By Anatol Lieven, The Nation, 10/29/24

Whoever wins the US election, the start of a new administration should be an opportunity for a serious reevaluation of US policy toward the war in Ukraine. For it is abundantly clear that the present course is unsustainable, and if persisted in, is likely to lead sooner or later either to Ukrainian collapse or to direct NATO involvement in war with Russia. This is indeed now tacitly admitted by some US commentators like Robert Kagan, though he has not been willing to tell Americans that they must go to war in order to prevent Ukrainian defeat or a compromise peace.

The news from the Ukrainian front line is grim. Ukrainian forces are heavily outnumbered and outmatched in artillery and ammunition. There are growing signs of exhaustion, demoralization, desertion, and evasion of service by both the elites and ordinary people. Russian success is grounded in the fact that Russia simply has far greater resources than Ukraine in terms of both industry and manpower. It has been able to recruit hundreds of thousands of new troops by paying them very high wages, up to six times the average salaries in the regions from which they are drawn.

Ukrainians and Western hawks claim that more Western weapons will make a critical difference; and indeed, if some of these had been provided in 2022, when the Russian armed forces were outnumbered and in serious disarray, they might have led to much greater Ukrainian success. Now however, so great is the Russian advantage that Western supplies can make little difference.

Western industry cannot produce anything like the number of artillery shells Ukraine needs; the USA cannot provide sufficient air defense systems to Israel and Ukraine and keep enough for a possible war with China. And above all, NATO cannot manufacture more soldiers for Ukraine. The German government has already declared that it is freezing military aid, and will cut aid to Ukraine by almost half next year, and by more than 90 percent by 2027.

Faced with this reality, Western advocates of unconditional support for complete Ukrainian victory are becoming increasingly desperate. Earlier this year, we were told by the likes of retired Gen. Ben Hodges that the (genuine) success of Ukrainian missiles and drones in driving the Russian Black Sea Fleet from its bases in Crimea meant that these could also drive the Russian army from Crimea and somehow regain it for Ukraine (after he told us in June 2023 that Ukraine could “free Crimea by the end of summer”). Then, we were told that the (genuine but very limited) Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region of Russia marked a turning point in the war. Now, we are being told that allowing Ukraine to fire missiles guided by US satellites into Russia will allow Ukraine to transform the war.

It is true that the Ukrainian forces, with tremendous grit, are forcing the Russians to advance very slowly, and are inflicting heavy casualties. Together with the war weariness of much of the Russian population, and Russian economic problems, this could allow Ukraine to reach a peace settlement that would limit Russian territorial gains, and, while excluding NATO membership, allow Ukraine to seek membership of the European Union at some point in the future. This would be very painful for Ukrainians, but it would still be a great triumph in historical terms, and vastly better than what they are likely to get if the war continues. Headlines like “Ukraine must turn the tide before it can negotiate” are, however, meaningless, if by this is meant not just conducting a dogged fighting retreat but also driving the Russians back.

Tragically, the Ukrainian government and Western establishments have so often condemned the very idea of a compromise peace and insisted on complete Ukrainian victory that it is now very difficult for them to change course. They have also by now uttered so often the argument that if Putin is allowed to keep southeastern Ukraine he will go on to attack NATO that they may even have come to believe this nonsense themselves.

A more cogent argument, advanced for example by Ivan Krastev in the Financial Times, is that with the Russian army advancing, Putin has no incentive to seek peace at present; and that his offer of a ceasefire in return for Ukrainian withdrawal from the cities of Zaporizhia and Kherson (claimed but not occupied by Russia) is completely unacceptable.

This is true as far as it goes, but the counterargument is that we cannot discover which Russian conditions are absolute, and which negotiable, until we enter into negotiations with Russia; and starting negotiations does not mean accepting initial Russian terms. Members of the Russian establishment have suggested to me the possibility that in return for a treaty of neutrality excluding NATO membership, Russia would give up further territorial ambitions.

Let us make this suggestion in private and see what Moscow’s response is. Even better, empower neutral powers like India and Brazil to make such proposals for peace to the Russians. Given the effort that the Russian government has put into wooing these states and the “global majority,” it would be very difficult for it to spurn a peace initiative from them.

