Trump the Sequel took center stage this week in Washington. America’s
dance macabre. Another gig for the nefarious illusionist whose genius is transmuting the country’s hallowed pageant of progress into a raucous Saturnalian cruise on the river Styx. Grotesque yet magnetizing in its mix of dread and sardonic comedy.
They were on full display just 24 hours after the election when Trump and Elon Musk, his latest sidekick, took center stage to announce a plan to resolve the Ukraine crisis. Well, less of a deliberate strategy than an escape plot. The key ingredients are: a
ceasefire in place, de facto partition that leaves Russia in control of Crimea and the Donbass, a buffer zone the length of the new border policed by British and French military forces, a promise by the Western powers that Ukrainian membership in NATO
would be precluded for 20 years. Pure pie in the sky. Every one of these proposals contradicts core Russian national interests and violates Moscow’s clearly stated red lines – as has been bluntly stated repeatedly by Putin and Lavrov. Russia has not sacrificed
80,000 lives to secure the country against hostile NATO’s deployments on its doorstep just to have Western soldiers ‘peacekeeping’ a few miles from its homeland. Nor could any sane Russian leader make the country’s fate hostile to the good word of governments
that boast of tricking Moscow into the Minsk accords of 2015 which they never intended to abide by and subsequently torpedoed the initialed agreement reached with Kiev in April 2002. The ‘plan’ smacks of a product hatched in the rear seat of a Musk driverless
vehicle circling around Rock Creek Park while the seasoned statesman and his renowned grand strategist are sipping Diet Cokes and munching on Big Macs. In serious diplomatic terms, the odd couple are pranksters.
In fact, this self-serving scheme to salvage something from the Ukraine debacle is the brainchild of the same Neo-Cons & Assoc. who hatched the policy of weaponizing Ukraine against Russia and who instigated the 2014 coup. They’ve been floating their latest
fanciful plan within policy circles for a couple months.
The painful truth is that nothing that the Biden team currently are doing or contemplating meets the standard of serious diplomacy. The common denominator between them and the Trumpites is a congenital incapacity to acknowledge defeat and to accept the consequences.
American leaders are terrified at the prospect of looking like losers; that most certainly includes Trump. So, how do we cope with failure?
Michael Brenner
DEFEAT
The United States is being defeated in Ukraine. One could say that it is facing
defeat - or, more starkly, that it is staring defeat in the face. Neither formulation is appropriate, though. The U.S. doesn't look reality squarely in the eye. We prefer to look at the world through the distorted lenses of our fantasies.
We plunge forward on whatever path we've chosen while averting our eyes from the topography that we are trying to traverse. Our sole guiding light is the glow of a distant mirage.
It is not that America is a stranger to defeat. We are very well acquainted with it: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Mali - in strategic terms if not always military terms. To this broad category, we might add Venezuela, Cuba, Belarus, Georgia and
Niger. That rich experience in frustrated ambition has failed to liberate us from the deeply rooted habit of eliding defeat. Indeed, we have acquired a large inventory of methods for doing so.
DEFINING & DETERMINING DEFEAT
Before examining them, let us specify what we mean by 'defeat.' Simply put, defeat is a failure to meet objectives – at tolerable cost. The term also encompasses unintended, adverse second-order consequences.
1. What were Washington's objectives in sabotaging the Minsk peace plan and cold-shouldering subsequent Russian proposals, in provoking Russia by crossing clearly demarcated red lines, in pressing relentlessly for Ukraine’s membership in NATO; in installing
missile batteries in Poland and Rumania; in transforming the Ukrainian army into a potent military force deployed on the line-of-contact in the Donbas ready to invade or goad Moscow into preemptive action? The aim of the last was to either pin a humiliating
defeat on the Russian army or, at least, to inflict such heavy costs as to cut the ground from under the Putin government. The crucial, complementary dimension of the strategy was the imposition of economic sanctions so onerous as to implode a vulnerable Russian
economy. Together, they would generate acute distress leading to the deposing of Putin - whether by a cabal of opponents (disgruntled oligarchs as the spearhead) or by mass protest. It was predicated on the fatally ill-informed supposition that he was an absolute
dictator running a one-man show. The U.S. foresaw his replacement by a more pliable government ready to become a willing but marginal presence on the European stage and a non-player elsewhere. In the crude words of one Moscow official, “a tenant-farmer on
Uncle Sam's global plantation.”
