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By Michael F. Duggan

The worst battles and phases of battles often take on grim nicknames. There was the “Hornet’s Nest” at Shiloh, “Bloody Lane” at Antietam, the “Slaughter Pen” at Gettysburg, and the “Bloody Angle” at Spotsylvania. During the Spanish-American War, U.S. forces were for a time pinned down at “Bloody Ford” at the base of San Juan Heights. The operational name for Verdun was Gericht, or “place of judgment.”¹ And in Vietnam, Hill 937 became “Hamburger Hill.”

For several weeks, I have been listening to interviews of former U.S. military officers on the Russo-Ukrainian War. What seems to be emerging is a consensus about the nature of the much-discussed Russian winter-spring offensive. Rather than a front-wide blitzkrieg or an American-style “shock and awe” campaign, they anticipate an inexorable but targeted offensive that grinds away at key points on the Ukrainian lines as it steadily builds to a breakthrough. Such a campaign would be have elements of a First World War attrition offensive like the German assault on Verdun in 1916, and the Soviet offensives on the Eastern Front during the later phases of the Second World War. These ex-military men expect the Ukrainian Ground Forces to be effectively destroyed by this process. The battle in and around Bakhmut is already being called “The Grinder.”

One of these officers, Douglas Macgregor—a former tank commander, famous for the U.S. armor victory of the Gulf War called the Battle of 73 Easting—believes that not only are we watching the death of the nation of Ukraine (a point on which former Marine intelligence officer and United Nations weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, agrees), but the beginning of the end of NATO.

Note
Jay Winter and Blaine Baggett, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, 157-58.

By Michael F. Duggan

Last night the Russian political scientist and nationalist, Sergey Karaganov, was the remote guest on the BBC program, HARDtalk. What could have been an interesting interview quickly became an exercise in condescending badgering by the program’s host Stephen Sackur. If you can get past Sackur’s abysmally conventional interpretation of events, you can glean some insights on Russian thinking from Mr. Karaganov’s answers to the questions thrown at him.

In crises, diplomacy, and war (and especially in the run up to wars), it is imperative to try to see events as your opponents see them (what the Quincy Institute called “strategic empathy” in a discussion that aired a month before the Russian invasion). This does not make you an agent or a “dupe” of the other side. It makes you a sensible, honest broker who is far more useful to your team than zealots and true believers mouthing cliches while dehumanizing and demonizing the opponent and ignoring the possibility that the other side has legitimate security interests too.

Reflecting Russian suspicion of the West and a sense of betrayal, Karaganov compared NATO to a spreading cancer and said that to date “persuasion,” “therapy,” nor “surgery” have worked. His implication was that a more aggressive kind of surgery was soon to be at hand. He hoped that a “radiological” approach would not be necessary but that nothing was off the table. He said that NATO was “ramming the doors of “Hell.” The implications could not have been clearer.

Sackur saw this as mere saber-rattling and pointed out that previous Russian threats of escalation had not been actualize. In other words, rather than acknowledging Russian restraint to date, Sackur was taunting his guest over what he characterized as bluff and bluster (can we presume that Sackur would he have preferred a disproportional Russian response to Western escalations?). Rather than acknowledging the danger of the situation, the host seemed to shrug off the possibility of a wider war as an irresponsible but ultimately empty threat. This is exactly the kind of dismissive attitude that could trigger a wider war.

Karaganov repeated a number of times that Russia will not lose the war under any circumstances. This statement and the by “all means” implication of a nuclear threat lends insight into how Russia sees NATO expansion and the escalating proxy war. They see the latter as the inevitable consequence of the former, an effort to surround European Russia for the purpose of degrading and humiliating it (as Jeffrey Sachs, recently observed, NATO’s long-term strategy against Russia is essentially akin to that of Palmerston and Napoleon III during the Crimean War). The Russians see NATO expansion as aggression, and since the Bucharest Accords of 2008, have been on the record saying that movement toward Ukrainian or Georgian membership in NATO would be regarded as an existential threat, i.e. tantamount to an act of war.