Western support to Ukraine should continue during negotiations so that the Ukrainian forces can continue to fall back slowly and inflict heavy casualties, thereby encouraging the Russians to accept a compromise. We must not, however, delude ourselves either that our support will last indefinitely, or that it can possibly help Ukraine to regain territory that it has lost. We therefore have no honest and viable alternative to also putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to accept a compromise peace.

If the next US administration fails to adopt this course, then there is a serious risk that, like First World War armies after years of trench warfare, the Ukrainian army will eventually collapse. Washington will find itself faced with a choice between accepting severe Ukrainian defeat or intervening directly and risking—or even ensuring—nuclear war with Russia. We must hope that the leaders of the next administration will have the intellectual clarity and the moral courage to recognize this, and act accordingly.

YouTube link here.

By Kit Klarenberg, Website, 10/29/24

On July 29th, Pentagon-funded “think tank” RAND Corporation published a landmark appraisal of the state of the Pentagon’s 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS), and current US military readiness, produced by a Congress-created Commission of “non-governmental experts in national security.” Its findings are stark, an unrelentingly bleak analysis of every aspect of the Empire’s bloated, decaying global war machine. In brief, the US is “not prepared” in any meaningful way for serious “competition” with its major adversaries – and vulnerable or even significantly outmatched in every sphere of warfare.

The 2022 NDS was released in October that year, with much fanfare. Its contents bombastically proclaimed to offer a bold, comprehensive roadmap for how the US national security state, and all its divisions, would evolve and adapt to “dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and our environment.” Promising to safeguard Washington’s hegemony for “decades to come,” the Strategy’s introduction loftily declared that the Pentagon was obligated to the US military and public alike:

“To provide a clear picture of the challenges we expect to face in the crucial years ahead – and we owe them a clear and rigorous strategy for advancing our defense and security goals…From helping to protect the American people, to promoting global security,to seizing new strategic opportunities, and to realizing and defending our democratic values.”

Fast forward to today, and the RAND Commission’s appraisal of the NDS couldn’t be more scathing. The Pentagon’s comprehension of the economic, military, and political threats to “US interests” posed by China and Russia, and the pair’s emergent, world-defining partnership – to the extent they were even acknowledged at all – is found to be hazardously defective, if not non-existent. And the NDS’ proposals for overcoming these issues, and maintaining the Empire’s worldwide dominance, are judged to be at best woefully inadequate, at worst outright delusional.

‘Multiple Adversaries’

The NDS did get one thing right – China and Russia represent major threats to the Empire, and actively “seek to undermine US influence” worldwide. Beijing particularly was branded a “pacing challenge” economically and militarily, given the extraordinary speed and scale of its scientific and technological innovation and growth. However, the NDS assumed Washington maintained major ‘edges’ over its rival, and widening those gaps further was promptly and readily achievable. To say the least, the RAND report begs to differ:

“We believe the magnitude of the threats the US faces is understated and significantly worse…In many ways, China is outpacing the US…in defense production and growth in force size and, increasingly, in force capability and is almost certain to continue to do so…[Beijing] has largely negated the US military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment. Without significant change by the US, the balance of power will continue to shift in China’s favor.”

This dire situation is greatly magnified by China’s “no limits” partnership with Russia, signed in February 2022, and explicitly “aimed at challenging US leadership internationally.” The pair’s burgeoning alliance with the Global South, specifically Iran and North Korea, exacerbates things yet further. Alliance and collaboration between these countries means they are all growing “bolder”, in turn undercutting Washington’s “force planning and force structure…designed to deter aggression by others, when the US is involved in conflict elsewhere.”

This ever-germinating union of disaffected states – stultifyingly dubbed “An Axis of Growing Malign Partnerships” by RAND – means “efforts to isolate and coerce these states through international means – such as sanctions, embargoes, and censure – will be far more difficult.” Even more gravely, it “increases the likelihood that a conflict with one would expand to multiple fronts, causing simultaneous demands on US and allied resources”:

“At minimum, the US should assume that if it enters a direct conflict involving Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea, that country will benefit from economic and military aid from the others…This new alignment of nations opposed to US interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multi-theater or global war…As US adversaries are cooperating more closely together than before, the US and its allies must be prepared to confront an axis of multiple adversaries.”

