War is the imposition of the will of one human polity (empire, nation, people, or tribe) on another by force. Nations and peoples sometimes fall to their enemies without open violence, although the threat of force is always in the background. When the outcome of armed conflict appears foreordained and unavoidable, often no shots are fired. What the strategists of the old Soviet Union called the "correlation of forces" can be so lopsided that war is pointless, and the aggressor achieves its goals by posing a credible threat without actually attacking, or the defender seeks terms through negotiation, hoping for a better outcome than it would get at the end of an armed struggle.
Modern societies tend to lack the will to engage in a fight without hope, and in truth very few such wars have ever been fought. In the late stages of a conflict, a losing side does, rarely, fight to the death; perhaps the best-known example of that is the Jewish rebellion against Rome that ended after a two-year siege of the mountain fortress of Masada in 73 C.E., when the last of the defenders took their own lives rather than throw themselves on the notoriously thin mercy of the victorious Romans.
There is much war afoot in the world today, and quite a bit more imminent, in the Middle East, the eastern Pacific, and elsewhere. For America, the most important conflict at this writing is the war in Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022 when Russian forces crossed the border between those two nations. Students of history, of which there don't seem to be many in leadership positions in the Western world, should be familiar with Clausewitz' On War, which categorizes wars by two criteria, aims and means. These don't have to be symmetrical, or the same for both sides of any given conflict. Bear with us for a brief summary.
Ends and Means
Aims are either unlimited – for instance, the World War 2 Allies' demand for unconditional surrender of the Axis powers – or limited. A war of limited aims does not seek total defeat or conquest of the enemy. Its objectives are instead lesser concessions, such as territorial gains, for instance the border region of Alsace-Lorraine that changed hands repeatedly between France and Germany from at least 1648 until 1919.
Other limited aims include economic concessions or restrictions, or specific changes in the enemy's behavior. Two recent American examples are Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991. Although very different in size, duration, and impact, America's aims in both wars were essentially for a return to the status quo ante; for an independent South Vietnam free of the threat of a Communist insurgency or Northern invasion, and in the Gulf War, the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Both are examples of how war aims can be different between two antagonists. Iraq's objectives were unlimited, as shown by its declaration that conquered Kuwait was the 19th province of Iraq; and North Vietnam explicitly intended to conquer the south and incorporate it into a single united Vietnam under the North's control. Of course, Iraq failed and North Vietnam succeeded in their respective wars; both limited and unlimited aims are susceptible to miscalculation and failure.
Means refer to the resources, specifically the proportion of the nation's total resources, committed to the war. A war of limited means uses less than the whole potential power of a nation. Looking again at America in Vietnam, its chosen means never included the use or threat of nuclear weapons, nor even a mobilization of American military reserves, manpower, or industry like that of the Second World War. America fought for twenty years a war of limited means in pursuit of limited aims, and eventually accepted defeat without modifying either its aims or means.
War aims and means are closely related, if a nation has even a modicum of wisdom and strategic smarts – which is no longer something to be taken for granted, as our own leadership makes clear almost daily.
Despite the chest-thumping and fear-mongering of American and European (NATO) leaders and spokesmen, there is no evidence that Russia's aim was ever the conquest and domination of Ukraine, much less a continued war of conquest beyond Ukraine into Europe. Pundits and academics continue to opine that it is indeed that, a first step toward reestablishing the USSR or the earlier Russian Empire, but that is purely speculative and takes no account of the fundamental economic and demographic weakness of modern Russia, of which Russia's leaders are very aware even if we are not.
Capabilities
Russia's population is 142 million (and declining), less than half that of the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse and less than one-third the current population of the European Union. The comparison of relative economies is even more stark. The GDP of the Russian Federation in 2020 was $1.48 trillion; that of the European Union $15.3 trillion, more than ten times as large. Both comparisons – population and GDP – are even worse from Russia's point of view if the U.S. and Canada (both NATO allies) are included; U.S. population alone is over twice Russia's, and U.S. GDP in 2020 was $21 trillion, fourteen times Russia's. Military potential is closely dependent on population and the size and strength of a nation's economy, of which GDP is the most reliable measure.