Taking these observations at face value, how does all of this play out from here? We know from Karaganov’s statements, as well as those from the speech given by Putin on the anniversary of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, that they will not accept defeat and are willing to resort to nuclear weapons. At this point, it is unlikely that they will negotiate short of an agreement of unconditional surrender by Ukraine. In other words, Russia is committed to victory, whatever it takes. The danger is that the neocons and allied liberal interventionists in the foreign policy Blob may be similarly committed.

Suppose that the anticipated Russian winter offensive is launched sometime this month. What will happen if the brave Ukrainian Ground Forces are eventually defeated and Russia has secured its territorial ambitions in the east, leaving a Ukrainian rump state? Suppose also that Ukrainian generals inform their government that the war is over and overthrow the Zelensky administration if it does not acknowledge defeat.

At that point, what would the United States do? Rationally there would be nothing it could do. And yet if the Biden administration does nothing, the defeat will be characterized by the Republicans as a Democratic foreign policy debacle. If the administration does not commit the U.S. and NATO to an all out war against Russia, the Democrats could face defeat in the 2024 election. And yet if the U.S. does intervene directly in the war, it will be a world war that will most likely end with the use of nuclear weapons. Some choice, huh?

Ironically, some Republicans have shown a more sensible and realistic understanding of the conflict and the massive spending that has kept the Ukrainian in the fight to date. Is a right-wing House of Representatives the only possible brake on events whose momentum appears to be pushing the world toward a nuclear war, or will cooler heads prevail without them?

By Michael F. Duggan

We round out January with another round of dangerous escalation in the Russo-Ukrainian War, or at least an escalatory IOU.  In terms of military hardware promised, the war is starting to look like an updated version of the one that the United States and Soviet Union successfully avoided fighting during 1945-91.  

War is fundamentally unpredictable, and the war in Ukraine has too many moving parts and too many unknowns to make precise adumbrate possible.  That said, when one considers the bigger Clausewitzian picture of relative resources that may be brought to bear (as opposed to individual Jominian facts, like the Russian reverses, or consolidations, in the northeast and in the south around Kherson), it appears that the Russians could win the war within a matter of months. 

To date, the war has been characterized by a series of continuing rounds of escalation.  Over the summer the U.S. and Britain gave the Ukrainians M142 HIMARS and M270 MLRS rocket systems, and in the fall, began training them in the use of Patriot missiles. There was the Russian announcement on September 21, 2022 of a partial mobilization and the annexation of the eastern Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhia. Then there is the persisting Russian drone and missile offensive designed to degrade Ukrainian infrastructure and power grids and the Ukrainian retaliatory strikes against Russian airbase near Engels that houses a part of their TU-95 and TU-160 nuclear bomber fleet.  After that came the announcement that the U.S. would be providing the Ukrainians with Bradley Fighting Vehicles (BFV) and Stryker Infantry Carrying Vehicles (ICV).  There were the recent Russian advances around Bakhmut and Soledar and ongoing speculation of a Russian winter or spring offensive possibly beginning this month (February).  Escalations continue and the danger is that things that are easily ratcheted up may not be as easily brought down again.   

The latest escalation was last week’s announcement by the U.S. and Germany to supply the Ukrainian Army with 31 Abrams (M1A2) and 14 Leopard II tanks (and this week Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and the UK have also pledged tanks, possibly bringing the total to 321, or the heavy armor compliment of two tank divisions).  The Russians responded to this with a particularly heavy barrage of drones and cruise missiles on January 26 that reportedly killed 11 Ukrainian civilians.  Until this week, President Zelensky’s lobbying campaign for modern heavy armor had been a mostly tankless effort.  No more, apparently.

But if providing main battle tanks (MBT) had previously been taboo, then why now (besides the obvious answer that it is the next logical step in a protracted, escalating war)?