2. The taming and domestication of Russia was conceived as a vital step in the impending great confrontation with China - designated the systemic rival to American hegemony. Theoretically, that objective could be achieved either by enticing Russia
away from China (divide and subordinate) or totally neutralizing Russia as a world power by bringing down its stiff-backed leadership. The former approach never went beyond a few desultory, feeble gestures. All the blue chips were placed on the latter.
3. Ancillary benefits for the United States from a war over Ukraine that would bring Russia low were a) to consolidate the Atlantic alliance under Washington's control, expand NATO and open an unbridgeable abyss between Russia and the rest of Europe
that would endure for the foreseeable future; b) to that end, the termination of the latter's heavy reliance on energy resources from Russia; and c) thereby, substituting higher-priced LNG and petroleum from the United States that would seal the European partners' status
as dependent economic vassals. If the last were a drag on their economies, so be it. Germany, whose industries were heavily dependent on abundant amounts of cheap Russian petroleum and natural gas, was the key country. Washington cynically played upon Chancellor
Olaf Schulz’s meekness, the Germans’ deeply rooted dependency relationship with the U.S., and the strong undercurrent of Russo-phobia among the German political class to browbeat Berlin into winking at destruction of its Nordstrom II pipeline along with the
severing of other energy linkages.
The grandiose goals stated in (1) and (2) manifestly have proven unreachable -indeed, delusional – a blunt truth not as yet absorbed by American elites. Those in (3) are consolation prizes of diminished value. This outcome was determined in good part, albeit
not at all entirely, by the military failure in Ukraine. We now are about to enter the final act. Kiev’s vaunted counter-offenses have gone nowhere – at an enormous cost to the Ukrainian military. It has been bled white by massive losses of manpower, by the
destruction of the greater part of its Western supplied armor, by the ruin of vital infrastructure. The Western-trained elite brigades have been mauled, and there no longer are any reserves to throw into the battle. Moreover, the flow of weapons and ammunition
from the West has slowed as American and European stocks are running low (e.g. 155mm artillery shells). The shortage has been aggravated by newfound inhibitions about sending Ukraine advanced weapons which have proven highly vulnerable to Russian firepower.
That holds especially for armor: American Abrams, German Leopards, British Challengers, as well as Combat Fighting Vehicles (CFV) like the American Bradleys and Strykers. Graphic images of burnt-out hulks littering the Ukrainian steppe or of captured tanks
on ignominious display in Moscow squares are not advertisements for either Western military technology or foreign sales. Hence, too, the slow-walking of deliveries to Kiev of the promised F-16s lest they suffer the same fate.
The illusion of eventual success on the battlefield (with its envisaged wearing down of Russia’s will and capacity) was founded on a mistaken idea of how to measure winning and losing – as well as a gross underestimation of its military strength. American leaders,
military as well as civilian, are stuck to a model that emphasizes control of territory. Russian military thinking is different. Its emphasis is on the destruction of the enemy’s forces, by whatever strategy is suited to the prevailing conditions. Then, in
command of the battlefield, they can work their will. The aggressive tactics of the Ukrainians entailed the throwing of its resources into combat in relentless campaigns to evict the Russians from the Donbas and Crimea. Unable to achieve any breakthrough,
they invited themselves to a war of attrition much to their disadvantage. It has been succeeded by this autumn’s last desperate lurch into Kursk which has proven suicidal. Throughout, Washington-led Western governments thereby have played into the Russians’
hands. Hence, while attention was fixed on who occupied this village or that on the Dontesk front, the real story has been Russia’s dismantling of the reconstituted Ukrainian army piece by piece.