Partnership between Beijing and Moscow has only deepened since February 2022. In the words of Stockholm’s Institute for Security and Development Policy, “the world order has become much more unfavorable and hostile in the Russian and Chinese conceptions, and has warranted closer ties and unwavering mutual support.” Their alliance’s revolutionary geopolitical ramifications were abundantly clear when the NDS was published that same year. Yet, that document made zero reference to the “no limits” relationship whatsoever.

The obvious prospect that the US waging war against one of the pair would inevitably mean war with the other – a threat now all the deadlier due to their alliance expanding – was similarly unconsidered. The Empire is extremely fortunate no such conflict has come to pass in the two years since the NDS was published. As the Commission report spells out in forensic detail, Washington would be almost completely defenceless in such a scenario, and likely defeated nigh on instantly.

Multiple passages slam the US military’s lack of “readiness” for a major conflict. Recent “crises”, including the Zionist entity’s genocide in Gaza, “have led to unplanned force deployments to Europe and the Middle East, creating high demand for ‘stressed’ force elements with multiple requirements across theaters, such as air defense and aerial refueling.” In tandem, “constant demand for presence operations, exercises, and security cooperation activities has exacerbated readiness challenges, especially when paired with the training requirements to prepare for great power competition and conflict.” Meanwhile:

“The US Navy is also suffering from readiness issues stemming from its high operational tempo, aging ships, shipyard backlogs, and crew fatigue. Continued mishaps at sea and in military aviation pose risks to troop safety and are symptomatic of a decline in readiness, reflecting both a lack of experience and the increased complexity of the future warfighting mission. The steady demands of campaigning on a smaller military force – and an even smaller number of responsive, modernized, and combat-credible forces – has stressed force readiness.”

‘Affordable Cost’

It’s not just being spread too thinly on the Grand Chessboard that means the Empire’s military machine “lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.” Munitions, or lack thereof, are a fatal susceptibility. “Extraordinary” levels of “consumption and demand” for US weapons “by allies and partners in Europe,” combined with the Zionist entity’s rapacious appetite for heavy bombs, have left Washington’s stockpiles “already inadequate for a high-end conflict.”

Renewing those stockpiles, let alone equipping the Empire for future war, won’t be easy. The RAND Commission found Washington’s “defense industrial base” is completely “unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs” of the US, let alone its allies. “A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theaters, would require much greater capacity to produce, maintain, and replenish weapons and munitions” than is currently in place, the report observes. Rebuilding that capacity “requires greater urgency and resources,” and “should remain a top priority” for the Pentagon.

For decades, the US military “employed cutting-edge technology to its decisive advantage for decades.” This “assumption of uncontested technological superiority” on the Empire’s part meant Washington had “the luxury to build exquisite capabilities, with long acquisition cycles and little tolerance for failure or risk.” Those days are long over though, with China and Russia “incorporating technology at accelerating speed,” and “even relatively unsophisticated actors” such as Yemen’s Ansarallah “able to obtain and use modern technology (e.g. drones) to strategic effect.”

The Empire already isn’t keeping up, and in any future war, will need “to continue to develop, adopt, and iterate new technologies at greater speed and scale and at an affordable cost,” while simultaneously replenishing “existing munitions” for a “protracted” period, “to keep pace with warfighter needs.” Current Pentagon research and development and procurement systems were judged by the Commission to be wholly inadequate for the task. And America’s “defense industrial base” is today crumbling, riddled with a myriad of deleterious issues:

“These shortcomings include the deteriorating condition of defense depots, contract maintenance performance issues, and underproduction of spare parts, among many others. The result is a US military that is minimally operationally ready today but is unlikely to be ready for tomorrow….[The US] is unable to produce the weapons, munitions, and other equipment and software needed to prepare for and engage in great power conflict. Consolidation and underinvestment have led to too few companies, gaps in the workforce, insufficient production infrastructure, and fragile supply chains.”