One answer might be that Western politicians and war planners realize that motorized infantry hardware like BFVs and ICVs would be of limited use in a modern combined arms campaign without heavy armor.  Perhaps they believe that Western tanks might be Ukraine’s only hope for repelling a Russian offensive. 

Of course the real answer might be the opposite of this, cynicism, for instance. Given that the Leopards will not be arriving for two or more months and the Abrams—which will be built for the Ukrainians rather than taken from existing U.S. stockpiles—will probably be coming in six months to a year, they may be as about as relevant as reinforcements for the defenders of Bataan, Wake Island, or the Alamo shipping on a similar schedule.  But their effects may be felt immediately and not in the way that is intended.  With the 321 tanks now in the offing, their practical value will be as a signal of determination and a desire to up the ante: i.e. a provocation for further escalation.  When they do arrive—assuming that Ukrainians can be trained to use and repair these highly complex machines in a reasonable amount of time—their other practical effect will likely be to lengthen and intensify the war, therefore increasing casualties and prolonging the suffering on both sides.   

Of course, the most obvious answer to “why tanks, why now?” is an assertion of NATO solidarity—an encouragement for others to send heavy armor—a reaffirmation of U.S. leadership and cover for European nations to follow suite, which they now have.  But this also suggests a dangerous lack of concern over the possibility of Russia reacting disproportionately.  The all-important question for policymakers about assumptions of provocative escalatory measures in a game of nuclear-backed brinksmanship is: what if you are wrong? After all, another way of interpreting the pledge for tanks would be to say that the West is willing to send heavy weapons built in the United States, Germany, and the UK to a nation on Russia’s western border to kill Russian troops.  If the situation was reversed, how would NATO respond?  How would the U.S. react if the Russians were supplying their latest tanks to anti-American forces in Canada?

The lesson the Russians take away from this gesture could be quite different from the intended one, and it may force unintended consequences.  Although a Russian offensive in the near future is likely, the scheduling of German armor for arrival in the spring (?) may compel them to invade well before arrival of the tanks, sooner rather than later. Thus the pledge may actually provoke the attack. And if the Russian attack is successful in decisively defeating the Ukrainian Ground Forces, then a far more dangerous escalation on the part of the West may be inevitable.

Ever since the 1990s, the U.S. foreign policy apparatus (“The Blob”) has been dominated by Neocons and other genera of interventionists.  Their self image is heavily invested in the eastward expansion of NATO.  And the front lines are now in Ukraine. Victory in Ukraine (whatever that might mean) means everything to them, and if hawks like Antony Blinken and zealots like Victoria Nuland have anything to say about it, Ukrainian defeat will not be an option.

If Russia defeats the Ukrainian Army in the coming months, thus forcing the collapse or decapitation of the Zelensky government, would the U.S. and Poland just stand by?  In rational terms there would be little they could do in a conventional military sense, short of committing the West to an all-out war with Russia and its allies. 

But given that a Ukrainian defeat, or anything perceived as a weak Western response to it, would spell disaster for the Democrats in 2024—and given the Trotskyite fervor of The Blob and the considerable, perhaps irresistible, political pressure that would be brought to bear on the administration—would the U.S. and its allies be compelled to enter directly into the fighting?  If they did, it would mark the start of the Third World War, a war that would likely have a nuclear ending.     

Given the insufficient numbers of promised tanks and the unrealistic timetable of training Ukrainian tank crews and mechanics and actually delivering the weapons, the final possibility is that the promise to send tanks is all just window dressing in a war that may soon be lost—a preemptive political fig leaf. The purpose would be to show that the West is doing all it can, albeit for domestic consumption.  This way the administration can point to the tank promise as proof that the United States did everything it could to win the war short of intervention. Let’s hope that this is the real purpose for the tank pledge. Otherwise it is just one more step toward Armageddon.

