If you're gonna bleed someone, you better be sure they'd be doing the bleedin

The full strategic implications of the military humiliation of the West in Ukraine have yet to be recognized. In Ukraine, a strategic decision in favor of Russia is within sight. But that is not the military humiliation. The West believed that it would crush Russia because the balance of economic power was so overwhelmingly in the West’s favor that many American senators openly relished the prospect of bleeding Russia and SecDef Austin declared that destroying Russia’s ability to wage war was the goal of US policy.

I had warned early on that this was based on Western misperception of Russian power. But even my fears have been exceeded by events. Russia—with limited help from friends and neutrals to be sure—has at least matched the combined might of the West in defense-industrial production. The US is expected to ramp up shell production to 0.5 million this year, while the Russians produced 3.5 million last year, with production expected to ramp up to 4.5 shells this year. Shell output may be exceptional, but there is no doubt that the West is struggling more than Russia in supplying the war effort. See Big Serge’s notes for these figures and the military case that Ukraine is now facing strategic defeat.

The issue is not military defeat in Ukraine per se, but what it says about the global balance of defense-industrial power. For if the West cannot even outproduce Russia in war production, how could it possibly outproduce China? That is the cliometric humiliation of the West in Ukraine. The origins of this catastrophe can be traced proximately to the Biden escalation.

When the Biden team came back in, they were probably already plotting against Moscow. Jake’s nest of hawks (rather precisely described by Walt as ‘mechanics’), being from the Clinton end of Washington, were at risk of believing that the Russians had something to do with Clinton’s defeat at the hands of Trump. Whatever their initial presuppositions, US Russia policy did not turn very hawkish until much later. In the proximate story of the origins of the Ukraine war, the crucial question is why Zelensky was suddenly ordered to report to the White House within days in August 2021.

There may have been other points of no return. But whatever the precise day by day developments in Russo-American relations, the basic picture is that the US rejected Russian demands for neutralization and instead encouraged Ukrainians to escalate their confrontation with the Russians. This is consistent with many senators later letting the cat out of the bag. It was a splendid bang for the buck, or so they said.

The elementary due-diligence before pursuing a bleeding strategy is to make certain that it is the adversary who will bleed and not ego. Either they considered the question to be too outlandish to seriously ask—Russia is no bigger than Spain! Or they simply underestimated the revival of Russian strength under Putin. In either case, they clearly did not consider the possibility that, as I had warned, Putin may have the upper hand in the competition in pain-tolerance.

There are certain homologies between the Biden escalation and the Kennedy escalation. In both, the best and the brightest come in with very specific theses about the balance of power that led them to make poor and deeply tragic foreign policy choices that triggered wider conflagrations that ended in US humiliation. Bundy’s nest of hawks was convinced that ‘the only gap in military containment will close if we demonstrate that wars of national liberation must fail’ (Osgood 1979). The confrontation with the Soviets culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis; that with the Chinese Communists ended with the humiliation in Vietnam, where our commitment to fight internal war in thirty nations bore most fruit.

Jake’s nest of hawks also came in convinced that China and Russia had to be contained. (Not to mention, Iran.) The confrontation with Russia has led to the specter of strategic defeat in Europe. And that is operationally true even if Western media elites convince each other that they are winning all the way until, if it obtains, the collapse of the Ukrainian armed effort, because the more important audience is China and third parties, who don’t live inside the Western media echo-chamber.

The Biden chips escalation is going to work no better than his economic war on Russia in securing any US objectives. But it’s damage to US security has already been done. China has, in effect, been issued a strategic warning. We might as well have handed them a signed note saying: you must fight us if you want to sit next to us at the table. This combination of military humiliation in Europe and provocation in Asia is very dangerous.

As if these escalations against the great powers weren’t enough, the third signature move of Biden’s team of hawks was to ignite the Gaza war through its harebrained diplomatic scheme that tried to bracket away the Palestine question. Igniting the Gaza war was not enough, of course. Jake’s hawks have mobilized all forces to support Israel’s assault on the population of Gaza. This has left the US more diplomatically isolated than ever. Not to mention, morally humiliated, as the corpses continue to pile up.

The diplomatic isolation is mirrored in the collapse of elite authority at home. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans—including the vast majority of Jewish Americans—want a ceasefire, the US has openly blocked it, including by vetoing it three times at the UN Security Council.

The last fig-leaf of war-mongering Western elites vanished when Aaron Bushnell exposed their lies through his supreme act of self-sacrifice.

America’s political class is so trapped in the competitive logic of electoral politics that they are only capable of tactical thinking—the White House is, as it were, run by campaign professionals. In their struggle for mastery at home, they have completely overlooked the emerging limits on US power abroad.

American political elites think that forcing a counterbalancing alliance of China, Russia and Iran is good politics. This is extremely dangerous. For a three-front war is a recipe for strategic defeat in what amounts to a world war. Do we really want to play this out in light of the balance of defense-industrial power revealed by Ukraine?

Somehow, I am reminded of why I chose to write about ‘the quiet war’ in the concluding section of my essay on the Kennedy escalation. It’s the same reason, I suppose, that I feel compelled to conclude here with the Houthis.

A Democrat in the White House cannot afford not to respond to the Houthis. At the same time, given the strength and stability of the Houthis as a mass political organization, airstrikes aren’t gonna stop them for firing missiles. And the missile capabilities can be replenished by others in our diversified portfolio of enemies. It is certainly not going to restore the flow of commercial traffic through Suez, whose collapse, in any case, is not as economically damaging as widely feared.

So, we are left with a side slaughter whose purpose is … what? a costly signal to global investors? a signal to other armed actors contemplating confrontation? This little side show, this ‘diplomacy of violence’, is a formal, symbolic, performative speech act; performing, as it were, an optimal response in some signaling game.

I think I was following Sebald in a way. Just as Austerlitz would not dare look at the horror in the face and must face it obliquely, as it were, I too chose to, in the end, “hide” in ‘the quiet war’ to contemplate the catastrophe of the 1960s. I feel the same way about the catastrophe of the Biden escalation. I’d rather talk about the Houthi dramedy than dwell on the horror in Gaza or Ukraine, and potentially greater horrors to come. Or, indeed, the larger catastrophe of our monkey democracy.