By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 1/8/24
Yesterday I was reading a speech about the Russia-Ukraine war that was recently delivered by one of America’s most experienced and independent-minded diplomats who is now in semi-retirement. The speech exemplified both the merits and the drawbacks of his profession.
By nature, diplomats look for compromises that can result in negotiated settlements to conflicts. In the given instance, the logic of diplomacy is to say that none of the protagonists in the Russia-Ukraine war, both those named and those unnamed, meaning the foreign backers of the Zelensky regime, has achieved its maximal goals, and so all should sit down at a table and reach a settlement that satisfies none but puts an end to the killing.
However, sometimes there are clear winners and losers
If one has to look for a loser, Ukraine is the stand-out. It has lost in every dimension: lost territory; more than 500,000 killed and maimed soldiers; destroyed military hardware, including the Wunderwaffe received from the USA and Europe; economic collapse; heavy losses of population as millions of refugees fled West and East. This irremediable disaster is every day acknowledged by more mainstream media in the West and explains the reluctance of politicians in Washington and Brussels to continue funding the war.
As for winners, most commentators in the West, including the referenced diplomat in his recent speech, are reluctant to admit the obvious. The big winners from this war are the United States and Russia.
These commentators measure the success or failure of the United States in this latest foreign adventure against its stated aim at the outset: to deal devastating blows to the Russian armed forces and to the Russian economy, thereby ensuring that the country would be unable to unleash an aggressive war against any of its neighbors for decades to come. If I may translate this into standard English: to eliminate Russia from the short list of world powers and enable the United States to move on to its greater task of vanquishing China, and so ruling the roost unchallenged.
Of course, the United States has failed in this mission as we will see in a moment when we look at the other side of the coin, namely how Russia has fared.
But it would be an unforgivable mistake to take Washington at its word. I venture to say that the greater objective, which could not be stated publicly, was to reinforce American subjugation of Europe for the sake of financial gain and to bulk up for the showdown with China.
In this regard, the Ukraine war has paid off handsomely for Washington. The destruction of Nord Stream with the complicity of the German government completed the severance of Europe from cheap Russian pipeline gas that had been a steadfast American objective since the mid-1990s. Instead, Europe became dependent on American LNG, propelling the United States into a world beating position on energy markets and yielding windfall profits from sales to the Old Continent.
Inflated energy costs hastened the deindustrialization of Europe and redirection of investments in industrial capacity by European firms to the United States, where energy costs are three or four times lower. Meanwhile, cleaning out the stores of military weaponry in Europe to assist Kiev under Washington’s direction has meant that all European NATO countries are utterly dependent on new U.S. weaponry to refill their arsenals. Without such deliveries, they cannot presently resist a Russian ground offensive for more than a few days of intensive artillery battles. The European leadership understands this fatal weakness very well and it makes them utterly compliant with Washington’s wishes in all matters.
However, I believe this subjugation of Europe is against the laws of nature and is untenable. In the foreseeable future, there will be a revolt against Washington and/or the collapse of the European Union over its role as facilitator of American domination. We may expect the political forces now categorized by Western media as the ‘Extreme Right’ to lead the fight for national liberation and overthrow the shackles that Washington has forged. The June 2024 Europe-wide elections will be an important test.
What about Russia?
Serious commentators in the West all recognize that the Russian economy has shown unexpected resilience and that the war economy has yielded positive growth, while Europe stagnates or enters recession. Curiously, attention is drawn to the important role of military orders in Russia’s expanding economy as if that were a negative factor for predicting Russia’s future economic prospects. But if the military industrial complex has been for decades and remains today a major sponsor of research and industrial innovation in the United States, which is obvious as day to any investor in Boeing, for example, then why should it be any different for the Russian economy. To those with eyes to see and with minds open to the facts, it is clear that Russia is going through very fast paced reindustrialization in all sectors.
Observers of China have long told us that the country cannot easily be replaced by Vietnam or India as the world’s factory because they have learned to optimize the organization of production on the factory floor and in this regard they have gone well beyond the Western companies whose designs they turn into goods.
Meanwhile Russia has made its own breakthroughs. The time spent from establishing new product requirements for the armed forces in the field through the time needed to design and manufacture suitable products en masse was reduced from 7 years to 7 months during 2023 and this energy is spreading across the economy. The links between basic science, applied science and serial production were always very weak in Russia. No longer.
Import substitution has been a slogan in Russia ever since the West imposed harsh sanctions on the economy in the summer of 2014. Now, with the generalized reindustrialization of Russia, the notion has grown legs.
At the same time, Russia has continued its program of heavy investments in civilian infrastructure. The emphasis, of course, is on European Russia, which is being knit ever more closely together by newly opened world class intercity highways, high speed trains and new airports served by Russian built civilian planes. But more and more funding has been assigned to logistical solutions for the Far North, Eastern Siberia and the Pacific Maritime regions in support of the Northern sea route and in support of the extractive industries. All of this lays the groundwork for a fast growing national economy in the future.
