BY PAUL T HORGAN

The growth of a new global axis to challenge the democracies has been an increasing concern. Russia has invaded Ukraine, China is making noises around Taiwan. Iran exports terrorism and is developing nuclear weapons, the first test of which will likely result in Israel in mounting a pre-emptive war.

However, amidst all the concern there should be a reality-check. Russia’s military, for over the last century, has not been sufficient to successfully complete its assigned missions, or if it has, the missions have been completed incompetently. China’s military is seriously inexperienced. Iran’s hard power is limited.

Prior to the Great War, the term ‘Russian Steamroller’ was used to describe Russia’s armed forces. The sheer quantity of soldiery was regarded as capable of wiping away all opposition. And yet between 1904 and 1942, all Russia showed to the world was that mass did not always equal victory. Russia was humiliated in defeat in her war with Japan, and was obliterated by the Central Powers in 1917, collapsing into revolution and civil war as a consequence. An advance to the gates of Warsaw was blunted and turned. Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s eliminated the professional officer corps, resulting in defeat after defeat against Nazi Germany. The Wehrmacht’s failure to capture Moscow in 1941 was due to attrition as well as an over-reach that hampered logistics, rather than superior Soviet tactics. The consolation of victory in Finland in 1940 was only possible with disproportionate losses and achieved with sheer mass against a much smaller neighbour.

Russia only really managed to turn the tide against the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front by eventually leveraging her superior resources against an enemy who had hoped for a triumph as rapid as she had enjoyed in the West. Instead Germany had became bogged down, a situation for which her army was not really designed, as was also the case in 1914. It was little more than sheer size that secured eventual Russian victory, but that did involve surrendering large areas of territory, exposing populations to Nazi death squads, and throwing vast quantities of troops at German positions to fix and then wear down the enemy, taking immense, but avoidable, casualties all the while.

Leftists like to validate Marxism in general and Soviet Communism in particular by talking of “sacrifice”, but in truth the waste of Soviet lives was due to incompetence and inflexibility of command of a kind the same leftists use to attack Douglas Haig unfairly, while the same people deliberately ignore the human wave strategy of Georgy Zhukov and his contemporaries. Only the Soviet Union deployed barrier troops in the rear of the battlefront to force advances by deterring withdrawals and kept doing so until late 1944, by which time Nazi Germany had effectively lost the war on all fronts and was in almost-permanent retreat everywhere.

Russia’s military, while extensive, has not been exercised properly over the years. While critics decry American strategy, the USA has been able to provide actual and extensive combat experience to its soldiery in every decade since the end of the Second World War, apart from during her post-Vietnam funk of the 1980s. Similarly Britain’s soldiers have also acquired vital knowledge at the sharp edge in postwar counter-insurgency and urban warfare operations, as well as in Korea, Aden, the Falklands, West Africa, Northern Ireland, and the Gulf. During the same period, the Soviet, and then Russian, armed forces languished in the barracks, airfield, and ports when they were not using tanks against civilians in Berlin, Budapest, and Prague. Russia’s outings have all been on her peripheries and she has not covered herself in glory. Whether it be in occupying Afghanistan, internal operations in Chechnya or in detaching South Ossetia from Georgia, contact with her enemies has exposed serious and, as we now see in Ukraine, unremedied shortcomings.

The biggest claim that can be made about modern Russia is that invasion of the Motherland by a major power is now unthinkable and has been so since 1945. Prior to this, the Russian Steamroller provably could not defend the country, losing to Britain and France, Japan, Imperial Germany, and Poland. This then is the single lasting achievement of Stalin and his successors to this day. All other kinds of societal and economic stewardship by Russia’s post-Imperial leaders have been failures with varying degrees of disaster in one form or another.

The same can also be said of the People’s Republic of China. All the communists have really managed to do is to deter foreign invasion, but also to prevent, through murderous violence, the fragmentation of the vast land and population into various fiefdoms dominated by regional warlords. The People’s Liberation Army is huge. But it is an untested weapon. Its combat experience is limited to internal repression, human wave attacks against the United Nations in Korea, a punitive expedition against Vietnam, and border skirmishes with India. And that’s it. Rather like Germany in both world wars, China’s strategy seems to be securing victory through a rapid sustained attack before opposition can be mobilised, rather like Putin failed to do in Ukraine. China’s hope seems to be that she can win a war before numerous mistakes borne of inexperience and hidden faults consequent of corruption fostered by dictatorship cripple her military.

The revolutionary government in Iran may also lay claim to have secured national integrity. As Persia, the country was ailing. Like China, Persia was not actually colonised by the Great Powers, but instead had to provide numerous concessions, such as allowing the British Empire to control her oil fields. In 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded what was now called Iran, and the wartime conditions resulted in a famine that killed up to two million people, although accurate figures are hard to come by. In 1953 the country was subject to a form of postwar imperialism, when the newly-formed anti-West government was toppled in a joint MI6-CIA operation, making a mockery of the concept of national sovereignty. It is therefore reasonable for the rulers of Iran to harbour more than a bit of a grudge. Modern Iran’s independence could be argued to date only from the 1979 revolution.

However, Iran has the same problem as both Russia and China, in that its armed forces are largely untested. While this may seem an unusual assertion given the 8-years-long war with Iraq in the 1980s, it has to be remembered that rather than innovative generalship, Iran, then internationally friendless, fell back on primitive human wave attacks against the forces of a neighbour which had a population at the time one-third the size. The war ended in status quo ante bellum. Iran relies not on its armed force to extend its influence, but the organisation of an international terrorist network that uses religious affinities to reach into its neighbours and further afield, as well as fatwas to motivate fellow travellers, most recently when a religious maniac tried to murder a leading British author in the USA.

The rising of anti-democratic forces seems to parallel that which took place in the 1930s and 1950s. While there is much to worry about, not the least how Russia, China and Iran’s soft power is subverting political freedom in the USA and UK through the rise of militant political and religious groups, this concern should not slide into paralysing terror or unilateral concession.

Countries initiate wars in the hope of swift victories. When they find themselves bogged down in a long conflict, this invariably heralds at worst defeat and at best a forced compromise with their intended victims. The biggest danger is that this anti-democratic axis defeat us through destroying our will to defend our values by hollowing us out from within, and that is what is going on now. There are groups and movements that are being unreasonably critical of the fundamental structures that hold together our civil societies in hope of weakening them. Weakened countries are easier to defeat. These groups seem to abuse the freedoms of expression to limit what can actually be expressed, such as stating that a woman is an adult human female, or that our monarchy is a symbol of national unity away from political turmoil. That is where the war is currently being fought. It is a bit worrying that in this area it is the forces that would destroy us that seem to be winning.

Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.