To address these problems, the Commission calls for enormous amounts of money to be spent on “the capacity to build” munitions domestically, “the recapitalization of armories,” and “advanced manufacturing and further stockpiling of munitions.” In other words, to reindustrialise the US after years of outsourcing, offshoring and neglect. No timeframe is provided, although it would likely take decades. Meanwhile, the Pentagon simultaneously “needs to work with other countries to expand production capacity for munitions,” while ensuring “it can buy all munitions at sufficient scale to deliver the desired operational effects.”

Of course, the Empire already wastes exorbitant sums on keeping its existing outgunned, outnumbered, outproduced military machine, which wouldn’t survive first contact with an actual war, operational. Doing so requires printing astonishing volumes of dollars, in turn producing such high inflation that arms suppliers are now rejecting Pentagon contracts and tearing up existing deals, as they have become “money-losers”. Washington’s response? The US defense budget now allocates over $1 billion annually in yet more freshly-printed money, to compensate them for inflation-related losses.

We have entered a strange, late-stage Empire era, comparable to the Soviet Union’s Glasnost, in which elements of the US imperial braintrust can see with blinding clarity Washington’s entire hegemonic global project is stumbling rapidly and irreversibly towards extinction, and announce so publicly – but their insight does not translate into evasive governmental action at home. The RAND Commission report elicited no mainstream coverage or comment whatsoever, proof positive there isn’t a concomitant effort to manufacture consent for its radical, far-reaching prescriptions.

Were the Commission’s recommendations remotely plausible, a multipronged PR campaign would’ve immediately ensued to convince Americans of the righteousness of the Empire’s mission, and the necessity of investing in US “defense” to the tune of trillions. The media’s silence on the report’s damning findings definitionally reflects an omertà among the US political class. They well-know American reindustrialisation can’t happen. So, the fatal “disconnect” between Pentagon operational and industrial planning identified by RAND will endure, and with it ever-intensifying US military impotence. We’re spectating the Empire’s final acts in real-time.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 11/9/24

Trump’s reported plan for a Western/NATO peacekeeping mission in Ukraine places Russia in the dilemma of either preempting this with another large-scale nationwide offensive, targeting those forces after they enter at the risk of sparking World War III, or tacitly accepting this endgame.

The Wall Street Journal’s report that Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine envisages the creation of an 800-mile demilitarized zone that would be patrolled by Europeans adds a lot of urgency to Russia’s nearly 1000-day-long struggle to achieve its maximum goals in this conflict. The potential entrance of conventional Western/NATO forces into Ukraine as peacekeepers places Russia in the dilemma of accepting yet another “red line” being crossed or risking World War III by targeting them.

To refresh everyone’s memory since it’s been so long since the special operation started, Russia officially aims to: 1) demilitarize Ukraine; 2) denazify it; and 3) restore its constitutional neutrality, among other supplementary and informal goals. September 2022’s referenda then added the official goal of removing Ukrainian forces from the entirety of the four regions that Russia now claims as its own, including the areas of Kherson and Zaporozhye on the other side of the Dnieper, which will be challenge.

At the same time, Putin has repeatedly refused to reciprocally escalate in response to egregious Ukrainian provocations like its bombing of the Kremlin, early warning systems, strategic airfields, oil refineries, and residential buildings, et al, all due to him not wanting the conflict to spiral out of control. For as responsible of an approach as this is, the drawback is that it created the perception that he might accept the crossing of even more “red lines”, including conventional Western/NATO forces in Ukraine.

Putin’s aversion to escalation might therefore be exploited by Trump, who was reportedly handed a plan in June advising him to give Ukraine whatever it wants if Russia refuses whatever peace deal he proposes, ergo the high likelihood of a conventional Western/NATO intervention to decisively freeze the conflict. Trump’s track record of “escalating to de-escalate” with North Korea and Iran suggests that he’d also go through with this plan against Russia, hence why it should take this scenario seriously.

Provided that Putin lacks the political will to risk an unprecedented escalation by targeting those conventional Western/NATO forces, and his behavior thus far in response to other provocations suggests that this is indeed the case, then he’ll have to race against the clock to achieve his maximum goals. It’ll still take some time for the US to get key stakeholders like Poland on board, where 69% of the public is against dispatching troops to Ukraine in any capacity, so this likely won’t happen by mid-January.