In historical perspective, there are two instructive analogies. In the last year of WW I, the German high command launched an audacious campaign (Operation Michael) on the Western Front in March 1918 using a number of innovative tactics (featuring commando
squads, stormtroopers equipped with flame-throwers) to punch holes in allied lines. After initial gains that brought them across the Marne, attended by very heavy casualties, the offensive petered out and allowed the allies to roll over their gravely depleted
forces – leading to the final collapse in November. More pertinent is the battle of Kursk in July 1943 wherein the Nazis made a massive attempt to regain the initiative after the disaster at Stalingrad. Again, after some noteworthy success in breaching two
Soviet defense lines they exhausted themselves short of their objective. That battle opened the long, bloody road to Berlin.
Ukraine, today, has suffered huge losses of proportionally equivalent magnitude in the Kursk salient (ironically, the same locale), without achieving any significant territorial gains and the frustration of its goal to seize the Kursk nuclear power plant to
use as some sort of bargaining chip. Together with accompanying losses in the Donbass, the road to the Dnieper is cleared for the 600,000 strong Russian army equipped with weaponry the equal of, if not superior to what we have given Ukraine. Hence, Moscow
is poised to exploit its decisive advantage to the point where it can dictate terms to Kiev, Washington, Brussels et al.
The Biden administration has made no plans for such an eventuality, nor have its obedient European governments. Their divorce from reality makes this state-of-affairs all the more stunning – and galling – for the collective West. Bereft of ideas, they are floundering.
We can say with certainty one thing: the collective West, and especially the U.S., will have suffered a grave defeat. Coping with that truth will become the main order of business for the Trumpites.
Here is a menu of options for handling it.
1. Redefine what is meant by defeat/ victory, failure/success, loss/gain. There is a new narrative that is scripted to stress these talking points:
· It is Russia that has lost the contest because heroic Ukraine and a steadfast West have prevented it from conquering, occupying and reincorporating all of the country
· By contrast, Sweden and Finland formally have joined the American camp by entering NATO. That complicates Moscow’s strategic plans by forcing a dispersion of its forces across a wider front
· Russia has been politically isolated on the world scene (MB: that is because North America, EU/NATO EUROPE, Japan, South Korea, Australia & New Zealand have backed the Ukrainian cause. Not a single other country has agreed to apply economic sanctions;
the “world” does not include China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa et al).
· The Western democracies have displayed unprecedented solidarity in responding as one to the Russian threat
This narrative already has been given an airing in speeches by Blinken, Sullivan. Austin and Nuland. It is echoed in the stenographic media and the think tank galaxy. Now, it has registered among Trump advisers. The target audience is the American public;
nobody outside the collective West buys it, though – whether or not Washington has recognized that cardinal fact of diplomatic life.
2. Retroactively scale back your goals and stakes.
· Make no further reference to regime change in Moscow, to toppling Putin, to crashing the Russian economy, to breaking the Sino-Russian partnership or to fatally weaken it. (The last figures among the vague notions floating around the Trump entourage).
· Speak of safeguarding the integrity of the Ukrainian state by tacitly acknowledging that the Donbass and Crimea have been permanently severed from the ‘mother country.’ Emphasize that your friends in Kiev are still titular, legitimate leaders of a rump
Ukraine.
· Aim for a permanent ceasefire that would freeze the two sides in existing positions, i.e. a
de facto division a la Korea. The Western portion then would look forward to eventual admission to NATO and the EU, and rearmed at some point down the road. This is the Trump-Musk gambit. Ignore the inconvenient truth that Russia would never accept
a ceasefire on those terms
· Maintain the economic sanctions on Russia but look the other way when needy European partners make under-the-table deals for Russian oil and LNG (mostly through intermediaries like India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan) as they have been doing
throughout the conflict. (The Trumpites, though, will press hard to maximize an expansion of American energy exports; today, Russia is still supplying a larger fraction of European natural gas, by various routes, than is the U.S.)
