BY STEWART SLATER
Wars, the old military saw has it, start when both sides have an unrealistic understanding of their own power and end when both sides have a realistic one. War is a learning process, stripping through delusion and self-deception to reveal the truth. We may assume that the Russian military, if not necessarily its leadership, has a slightly greater awareness of its capabilities than it did at the start of the war in Ukraine when, as attested by the dress uniforms found in the husks of burnt-out tanks, it seemed to believe that three days would be all it would take for tea and medals in what would still have been called Kiev.
If events have revealed the Russian military to be a paper tiger (at least in comparison to its own self-image), held together by conscription and corruption, what do they tell us about the opposition? Not so much Ukraine, which has fought with courage and panache, but the international coalition which has stood steadfastly behind the beleaguered country, and acceded to (pretty much) every request, if not always at the first time of asking? If Russia has been found to lack the power to achieve its war aims, has the West, thereby, been validated in its view of its own strength?
Answering this is trickier than it might seem for it appears that Western war aims have changed through time. As Frank Ledwidge argued in The Guardian at the start of the year, American objectives since the start of the conflict appear to have had three distinct phases. Once the early attacks were held, Joe Biden seemed to be arguing for a policy of regime change in Russia. Shortly after, the Secretary of Defence said that America’s policy was “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the things it has done” – bleed Russia dry by fighting to the last Ukrainian. By the end of the year, policy, as stated by the Secretary of State, seemed to have morphed into supporting Ukraine to take back the territory it had lost since February, but not necessarily any more.
It was towards this last end that Ukraine, aided by Western training and material launched its delayed spring/summer offensive, which, at the time of writing, seems to have stalled to such an extent that intelligence sources are willing to brief the media as to the cause of its failure – splitting the attack across three axes rather than the one advised by the British and Americans, apparently. Senior NATO officials have, in recent days, floated the idea of Ukraine not reclaiming territory but rather ceding it to Russia in return for the Kremlin turning a blind eye to the rump state joining the alliance.
Wars are fluid things, apt to turn on a dime. It may be that Ukraine is on the verge of a significant breakthrough which will drive Russia back across the border, but, if the stalemate continues (and, in late August, winter, and the end of the fighting season, is not too far off) and some sort of peace is negotiated on something like the current lines, what will the West have achieved?
Mr Putin will remain in the Kremlin and will be able to tell his people that he has made progress towards reclaiming the Russian empire. He will not have secured total victory but he will have won some sort of victory. If we were to take President Biden’s initial aim, therefore, (and taking anything which Sleepy Joe utters at face value is always a bold strategy), America would have failed.
As for Anthony Blinken’s objective of helping Ukraine retake the territory it had lost, America would have come up empty on that one too. The only aim which it might possibly have achieved is the more limited one of sufficiently degrading Russia’s forces that it cannot mount another incursion. But it will be difficult in practice to tell if this is the case, however, and there is no reason to believe that, in such a situation of the partial achievement of its war aims, Russia’s will would be degraded. It would, therefore, be at most a temporary victory; armies can be rebuilt – even with Russia’s dubious demographics. America would not have won, it would merely have stopped Russia winning completely – this time. As the great military strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “If, therefore, the enemy is to be reduced to submission by an act of war, he must be… positively disarmed…As long as the enemy is not defeated, I have to apprehend that he may beat me.”
Under a settlement on the current lines, America would, then, have had limited success in achieving its stated aims, but what of the principles which have underpinned its actions? In a speech in Warsaw on the first anniversary of the war, President Biden asked a series of rhetorical questions, “Would we stand up for the sovereignty of nations? Would we stand up for the right of people to live free from naked aggression? Would we stand up for democracy?” and answered positively to all of them. In this he was surely correct, but there is a difference between standing up for something and ensuring its success.
In the case of Ukraine, we would have stood up for sovereignty only to see the map redrawn to reflect its violation, we would have stood up for freedom from aggression only to see people forcibly subsumed into a foreign country, we would have stood up for democracy only to see people given no choice in their nationality.
At its most basic, power is the ability to have the real world conform to one’s desires. Gardens represent man’s power over nature because, left to its own devices, the planet will not produce neat lawns and flower beds. To produce the sort of environment of which Alan Titchmarsh would be proud, one needs both the capability – spades, mowers etc. – and the willingness to use them (leaving them in the shed will not achieve much). And one has to keep using them – gardening is not a fire-and-forget pastime, nor is Mother Nature the sort of opponent who gives up. Gardeners must exercise ceaseless vigilance to ensure their vision remains reality.
The natural world is not (save to advocates of Gaia theory) sensate and so power in human affairs has an extra component – the views of one’s opponent. One can have power over another if one has the capability to dominate them and the willingness to use it, but one can also have power over them if they believe (rightly or wrongly) in one’s capability and willingness. There is no point in A resisting B if the former believes the latter has the ability to win and is quite happy to use it.