Russia's military is strong relative to its population and economy, largely a result of inheriting a large part of the forces and military industrial complex of the late Soviet Union. However, its vulnerabilities are also great, with the world's longest land borders and with unfriendly nations along most of them.
China is one of those fundamental threats, and no friend to Russia; in fact, it has always posed an explicit and significant threat to Russia's Asian territories and resources, and they were only intermittent allies even in the heyday of international Communism. As leaders and diplomats from Lord Palmerston to Henry Kissinger have often said, nations do not have permanent allies or enemies, only interests. Thanks to the anti-Russian belligerence of recent American administrations and of NATO as a whole, China's interests have made it a temporary ally of convenience to Russia as their interests converge. In the long run, those two nations are mutual antagonists, and China's demographic and economic superiority give it a strong upper hand in every category of national strength except nuclear weapons. In this, Russia's position in relation to China is not unlike its position vis-à-vis the European Union or the United States. Is it any wonder that Russia finds it necessary to remind the world of its one great strength?
Russia is significantly outclassed by NATO in almost every military capability except nuclear weapons, where it has rough parity. It is significant that European NATO nations have notoriously allowed their military forces and defense spending to decline ever since the fall of the Soviet Union thirty years ago; their potential is vastly larger than their current strength, and yet collectively they still outclass Russia by most measures. The comparison would be even more in their favor if they were to fight – as the NATO charter and its public positioning requires – a defensive war on NATO territory.
How far could Russia hope to pursue a war against NATO, given nuclear parity and inferiority in nearly every other measure of military power? Russia's current leaders are the children of men who led the Soviet Union to victory over Nazi Germany – a war of unlimited aims and means – at a cost of approximately 18 million dead by 1945 (by comparison, total U.S. deaths were less than 300,000). They know the cost of war and are not ignorant of history and strategy. It's time to dismiss the over-inflated fears of Russian aggression in light of the true correlation of forces between Russia and the West.
Intentions
Russia's war aims in Ukraine are synchronous with its means – its actual capabilities. It is fighting a limited, regional war – not even really a regional war, but a war of limited aims and means against a single adversary. Allegations of Russian failure and incompetence propagated by Ukrainian propaganda and supported by Western governments and media would only make sense if Russia's aims were unlimited: the conquest and subjugation of the entire country. But as we've pointed out, there's no evidence that was ever Russia's objective, and substantial evidence to the contrary, not least of which is Russia's self-imposed limitations on its use of force, expenditures of munitions, and the size of the forces it has committed. These are the sons and grandsons of the people who destroyed their own city of Stalingrad in order to save it, reduced Berlin to rubble (with the help of Britain's Bomber Command), and wiped East Prussia from the map. What do we think Kyiv and Kharkiv would look like, if this were that kind of war?
Russian President Vladimir Putin's announced objectives are by any rational analysis very close to his probable aims: ensuring Ukrainian neutrality, i.e., preventing it from joining NATO; "demilitarizing" it, i.e., reducing its significant pre-war military potential; "de-Nazification" of a country that does have a substantial neo-Nazi faction in its society and government; and ensuring the security and autonomy of the ethnically Russian Donbas region that has been under constant attack by the Ukrainian government since a Western-backed coup replaced the elected Ukrainian government in 2014.
This all fits every definition of a war of limited means, for limited aims. You would think, though, listening to the rhetoric of the Biden regime and its NATO allies, that this was an existential threat to the freedom and security of the world. It is not. It is not even an existential war for Ukraine, much less for Europe or the U.S. Why are the NATO governments so determined to frame it as something it is not?Perhaps their Clausewitz deficiency is on display again, as they are definitely not taking this piece of his advice:
"The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive."
While Russia has the upper hand at the time of this writing in early May, the continuing infusion of military and economic aid from NATO has kept Ukraine away from the negotiating table and prolonged the war, without promising any change in the eventual outcome. That change could only be forced by direct NATO intervention, which would be uncertain and dangerous for all concerned. And that is the key point of our discussion here.
There are many theories attempting to explain this massive misguided Western effort, but we should never forget the old wisdom encapsulated in Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." For now, we'll just move on to the indirect consequences of America and NATO prolonging a war that does not threaten their legitimate core interests.