· Put the spotlight on China as the mortal threat to America and the West while disparaging Russia as just its auxiliary.
· Highlight symbolic gestures like the Ukrainian drone the strikes on prominent targets in Russia itself and Crimea. (This act is akin to rabid fans of a football team that just lost to a hated rival who puncture the tires on the bus scheduled to take
them to the airport).
3. Cultivate AMNESIA
Americans have become masters in the art of memory management.
Think about the tragic shock of Vietnam. The country made a systematic effort to forget – to forget everything about Vietnam. Understandably; it was ugly - on every count. Textbooks in American history gave it little space; teachers downplayed it; television
soon disregarded it as retro. We sought closure – we got it.
In a sense, the most noteworthy inheritance from the post-Vietnam experience is the honing of methods to photoshop history. Vietnam was a warm-up for dealing with the many unsavory episodes in the post-9/11 era. That thorough, comprehensive cleansing has made
palatable Presidential mendacity, sustained deceit, mind-numbing incompetence, systemic torture, censorship, the shredding of the Bill of Rights and the perverting of national public discourse - as it degenerated into a mix of propaganda and vulgar trash-talking.
The “War on Terror” in all its atrocious aspects
Cultivated amnesia is a craft enormously facilitated by two broader trends in American culture: the cult of ignorance whereby a knowledge-free mind is esteemed as the ultimate freedom; and a public ethic whereby the nation’s highest officials are given license
to treat the truth as a potter treats clay so long as they say and do things that make us feel good. So, our strongest collective memory of America’s wars of choice is the desirability – and ease – of forgetting them. “The show must go on” is taken as our
imperative. So it will be when we look at a ruined Ukraine in the rear-view mirror.
The cultivation of amnesia as a method for dealing with painful national experiences has serious drawbacks. First, it severely restricts the opportunity to learn the lessons it offers. In the wake of the inconclusive Korean War where the United States suffered
49,000 killed in action, the mantra in Washington was: no war on the mainland of Asia ever again. Yet, less than a decade later we were knee-deep in the rice paddies of Vietnam where we lost 58,000 people. After the tragic fiasco in Iraq, Washington nonetheless
was gung-ho about occupying Afghanistan in a 20-year enterprise to construct a similar Western-leaning “democracy” out of the barrel of a gun. Those frustrated projects did not dissuade us from intervening in Syria where we failed once again to turn an intractable,
alien society into something to our liking – even though we went to such an extreme as a tacit partnership with the local al-Qaeda subsidiary. As Kabul showed, we didn’t even take away from the Saigon denouement the lesson in how to organize an orderly evacuation.
At the very least, one might have expected that a reasonable person would have come away with an acute awareness of how crucial is a fine-grain understanding of the culture, social organization, mores and philosophical outlook of the country we were committed
to reconstituting. Still, we manifestly have not assimilated that elementary truth. Witness our abysmal ignorance of all things Russian that has led us to a fatal miscalculation of every aspect of the Ukraine affair.
Second, amnesia may serve the purpose of sparing our political elites, and the American populace at large, the acute discomfort of acknowledging mistakes and defeat. However, that success is not matched by an analogous process of memory erasure
in other places. We were fortunate, in the case of Vietnam, that the United States’ dominant position in the world outside of the Soviet Bloc and the PRC allowed us to maintain respect, status and influence. Things have now changed. Our relative strength in
all domains is diminished, there are strong centrifugal forces around the globe that are producing a dispersion of power, will and outlook among other states. The BRICs phenomenon is the concrete embodiment of that reality. Hence, the prerogatives of the
United States are narrowing, our ability to shape the global system in conformity with our ideas and interests are under mounting challenge, and premiums are being placed on diplomacy of an order that seems beyond our present aptitudes.