In any case, Russia no longer has a hypothetically indefinite amount of time like before to: 1) demilitarize Ukraine; 2) denazify it; 3) restore its constitutional neutrality; and 4) remove Ukrainian forces from the entirety of the four regions that Russia now claims as its own, including those areas across the Dnieper. Even though the military-strategic dynamics of the conflict favor it, and capturing Pokrovsk could lead to huge gains in Donetsk, it’ll be very difficult to achieve all these goals by the time an intervention occurs.

To explain in the order that they were mentioned, Ukraine was initially supposed to be demilitarized upon the swift success of the special operation in its early phase, but the UK and Poland (whose role most observers aren’t aware of) convinced Zelensky to rubbish spring 2022’s draft peace treaty. That document would have greatly slashed its military capabilities, but it’s no longer realistic to imagine that he’d agree to this, especially after being given tens of billions of dollars’ worth of NATO arms.

NATO is also unlikely to agree to ask for them back due to the perception (regardless of its veracity) that Ukraine must be able to “deter” Russia from supposedly recommencing the conflict after it finally ends. The Taliban’s swift capture of Afghanistan after Biden’s bungled withdrawal from there was viciously lambasted by Trump, who’d go down in history as an even bigger loser if he agreed to “demilitarize” Ukraine and was then played for a fool by Putin if Russia steamrolls through it sometime later.

The only viable way in which Russia could implement Ukraine’s demilitarization in today’s context is to control as much of its territory as possible in order to ensure that no threatening weapons are deployed there. The problem though is that Russia is unlikely to obtain military control over all of Ukraine, or even just significant parts of its territory east of the Dnieper in proximity to the internationally recognized border across which Kiev’s shells still regularly fly, by the time of a Western/NATO intervention.

One of the reasons why the special operation’s opening phase didn’t result in ending the conflict on Russia’s terms is because the West informed Zelensky about how overextended its military logistics had become and thus encouraged him to exploit that to push it back like he ultimately did. Given how cautious of a leader Putin is, he’s unlikely to act out of character once more by ordering a repeat of this same risky strategy even if the frontlines collapse and Russia is able to roll into other regions.  

Another unforeseen challenge that Russia experienced during the special operation’s opening phase was actually holding the broad swaths territory that it nominally controlled. Ukraine’s hidden Javelin and Stinger stockpiles inflicted enough losses behind Russia’s lines to engender the large-scale pullback that coincided with the failure of spring 2022’s peace talks. There’s also the obvious difficulty of swiftly capturing large cities like Kharkov, Sumy, and Zaporozhye, which hasn’t yet happened.

Moving along to Russia’s second maximum goal of denazifying Ukraine after explaining how tough it’ll be to achieve the first one of demilitarizing it, this too can’t succeed without a political agreement that’s no longer realistic in today’s context after such a chance slipped away in spring 2022. What Russia has in mind is Ukraine promulgating legislation that aligns with these goals, such as banning the glorification of World War II-era fascists and rescinding restrictions on ethnic Russians’ rights.

Zelensky has no reason to go along with this anymore like he flirted with doing in early 2022 and Trump’s team doesn’t seem to care all that much about this issue anyhow. It’s therefore unclear how Russia can achieve this before a Western/NATO intervention except in the unlikely scenario of a Russian-friendly Color Revolution and/or military coup, neither of which the US would accept, and both of which would probably thus prompt the aforesaid intervention out of desperation to salvage “Project Ukraine”.

The third maximum goal of restoring Ukraine’s constitutional neutrality is comparatively more likely but nevertheless moot at this point given that the raft of security guarantees that it already clinched with NATO states since the start of this year de facto amount to continued Article 5 support. Contrary to popular perceptions, this clause doesn’t obligate the dispatch of troops, but only for each country to do whatever it deems fit to help allies under attack. Their existing military aid to Ukraine aligns with this.

Coercing Ukraine to rescind 2019’s constitutional amendment making NATO membership a strategic objective would therefore be a superficial concession to Russia on the US’ part to make Trump’s peace plan a little less bitter for Putin to swallow. As with the previous two maximum goals, Zelensky has no reason to comply with Putin’s demands in this regard since the latter’s forces aren’t in a position to impose this upon him, thus meaning that it can only realistically be done if Trump orders him to.