Like other complex chaotic phenomena, wars are fundamentally unpredictable. As Justice Holmes reminds us, “…I accept no prophecy with confidence. The unforeseen is generally what happens.”  On the other hand, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just moved the Doomsday Clock up to 90 seconds to midnight.  By comparison, it was at 7 minutes (420 seconds) to midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

By Michael F. Duggan

Norman Mailer would have been 100 this Tuesday. He was certainly not everybody’s cup of tea, but he was one of the most important writers and public intellectual celebrities of the postwar era. I can’t think of anybody today who fills the niche he once occupied.

He had ego and talent and showed real brilliance and occasional hostility in interviews and talk shows during the 1960s and ‘70s (he famously head-butted Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, after his anger at something Vidal had written about him and and uncompromising boorishness had turned the live audience against him). With the exception of Vidal, he tended to like his artistic competitors and ideological opponents. He and Bill Buckley were wary friends.

But there is something loutishly impressive about him—he was a real sweating human being with real insights, unlike so many of the increasingly mainstream extremists, cable TV cheap shot artists, conspiracy gurus, and tepid, blow-dried network lightweights of our own time. He was problematic and didn’t pull punches (literally or figuratively) or water down his message. Although he once called himself a “libertarian socialist,” and was critical of mainstream progressivism, he was of that last generation of liberals who had guts and were not afraid to stir the pot and say exactly what they thought regardless of the consequences. It is hard to square the puckish old man who discussed his book, The Spooky Art (about writing), with Charlie Rose in 2003, and who made an appearance on The Gilmore Girls the following year, with the two-fisted brawler of a few decades before who mixed it up with feminists and reactionaries alike.

One of the most notable postwar American realists ( that included Saul Bellow, James Jones, Philip Roth, and John Updike), Mailer was a best-selling author at 25, having written what is either the greatest or second greatest American novel about WWII, The Naked and the Dead (Catch-22 is arguably more important, if less realistic; Slaughterhouse Five and some of James Jones’s novels are also up there). This book, which was published in 1948 and added the word “fug” to the American lexicon, also has much to say about our own time (see “Mailer’s Ghost” on this blog, November 7, 2022). Notably, he was every adolescent boy’s instant excuse for “reading” Playboy.

His best books are good, but he wrote a lot, and, in some of his articles, you have to wade through a fair amount of crap to get to the gold nuggets. He had real psychological insight, in part growing out of a deep and honest understanding of himself and his own flaws. The chief problem with his analyses of US policy was a tendency to reduce events to the personal psychology of national leaders.

His nonfiction novels The Armies of the Night (on the antiwar march on the Pentagon in 1967), and The Executioner’s Song (about Gary Gilmore) are classics of journalistic realism. If you have a chance, take the time to look at Buckley’s interviews with him on these books as well as Mailer’s confrontation with Vidal on the Cavett show. His 1959 collection of articles and short fiction, Advertisements for Myself, is considered a milestone of the New Journalism. He admired Hemingway, although by his own admission, his writing style is more verbose and less distinctive. He was a student and practitioner of the hip, but eluded labels like hipster (original meaning) and beat. In 1955 he was one of the founders of The Village Voice.

A liberal who was frequently accused of sexism, he was married six times and appears to have been unhinged at times (he stabbed one wife and had a penchant for the “sport” of head-butting people at parties)¹ In 1969 he ran for mayor of New York City with legendary reporter, Jimmy Breslin, under the slogans “No More Bullshit!” and “Vote the Bums in!” Their platform included a plan to make the city the 51st state.

While we should not emulate the worst sides of Norman Mailer, there is something authentic and original about him. I am not sure how many people read him anymore, but he has a lot to offer our troubled, if morally superior, times. He died on November 10, 2007.

Note
1). Mailer’s enthusiasm for head-butting is well known. According to James Grady, Mailer head-butted G. Gordon Liddy one night in September 1990, sending the Watergate tough guy fleeing into the darkness.
https://lithub.com/the-time-i-watched-norman-mailer-try-to-fight-g-gordon-liddy-in-the-street/

By Michael F. Duggan

In the summer of 1864, the Union war effort was grinding to a halt. The Confederates had been defeated at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the previous July, but finishing the job was proving to be difficult for the Union. Sherman’s Military Division of the Mississippi and Grant’s Army of the Potomac were both stalled face to face with Confederate forces in a war of position outside of Atlanta and at Petersburg, south of Richmond.