NEXT: CHINA
Ukraine, in turn, is not cooling the ardor for confrontation with China. An audacious, and by no means a compelling, enterprise that is ensconced as the centerpiece of our official national security strategy. Senior Washington officials openly
predict the inevitability of all-out war before the end of the decade – nuclear weapons notwithstanding. Moreover, Taiwan is cast in the same role as that played by Ukraine in the American scheme of things. So, having provoked a multi-dimensional conflict
with Russia which has failed on all counts, we hastily commit ourselves to the nearly exact same strategy in taking on an even more formidable foe. This could be classified as what the French call a
fuite en avant – an escape forward. In other words: Bring it on! We’re geared up for it. Trump is not exempt from this fantastical thinking.
[The march to war with China defies all conventional wisdom. After all, it poses no military threat to our security or core interests. China has no history of empire-building or conquest. China has been the source of great economic benefit via dense exchanges
that serve us as well as them. Therefore, what is the justification for the widespread judgment that a crossing-of-swords is inescapable? Sensible nations do not commit themselves to a possibly cataclysmic war because China, the designated number one enemy,
builds radar warning stations on sandy atolls in the South China Sea. Because it markets electric vehicles more cheaply than we can. Because its advances in developing semi-conductors may outclass ours. Because of its treatment of an ethnic minority in western
China. Because it follows our example in funding NGOs that promote a positive view of their country. Because it engages in industrial espionage just the way the United States and everybody else does. Because it wafts balloons over North America, declared benign
by General Milley – then, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.]
None of these are compelling reasons to press hard for a confrontation. The truth is far simpler – and far more disquieting. We are obsessed with China because it exists. Like K-2, that itself is a challenge for we must prove our prowess (to others, but mainly
to ourselves), that we can surmount it. That is the true meaning of a perceived
existential threat.
The focal shift from Russia in Europe to China in Asia is less a mechanism for coping with defeat than the pathological reaction of a country that, feeling a gnawing sense of diminishing prowess, can manage to do nothing more than try one final throw
of the dice in a vain attempt at proving to itself that it still has the right stuff – since living without that exalted sense of self is intolerable. What is deemed heterodox, and daring, in Washington these days is to argue that we should wrap up
the Ukraine affair one way or another so that we might gird our loins for the truly historic contest with Beijing. The disconcerting truth that nobody of consequence in the country’s foreign policy establishment has denounced this hazardous turn toward war.
Their behavior supports the proposition that deep emotions rather than reasoned thought are propelling us toward avoidable, potentially catastrophic conflicts.
A society represented by an entire political class that is not sobered by that prospect rightly can be judged as providing
prime facie evidence of its being collectively disconnected from reality. A society that picks a freakish Donald Trump for its leader confirms that proposition.
We are confounded.
There are a number of reasonable and informed commentators who persist in the belief that a Trump presidency will put the ship of state onto a stable course. He will disengage the U.S. from Ukraine, find his way to a
modus vivendi with Putin, slow the accelerating momentum toward a collision with China, and maybe even draw back from our hazardous positions in the Middle East. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to support these hopeful projections. Let’s recall
that for four years the Trump I government steadily tightened sanctions on Russia while continuing the armament of Ukraine, heightened tensions with China by declaring a trade war in denunciation of its supposed malevolent purposes, and lambasted Iran as evil
incarnate. More recently, Trump and has been loud in his cheering on the Israeli genocidal rampage. Moreover, a marked change in these relations depends on a rethinking of Washington’s prevailing strategic vision and America’s paramount position in the world
– even if instinctively he is more of an America firster than a hegemonic imperialist. It is impossible simply to snap one’s fingers and on impulse shift course. A carefully thought through design and the crafting of a sophisticated diplomacy is the prerequisite.
Donald Trump, incontrovertibly, has no plan, no strategy, no design for any area of public policy. He is incapable of doing so; for he lacks the necessary mental concentration and organized knowledge.
There is one trait in Trump’s malign make-up that some small consolation. He is a coward – a blustering bully who evades any direct encounter with an opponent who will stand up to him (even running away from a second debate with Kamala Harris who roughed him
up in the first one). Trump has neither the stomach nor the mental strength for a serious brawl/war. Small blessing!