As the reader probably already picked up on, the common theme is that Russia’s inability to militarily coerce Zelensky into complying with its maximum goals greatly reduces the possibility that they’ll be achieved, which also holds true for the final one of obtaining control over all its new regions’ land. It’s unimaginable that Zelensky will voluntarily cede Zaporozhye with its over 700,000 population, for example, or that Trump will accept the Western opprobrium that would follow coercing him to do so.

The same goes for letting Russia cross the Dnieper to obtain control over that region’s and Kherson’s areas on the other side, thus creating the opportunity for it to build up its forces there in the future for a lightning strike across Ukraine’s western plains in the event that the conflict ever rekindles after it ends. There’s no way that Trump would ever give Putin such an invaluable military-strategic gift so Russia’s supporters shouldn’t deceive themselves by getting their hopes up thinking that this will happen.

The only way in which Russia can achieve its maximum goals before the entrance of Western/NATO troops into Ukraine as peacekeepers is through military means, which would require another large-scale multi-pronged offensive of the sort that characterized the special operation’s early days. Even then, however, the high risk of once again overextending its military logistics, being ambushed by Stingers/Javelins, and thus risking reputational costs and even on-the-ground losses, will remain.

As such, there are really only three options left for Russia: 1) escalate now before Western/NATO troops enter Ukraine and either coerce Zelensky into agreeing to these demands or capture and hold enough land in order to demilitarize as much of the country as possible; 2) escalate after they enter at the risk of sparking a Cuban-like brinksmanship crisis that could spiral into World War III; or 3) accept the fait accompli of freezing the conflict along the Line of Contact and begin preparing the public accordingly.

It’s unclear which option Putin will choose since he hasn’t yet signaled a preference for any of them. Nevertheless, it’s timely to quote 19th-century Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov, who famously said that “Russia is not sulking; she is composing herself.” Russia knows that the clock is ticking for achieving its maximum goals before Trump likely orders Western/NATO peacekeepers to enter Ukraine. The Kremlin is quiet for now precisely because policymakers have yet to decide what to do.

By Malcom Kyeune, UnHerd, 10/24/24

Last year, Tucker Carlson scandalised America by travelling to Russia and interviewing Vladimir Putin. As US viewers denounced the idea that one ought to speak to an enemy such as Putin, Tucker strolled around Moscow, filming himself taking the subway, buying a burger from the new Russian McDonalds, and going grocery shopping in a Moscow supermarket. Behaving, in fact, like he was in the West.

Back home, Tucker had some good things to say about Putin, as well as some bad things. But it was the streets and shops of Moscow that really “radicalised” him. The West likes to paint Russia as poor, miserable and oppressed, but Tucker described a perfectly ordinary modern society. The discrepancy between what Tucker had been taught to expect and what he actually saw in Russia didn’t just unnerve him — it made him angry.

Of course, one might point out that Moscow and St Petersburg are Potemkin villages of sorts, covering up the reality of deep poverty in much of the rest of the country. But none of this is ultimately a matter of facts. The conflict between the West and Russia today is now seen as ideological and existential, just as the conflict between communism and capitalism once was. To say something nice about the Russian enemy is to take his side; to say something nice about him that also happens to be true is seen as even more treasonous. Communist Russia was rife with stories about American workers being treated like dirt, toiling under truly awful living standards. After all, America was capitalist, and a capitalist society could never be a good place for a worker to live.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the epic tension that had built up over the decades between the US and Russia fell apart rapidly. Russians queued up to eat at McDonald’s or to buy blue jeans, and they also emigrated to America in droves. Some of them wanted a more stable place to raise their children than the dystopian nightmare that was Nineties Russia, others saw in America a more agreeable form of culture and ideology, and others still just wanted to make money. In 1980, the number of foreign-born Russian speakers in the US numbered less than 200,000. In 2011, that number had hit 900,000.

