Islamic State was still straddling the Syria-Iraq Border, the Korean Peninsula was either ablaze or rebuilding from a catastrophic war that leveled Seoul and saw the Chinese the only power able to invest in the reconstruction at scale, the Iranians annexing much of Iraq and gain significantly more control and leverage over Gulf oil flows, and the Chinese were attempting direct military coercion of one of the main economic thoroughfares of the world?
Okay. Truly only tactical effects.
That would be a very stupid pick, given there was no western alliance to fight China over Taiwan, that multiple European leading states including both France and Germany were not-subtly signaling their disinterested in supporting Taiwan over China, that the Europeans were even more militarily incapable of contributing useful military aid to Taiwan even if they wanted to, and that the European Union was far more vulnerable to Russia-PRC economic lobbies and coercion that would be pressuring them to neutrality vis-a-vis participation with the US.
But okay. You are the Protagoras here.
And that's for no reason other than because it's inconvenient to your argument.
You either haven't internalized that there is no meaningful difference between war and diplomacy, or you have and you're lying.
The Islamic State was literally created by specific decisions the Americans made in Gulf 2 and Syria. If they didn't have this silly belief that the middle east can be democratic and US aligned, none of this would have happened.
Korea had to be fought, but the US stalled as soon as China got involved.
This most of all is a complete failure of American diplomacy. They controlled Iraq militarily and we're kicked out of institutions they themselves created.
All in all, if there's strategic competence at play here, I don't see it.
As for the claim that Europe is a better ally now than before the war, it is the most ridiculous of all. The US had to shoot German industry in the kneecap to ensure its loyalty and France, Britain and Germany are experiencing levels of political instability unheard of since the 50s right now because of it. Not to mention they now have insignificant military capacity and would be unable to help even if they are utterly loyal to NATO.
Yes I believe either your eyes are closed or you're a sophist.
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I'll bite.
When was the Afghanistan war lost? I stand to be corrected, but it seems to me that across twenty years and four presidents, there is no obvious answer better than 2001, when we committed ourselves to invading, occupying and democratizing the country. I do not think you can point to a time past that point when we stood a better chance of securing a better outcome, in terms of costs and benefits, than before the war began. Everything that followed really does seem to have flown downhill from that point, from the sort of people who were in charge, the ideological commitments that defined them, the nature of our country and our military, and the realities of the nation we chose to invade.
If I'm wrong, it seems to me that the way to demonstrate it would be to point to some inflection point post-invasion, a before and after where things took a turn for the worse. But from what I can see, there is no such inflection point. From the moment American boots hit Afghan soil till the moment they left, America had the ability to utterly dominate Afghanistan militarily, at a significant cost in blood and treasure and human misery, and for zero tangible benefit. I have never seen evidence that it was ever going to get better, or that it ever was going to end any other way but how it did. We were always going to pay far too much for far too little until we eventually decided to stop paying. The only way to improve that calculus would have been to stop paying sooner, or ideally not pay at all.
You seem to be arguing that the nation-building was poorly executed, with the implication that it could have been done successfully. That may be true in some theoretical sense, but I see no plausible scenario where America actually does a better job of occupying and nation-building than we saw in reality. I don't think Gore, Kerry, Romney, McCain, Hillary or indeed Trump would have done any better than their respective opponents actually did. I don't think shuffling pentagon or state department officials around would have changed anything. I don't think you can actually argue that better outcomes were at hand if only the right people were in charge. I'm pretty confident that, in fact, the "right people" don't exist, then or now.
The best possible outcome I can imagine would be to have conducted the war as a punitive raid, bombed our way in, shot anyone who looked at us funny while hunting Bin Laden, and then rolled back out again once it became clear he was gone. No nation-building, no occupation, no two decades of graft and incompetence and pointless bloodshed so that washington and pentagon apparatchiks could play social studies phd through heavily-armed proxies.
Am I wrong? What am I missing here?
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Indeed, but western elites die and are replaced by other western elites. So, the question "have western elites ever" clearly isn't limited to current year plus nine.
Calling the Gulf war a defensive war is kind of funny once you realize it required sending troops to the other side of the planet and ended with coalition forces stomping the Iraqi military and rolling up to 150 miles away from Baghdad. Doubly so in the context of discussing another "limited defensive operation".
It's a logistical achievement for sure, and Schwarzkopf was no moron. But it's not exactly a total war. My point is that it's not a great example of a genuine strategic challenge because:
If the coalition toppled Saddam and replaced him with a regime loyal to the West we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead I'd be praising the continued skill of the West at building friends out of enemies in the continuity of what happened in Japan.
But that's not what happened. The Americans had to come mop it up years later and fucked that up really bad.
I don't think you can really say that the coalition consisted of GPs. Britain and France were hardly GPs in the 90s, to say nothing of Saudi and Egypt. Iraq also had a huge military and actually outnumbered coalition forces in terms of troops, tanks, etc.
I'll just dispute that. 1991 Britain and France were still some of the best equipped and trained militaries in the world. And we're only talking military power.
Iraq had a large conscript army with decent Soviet equipment. But they were no North Korea.
It's no shame, but It was not a fair fight. The main difficulty was force projection. Which is something that I'll gladly concede the West has gotten scarily good at.
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