As a result, Great Powers have often taken the opportunity to display their ability to remind others of their strength. Rome not only put down the Jewish Revolt, it built what is thought still to be the largest ramp ever constructed to mop up the final hold-outs in the desert fortress of Masada. Faced with the problem of supplying troops in the Second Dacian War, Trajan built the first ever bridge over the lower Danube, a construction which remained the largest in history for over a millennium. Britain reacted to the murder of its proconsul Charles “Chinese” Gordon by invading and colonising Sudan. Any province or nation tempted to resist these Powers was fully aware that, not only could their enemy defeat them, but that they would go to extraordinary lengths to do so.
These imperial adventures were successful in the bigger picture because they were successful in the local campaign. Rome and Britain achieved their aims in Dacia and Sudan and, by displaying their capability and willingness, reduced the likelihood they would need to do so elsewhere in the future. The supreme art of war, as the Chinese warrior sage Sun Tzu opined, is to “win without fighting”.
Peace in Ukraine along the current lines will not fulfil either America’s narrow war aims or its broader strategic objectives, so her adversaries will not draw the same lessons. Instead, they will see it as revealing problems with both of the key components of power.
In terms of capability, it has been remarked for almost a year that the amount of arms being given to Ukraine has degraded America’s stocks, particularly of dumb munitions such as howitzer shells. Last month, the head of the U.S. Air Force in Europe warned that NATO’s stockpiles were “dangerously low”. America and her allies have been able to supply Ukraine with weapons, but not with enough to win, revealing a limit on American power. Since Ukraine’s capacity for firing weapons exceeds the capacity of America’s depleted industrial base to make them, the country faces a long-term (if not permanent) reduction in the amount of blunt force it can deploy in a conflict.
In part this is because modern Western armies are not designed to fight the type of war Ukraine faces. American tanks are too heavy for many of the roads in the country but, more importantly, modern doctrine relies on air superiority. Establish control of the air, blow up anything which moves and then deploy the army to mop up. For all its willingness to give the Ukrainians shells and missiles, America has been reluctant to supply it with planes, rendering it unable to fight in the modern, Western manner.
In part this is due to practicalities – modern fighter jets are highly sophisticated platforms which require a minimum of months to master. But part of it is based on fear – fear of what Russia might discover if it shoots one down, fear of the consequences if the Ukrainians use them to take the war over the border. But fear is the opposite of will. Will carries on forward, fear pulls its punches. A weapon one is unwilling to use is no longer a weapon which counts in an assessment of one’s power, it is an ornament.
There have, for a while, been questions over America’s will. Bush’s Iraq adventure was the sort of punitive imperial exploit a Roman would recognise – a smaller nation had stepped out of line and had to be punished, if not for the ostensible reasons given, then to show that America could. The surge in 2007 showed that the country still had the will to bring the matter to a conclusion along broadly favourable lines. It showed not only that America could, but also that it would.
Since then, however, a different picture has emerged. Obama allowed his red line in Syria to be rubbed out. Biden handed back Afghanistan to the Taliban (a move started under Trump, to be fair). There is no greater admission of military failure than giving a country back to the group whose eviction was the main aim of one’s invasion.
It is thought that the retreat from Kabul played a role in convincing Putin to invade, what lessons will be drawn from a putative peace in Ukraine? America will have had aims it had failed to achieve, it will have had to acquiesce to the violation of its core principles. It did not, ultimately, have the power to impose its will on events. It tried, certainly, but it was unable to succeed. In doing so, it reduced, at least for the immediate future, its pure hard military capability. It showed that there were things it was unwilling to do. It showed its weakness.
This is not to say that America is going anywhere. It will remain an important country – its economy and the dollar will see to that, if nothing else. But it has problems. The country is far from united, even before we get to next year’s geriatric cage-match, sorry, election. Its fiscal profligacy is coming home to roost – its debt-to-GDP is over 120% and by early next decade, it will be spending more on interest payments than defence. If countries take from Ukraine the lesson that they can defy America’s wishes with impunity, the coming years are unlikely to alter that.
The last great Russo-American conflict was, of course, Rocky IV, a fight Mrs Balboa initially refused to attend because, as she put it, “You can’t win”. In this, she was of course wrong. The fighting pride of Philadelphia donned his stars-and-stripes shorts and found the will to knock seven shades of s**t out of his bottle-blonde, steroidal, commie beefcake opponent, thereby ending the Cold War. Absent a Rocky-like comeback in the final rounds, Ukraine will not, as many have argued, mark the end of the Russian empire, it will, instead, point to the end of America’s.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.