Since then, however, things have changed a great deal. The US is no longer the Mecca of foreign talent it once was, as it dives deeper into a geopolitical showdown with Russia, China, and the Brics more generally. The West is faltering both militarily and economically; the US empire is overstretched, practically insolvent, and facing growing exhaustion and disillusionment at home. To complicate this, the West’s own ideological tenets about freedom of speech and respect for human rights ring increasingly hollow. Even Westerners are losing faith in the American project.

While Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia was a one-off, there has been a small but growing trickle of news stories in Western media featuring Americans deciding to brave the Iron Curtain in the other direction. The reasons they give are eerily similar to the ones heard from dissidents in the past: the political system in the West is broken and the politicians have lost the plot; the ruling ideology is out of touch with ordinary people; the standard of living is falling and the cost of living too high. Mostly, the reasons given today have to do with politics rather than economics: in this telling the West is just too “woke”, too materialist, and too sclerotic. Russia, for its part, seems eager to offer “political asylum” to any Westerner with a big enough bone to pick with their home country.

It’s easy to dismiss what’s going on here as an irrelevant fringe phenomenon, but that might turn out to be a very grave mistake in the decade ahead. The ideological angle to these stories — that Russia is engaged in some fanciful or vain project of sheltering the “unwoke” out of some kind of humanitarian concern — is nothing but a fable. It is a velvet glove, hiding a far more calculating economic fist.

The truth of the matter is that Russia — like many other Brics countries now preparing their collective challenge to the West — has been struggling with the question of immigration for quite a long time now. After slowly recovering from the runaway brain-drain that hit it in the Nineties, the Russian state has cautiously moved to reform and rationalise its immigration system, particularly with an eye towards streamlining new channels for highly-skilled migrants. In other words, just the kind of migrants who tend to be in short supply and high demand worldwide. The fact that the Russians are entering into this competition decades late is certainly not lost upon them. During the unipolar moment, the West monopolised the pool of skilled migrants available, while also retaining all the high-value labour created at home. In the dawning multipolar world, however, the West appears not just as a competitor to be bested, but also as a potential goldmine from which an increasing number of migrants can be sourced.

It is only when one understands that the West could potentially become a victim, rather than a beneficiary of future brain drain that recent policy changes within Russia can begin to make sense. To wit, Russia recently announced that anyone living in a Western country “opposed to Russia” shall have access to a special, expedited visa process, exempt from all ordinary immigration requirements. There are no quotas for this kind of immigration, no tests on language skills or knowledge of Russian law, and all the other aspects of this visa process are tailored to be as generous as possible. Applicants only have to demonstrate that they wish to move to Russia due to a disagreement with their home country’s policies that contradict “traditional” Western or Russian values. Even if you’re not interested in Russia, Russia is now interested in you.

“Even if you’re not interested in Russia, Russia is now interested in you.”

Law and consultancy firms that offer help to clients looking to move to Russia aren’t exactly new, and there are a decent number to choose from. This new push toward “Shared Values Visas” from the Russian state, however, is notable in that it coincides with far more sleek and ideologically savvy new ventures into the market. A good example of this trend is “ArkVostok”, the company behind the website movetorussia.com. With the founders having mostly Western educational backgrounds as well as experience working inside Western consultancy firms, the pitch offered here is clearly tailored to appeal precisely to the sort of feelings that Tucker Carlson has recently given voice to. Tired of culture war and DEI? Worried about national debt and unsustainable pension funds? Paranoid about bugs in your burger and GMO-food slowly poisoning your body? Whatever you’re in the market to buy, Russia is in the market to sell.

It is tempting to dismiss this out of hand. What kind of traitor would ever contemplate leaving our glorious Free World ™ to shack up with the enemy, all for the worldly promise of a flat 13% tax rate? Unfortunately, the answer to that question, as history has borne out time and time again, is almost always “more people than you’d think”. While ideology and righteousness are always comforting things to have, consider this quote from Tucker Carlson himself on his experience inside that Moscow supermarket: “Everybody [in the film crew] is from the United States … and we didn’t pay any attention to cost, we just put in the cart what we would actually eat over a week. We all [guessed] around $400 bucks. It was $104 U.S. here. And that’s when you start to realise that ideology doesn’t matter as much as you thought.”