And what about Russia’s military strength?
At the level of strategic weapons systems, the past couple of years have witnessed the completion of a modernization program for Russia’s nuclear triad that puts the country well ahead of the United States in this domain. Among the strategic weapons that are now being put into regular service are a new ICBM that carries multiple hypersonic attack missiles that can pulverize whole nations at a go.
But let us recall that even in the 1990s Russia’s status as a nuclear superpower was not doubted even if loudmouth American politicians insisted that the nukes were useless since a nuclear exchange would yield no winners. Instead, they pointed to the utterly demoralized and underequipped Russian conventional forces that performed so poorly in the Chechen wars at the end of the last century and were said to remain underpowered and unimpressive during the Georgian war of 2008.
The situation today is vastly different. The challenges of the Ukraine war have compelled Russia to equip and train what are arguably the strongest conventional armed forces on the Continent if not in the world.
A lot of Russian IT geniuses may have emigrated to the United States since the 1990s to work for Google and others in Silicon Valley. Still more fled abroad in the opening months of the Special Military Operation. But there is always a surfeit of talent in a field like this, and the loyal souls who stayed at their work desks have created Electronic Warfare technologies, reconnaissance and attack drones, as well as other essential instruments of defense and offense for the battlefield that even Russophobes at The Financial Times are compelled to recognize as world beating, as we saw on their pages several days ago. Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters every day prove their superiority to NATO analogues on the battlefield, and this helps explain the 8:1 or 10:1 advantage in the kill rate of the Russian armies against the combined Ukraine-NATO troops today.
Until very recently, it was commonplace to find our mainstream commentators speaking of China as having the world’s second strongest military after the United States. Now I am reading on the pages of the FT that endemic corruption has been a blight on the Chinese military. It would appear that by trashing China, the editorial board is preparing the way for stating what is there for all to see: that Russia is now the number two military in the world.
Why is Russia not number one? Because Russia’s leadership has its mind on the ball. The Soviet Union sought to be a superpower, meaning capable of projecting force all across the globe. The Russian Federation has no such ambition. It seeks to be a hegemon in its own part of the world, meaning the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and to be a major player at the global Board of Governors alongside peers that include the USA and China, among others. To do this Russia has almost no need for military bases abroad, and it has no more than you can count on one hand. It has no need of aircraft carriers, which it does not build, concentrating instead on corvette sized naval vessels that are armed with hypersonic and other devastating missiles, as well as nuclear submarines carrying ICBMs and also hypersonic missiles for use in regional hotspots. These are being turned out and commissioned in the shipyards at a fast rate, as we heard and saw over the past couple of months of official commissioning. Those shipyards, are, by the way, now run by one of the most capable managers in the country, VTB Bank CEO Andrei Kostin.
The lecturer whose speech I read yesterday spoke of Russia’s cutting ties with Western Europe as the end of 300 years of immersion in European culture, and the present pivot of Russian foreign policy to China and the Global South as driven by necessity, a kind of forced isolation.
To be sure, the current split from Europe may last a generation, since feelings are very bitter on both sides. However, even in present conditions, the ‘cancel Russia’ policies in Europe that we saw at the start of the Ukraine war are fading. In the domain of culture above all Russia is indispensable if audiences are not to die of boredom, and Russian divas are once again on our opera stages. I have little doubt that Russian stars of other performing arts will soon reappear here. When some kind of settlement to the war finally occurs, Russia will slowly make a comeback in Europe.
However, it is a false and under-informed opinion to see Russia’s pivot to what we used to call the Third World as something new. The foreign policy orientation of the Soviet Union was internationalist in the broadest sense. It made fast and true friends across Africa by supporting the national liberation movements. It did the same by supporting Castro and other leaders in Latin America striving to get out from under the boot of Washington in their hemisphere. As for East Asia, apart from China, with which relations blew hot and cold, there was active cultivation of relations with Indonesia, with the countries of Indochina during Soviet times. But whereas the objective of Soviet policy was formation of blocs where possible, the RF objective is to release countries from control by Washington and its allies so that they may pursue their own national interests, which may diverge from Russia’s in many ways.
The single most flagrant error in the analysis of the enlightened and independent minded diplomat whose lecture caught my attention was to measure Russia’s success or failure in the Ukraine war by what we impute to Russia and not what Russians themselves define as their aims. In this war, Vladimir Putin listed three tasks at the outset: to demilitarize Ukraine, to denazify the country and to ensure it does not join NATO. The most important among them is, of course, ‘demilitarization’ which means crushing the Ukrainian armed forces. From this the other two follow necessarily. And destruction of the Ukrainian army is now a realistic expectation in the foreseeable future.
I have little doubt that this war will end, quite possibly in the coming six months, with a peace settlement that amounts to Ukrainian and Western capitulation to Russia’s demands. Winners take all!