Impacts
We've noted in an earlier article the looming second-order consequences of the war in Ukraine. All of them become more dire and threatening with every week the conflict continues. A negotiated settlement, which by definition would not entirely satisfy either belligerent, could mitigate these consequences very quickly. Our "leaders" have other ideas. Here's what the ongoing war means for the rest of us; except for #1, there are many other inputs to these problems, but the ongoing war in Ukraine multiplies their scale and impact:
- An elevated risk of nuclear war, if NATO listens to its own inflammatory rhetoric and there are no adults in the room to prevent direct intervention by NATO forces. There's a good reason why nuclear-armed powers (including Russia, the U.S., Britain, and France) have not engaged in open warfare with one another since World War 2; that reason appears to have been recently forgotten. NATO ground or air forces engaging in combat with Russian forces in Ukraine would invite escalation, miscalculations, and accidents, raising the risk of limited or unlimited and global nuclear war to levels even beyond those at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s. This is serious, folks. The latest generation of elites and power brokers lack the appreciation of what nuclear war would mean; they didn't grow up, as many of their parents did, "ducking and covering" under the school desks to avoid laceration by flying glass and debris from a nuclear detonation miles away.
- Global food shortages, resulting from skyrocketing fuel costs, sharply curtailed grain exports from both Russia and Ukraine, and a severe reduction in the world's supply of nitrogen-based fertilizers, of which almost 50% is produced in those two countries, due directly to the fighting in Ukraine and indirectly to the West's economic sanctions against Russia. "Food shortages" is a bit of a euphemism, even if, as the U.S. media blithely promises us, the impact in America will be only steadily climbing prices and an occasional temporarily bare shelf in the supermarket. In much of the world the result will be famine on a scale exceeding even that in China's Great Leap Forward 1959-63, with hundreds of millions of lives at risk this time. And with these famines will come unrest (already beginning), and mass migrations, and war. Americans might even wish we had a secure southern border.
- Continuing and worsening inflation and supply chain breakdowns, due to disruptions in the export of Russian petroleum, gas, and metals like chromium, vanadium, cobalt, platinum and tungsten. With the US-led sanctions being observed by less than a third of the world's nations, their impact may actually be felt more by the countries imposing sanctions than by Russia, which is finding other customers for those vital products. It's sad that the best possible outcome may be the failure of western economic sanctions, due to market adjustments in the distribution and cost of fungible goods. Prohibited from buying chromium from Russia? Bid, in a climbing market, for a replacement supply from Zimbabwe, the only other major exporter on earth. Those you outbid will satisfy their requirements from… Russia.
- Disruption and redirection of Russian exports are multiplying effects of the Biden regime's war on domestic fossil fuel production, contributing to a rapid and unprecedented rise in fuel prices globally that will have effects far beyond the agricultural sector. For just one example, in economies like ours built on "just-in-time" delivery, the supply of all commodities may be throttled by fuel price increases and scarcity. The warehouses and processing plants (those that have not burned or exploded) might be full of food, but if the eighteen-wheelers aren't rolling, you may not be able to buy it at any price. Scholars on the subject of famine tell us that most large famines are not the result of an actual shortage of food, but on an absence of the means and will to distribute it to the people who need it.
- The insistence on pouring billions of dollars in arms into Ukraine, which may prolong the war but will not reverse its outcome, when the domestic American and European populations are suffering increasingly from all the factors listed above, will have physical and political consequences all over Europe and North America.
War is not just about drones, tank ambushes, and heroic falsified tales like the "Ghost of Kyiv." In an interdependent global economy, its effects reach far and deep. And if these complications arise from just one small regional war, imagine those effects multiplied if China decides that current American weakness and disarray create the perfect opportunity to attack Taiwan. Or if Iran's nuclear ambitions lead next week, next month, or next year to the deployment of Iranian nuclear weapons, and regional nuclear war in the Middle East. Resettling destitute refugees will be a challenge of an entirely different order if the Fifth Fleet has to evacuate Israel's survivors off the Mediterranean beaches.
Famine and Pestilence can occur independently of War, but they follow often in its wake. We'll address them in the next installments of this series. Meanwhile, the man on the red horse is getting busy, and we need to prepare for what he may bring, if he's not stopped.