One can say that you can’t put a price on freedom, or morality; that the privilege of living in a free society cannot be measured in something so vulgar as dollars and cents. That’s a nice sentiment, but the reality of the human condition is that these things do have a price. Moreover, this price is often much lower than most of us would like to admit. Communists in the USSR, lest we forget, used to think that no human being would ever abandon socialism just for a pair of blue jeans. If we in the West want to ignore recent history and instead cling to the hope that nobody will ever switch sides just because someone floats an offer of better schools, safer streets, cheaper apartments, and lower taxes, we do so at our own peril.

Besides, to try to minimise the danger presented here by criticising Russia or attacking Putin is to catastrophically miss the point. Though the Shared Values Visa programme tries to present itself as a fairly niche culture war phenomenon, its true nature is not cultural or ideological. It is driven by a ruthless economic logic that is much bigger than Russia itself. Even if Russia’s various attempts at wooing Westerners end up being unsuccessful, it is merely the first vulture to start circling overhead. Many more scavengers are likely to appear before long, each one with a bewitching song of higher real wages, cheaper groceries, and lower taxes.

There are at least two big economic reasons that force this development. First, skilled immigration is simply a good deal. If you can poach a highly educated person of prime working age without paying for his education, you have secured a very expensive and limited resource without having to pay any of the costs involved in training, childcare, and healthcare. This is the main reason that brain drain as a phenomenon has been consistently popular inside the West, even as it has long been hated everywhere else: one side pays all the costs, the other side reaps all the benefits.

The economic logic behind the Shared Values Visa is more ominous, however. It’s often said that Russia has terrible demographics, and in many ways, this is true. Russia’s total fertility rate is around 1.4 children per woman, which is far lower than the replacement rate. Unfortunately, this is actually a completely normal fertility rate in 2024. Very few countries in the EU have fertility rates that are much better than this, and a good number of them are significantly worse. This is not an unknown problem in the West, and the hoped-for solution has long been immigration, preferably of the more highly-skilled kind. Without sufficient immigration, European social welfare systems risk collapsing under the weight of too many old people dependent on taxes levied onto too few young workers.

All this means that Europe is highly vulnerable to the poaching of workers. And indeed, because of how our welfare systems are set up, any outmigration cannot help but trigger a very destructive chain reaction: as people migrate due to high taxes, there’s less workers, meaning taxes will get higher, meaning the push factors to emigrate become even stronger. In this environment of stagnation, an extremely vicious game of musical chairs is likely to dominate, as all countries face the pressure to steal workers from somewhere else, in order to ease the tax burden on the workers that already have citizenship. With an extremely low public debt of around $300 billion and an income tax rate that tops out at 15%, Russia is far better prepared for this kind of competition than most people seem willing to admit. For comparison, America pays three times that amount in annual interest on its whopping $35 trillion debt.

This threat is real, and it is much closer than many think. In fact, the UK in particular is already in a slow-rolling brain-drain crisis. Education is getting increasingly expensive, the population is ageing, and real wages are no longer keeping up with inflation. For now, the main actors trying to poach talent are other countries inside the Western bloc, with America as the principal looter-in-chief. That order of affairs might not last for much longer, however, and America might find itself vulnerable to the same kind of asset-stripping before long. It’s hard to see how brain drain can possibly work out as a net benefit to the West in the years and decades ahead: the great majority of Western countries are now stuck in the same sort of malaise as the UK, with economies entering what now looks like a phase of almost permanent stagnation due to the energy crisis. There is no light at the end of the tunnel: opinion polls instead show an increasingly catastrophic loss of faith among the public in their parties and political institutions.

Brain drain often has ruinous effects on the countries that fall victim to it, even in cases where there’s not a looming demographic crisis threatening to upturn all welfare systems. Russia might be using honeyed words as it tempts people with family values and GMO-free burgers, but those Westerners who now glibly mock the velvet glove might end up bitterly regretting not taking the iron gauntlet hidden underneath more seriously. All of this is strictly business: it is the groundwork being laid in order to loot the West of talent the moment a crisis or moment of weakness strikes, leaving hollowed-out economies and dying communities in its wake. After all, the Russians probably figure, it’s only fair: we did the exact same thing to them.