"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
- Yeats,
The Second Coming'..the Biden administration is so lacking in political skill it cannot mobilise the majority to break the deadlock .. The decision of the Biden administration to keep Ukraine as a tortured prisoner, without the weapons systems it needs to break free, will not just seem a cruel policy but a colossal strategic mistake, which threw away the chance to weaken the West’s enemies.
The mistake so many of us living comfortable and secure lives make is to believe that we can escape the consequences; that what happens in Ukraine will stay in Ukraine .. Every cliché dictators utter about the flabbiness of selfish democracies will be proved true. Russia and indeed China will be able to tell the world that the United States and NATO were unreliable allies, who lacked the endurance for the long haul. Tyrants from Xi to Maduro will be licking their lips. Every illiberal movement on the planet will see Putin’s victory as their victory
It does not have to be this way. But unless in 2024 Western governments stand up for what they say they believe in, it will be.''For in this dark winter the question is now what happens if the West is humiliated? Where are our red lines? And what is our exit ramp?
Western success or failure remains in our own hands. The Institute for the Study of War is stating no more than the obvious when it says that, if the US and Europe stop their aid, Ukraine will fall. And that, if the West maintains and increases support, Russian cannot win.
I said these statements were obvious, and so they should be. Yet both the US and the EU are denying their force. The European Union allowed Putin’s client Viktor Orban to veto a €50 billion aid package. Meanwhile in the US, pro-Trump Republicans are blocking support to Ukraine (and to Israel and Taiwan) for the time being, and there is the prospect that Donald Trump will win the presidency in November 2024, and block it forever.
We know what a Russian victory will mean for Ukraine. In the areas of the country Russian troops have conquered, they hunted down local leaders who might inspire resistance, tortured, raped and murdered
What would happen to the West is a question that deserves more attention than it receives, however. The West isn’t a fixed place. If the term means anything it is a description of common beliefs and alliances shared across democratic nations. If the defeat of Ukraine shows that those beliefs are fatuous, Putinist politics will receive an enormous boost; not just in Russia, where the imperial and dictatorship would see its legitimacy enhanced, but also in Europe and North America.
Russian success would mean that, contrary to everything we were taught since 1945, dictators can reorder Europe’s borders by force, and occupy and terrorise an independent country. As that knowledge sinks in, the atmosphere in the West will turn foul and foul Western movements will thrive.
Talking about changes in the atmosphere or zeitgeist feels airy and imprecise; an improper subject for serious journalism. But the argument of this piece is that all societies manage with norms they take to be inviolable. When those norms fail everything changes.
If Russia can engage in unprovoked aggression and colonial land seizures, and get away with it, Donald Trump can deny the results of a legitimate election and incite insurrection, and still get to be US president again.
Trump, indeed, has already shown that he understands the dark currents of our time better than his critics.
..
If US weapons delays continue into 2024 and Ukraine staggers or falls, it will help Trump’s prospects and the prospects of Europe’s far right parties. Every Russian success is a jeering attack on human rights and the liberal order. All enemies of liberalism benefit from Putin’s victories.
Imagining a Ukrainian defeat is not to play some kind of grim parlour game. The weapons embargoes hurt. They make planning for the future of the war impossible. Phillips O’Brien, a leading military historian, says that “Ukraine has no idea what it will have in terms of… the equipment it will need to fight the war because it has no idea what the US will do in terms of aid. I’m struggling to think of a more difficult strategic planning situation.”
Like most historians and military strategists, he is astonished that we can even be talking about a Ukrainian defeat. The balance of forces is such that we should not need to contemplate it. First, credit must go to the courage of the Ukrainian armed forces. Contrary to all the expectations of the supposedly competent Western intelligence services, they did not fold in February 2022, but inflicted vast losses on the Russian army and defeated the Russian navy in the Black Sea.
And then there is the brute audit of power.
Russia is a vicious state with a relatively small economy and delusions of imperial grandeur. As of 2023, NATO had approximately 3.36 million active military personnel compared with 1.33 million active military personnel in the Russian military. NATO had 20,633 aircraft to Russia’s 4,182, and 2,151 military ships, to Russia’s 598. From any normal military perspective, an outgunned mafia state, should not be able to win a proxy war against the west.
If it does, three conclusions will follow, none of them comforting.
The power of malign minorities to dictate to the rest of us will be on full display. Most Americans and a majority of politicians in the US Congress want to help Ukraine. But a minority on the Republican right is blocking them, and the Biden administration is so lacking in political skill it cannot mobilise the majority to break the deadlock. Hungary, meanwhile, is a tiny quasi-dictatorship, and Viktor Orban is a Putin ally. If the European Union were a self-confident alliance of democracies, it would expel it. As things stand, it prefers to let Orban dictate European priorities instead.
I mention useless liberal leadership because so much of liberal commentary focuses on the far right. Journalist should be honest and report that the war is revealing a failure of nerve in the liberal mainstream. Everyone quotes from
The Second Coming in moments like these, but Yeats’s lines are unavoidable: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
If Ukraine loses, the liberal centre will not hold. The decision of the Biden administration to keep Ukraine as a tortured prisoner, without the weapons systems it needs to break free, will not just seem a cruel policy but a colossal strategic mistake, which threw away the chance to weaken the West’s enemies.
The mistake so many of us living comfortable and secure lives make is to believe that we can escape the consequences; that what happens in Ukraine will stay in Ukraine.
In fact, refugees will flood westwards, destabilising Europe and encouraging the far right. War won’t stop. Ukrainians will take to the forests and mountains and fight guerilla campaigns. Emboldened by victory and confident that the West lacks the will to resist, Russia will push again into Moldova and the Baltic States.
Every cliché dictators utter about the flabbiness of selfish democracies will be proved true. Russia and indeed China will be able to tell the world that the United States and NATO were unreliable allies, who lacked the endurance for the long haul. Tyrants from Xi to Maduro will be licking their lips. Every illiberal movement on the planet will see Putin’s victory as their victory
It does not have to be this way. But unless in 2024 Western governments stand up for what they say they believe in, it will be.'
- Nick Cohen,
A Russian victory will shatter the West, December 23, 2023
Context(It's just beginning) - '..every Russian murderer will get our response, and none of them will escape justice.'(Europe Stepping Up) - '..European militaries .. defend Europe against Russia .. drop all niceties..'The Survival of the Republic - 'Cato’s Letters .. its rousing lessons on liberty, power, tyranny, and republican government.'