In the 18th century—having learned their lessons from the total wars of the 17th century—European generals and princes sought to fight limited “cabinet wars.” Warfare was thus reduced to a chess-like game reflected in the doctrine of Swiss soldier and military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini. From the second half of the American Civil War onward, Western great powers wars tended toward total warfare and the more comprehensive view of conflict espoused by Clausewitz. In the atomic age, following hard upon the most destructive war in history, the overarching question facing strategists and war planners was how to keep the game alive without it turning nuclear. After the nuclear-heavy “New Look” grand strategy of the Eisenhower years, the Kennedy administration opted for “Flexible Response,” which certainly kept the game alive, but also made smaller, limited, wars more likely.¹

But in the later stages of the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman realized that in order to defeat the Confederacy, he would have to defeat the South as a whole and not just Southern armies, which had often defeated Union forces on the battlefield. From 1863 to 1864, the nature of the war changed from piecemeal “Napoleonic” battles to something more like modern campaigns punctuate by major clashes: Grant would fight Lee in an existential struggle in Virginia via a war of continuous campaign, and Sherman would bring the war home to Southern civilians in something conceptually akin to modern total warfare in Georgia and the Carolinas.²

Civilians support war through agriculture and food production, communications, industry and other economic activity, and transportation. After taking Atlanta, Sherman’s plan was to cut a 60 mile-wide swath “to the sea,” to Savannah, wrecking bridges, factories, railroads, and telegraph lines with soldiers and “bummers” foraging off of the land, burning plantations, and freeing slaves and Union prisoners of war along the way. Sherman called it a “hard war.” But unlike later total war campaigns—like Nazi Germany’s Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1941—the object was not the extermination of civilians, but rather to bring the CSA to its knees by wrecking its infrastructure and making civilians no longer want to fight by making life miserable. “I can make this march,” Sherman said, “and make Georgia howl.” And he did.

The situation in eastern Ukraine in some ways also resembles the scene at Petersburg in late 1864 and early 1865, when the Army of the Potomac under Grant (technically under George Meade, but Grant, in charge of all Union forces, was headquartered with him) squared off against the Army of Northern Virginia under Lee. After the brutal Virginia Campaign of May and June 1864, the exhausted armies settled into a war of position that foreshadowed the “trenchlock” on the Western Front 50 years later. It was a war of attrition in which the side with the greater numbers and resources eventually won.

This appears to be what is happening in Ukraine: the stronger side has a mixed record on the battlefield, the weaker side has fought extremely well, and the war has settled into deadlock. Although a winter offensive is still possible, perhaps inevitable, Russia seems to also be opting for a Shermanesque hard war by reducing Ukraine’s infrastructure and making life dangerous and miserable for civilians. Although there have been atrocities on both sides, Russia appears to be pursuing the systematic destruction of Ukraine as a functioning nation and the grinding down of its army on the battlefield rather than a strategy based on the of annihilation of civilians. A strategy based on breaking the will of a nation’s home front is always dicey, but on the other hand, it is also less risky for the attacker than outright combat. It would also be a means for prosecuting the war while waiting-out the other side.

The relevant questions at this point are: 1). will the more limited offensive strategy work, and 2). is it merely a prelude for a more robust offensive in February and March?

Notes
1. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010).
2. See James M. McPhereson, “From Limited War to Total War in America,” in On the Road to Modern War (Cambridge University Press, 1999) 297-309. See also Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press), 1985. For a general background of the grand strategies during the Civil War, see T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His General (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Charles L Webster and Company, 1885), and William T. Sherman, Memoirs (New York: Library of America, 1990 [1875]).

By Michael F. Duggan

It is unclear whether or not Russia will attempt to win the war by relying entirely on its current air campaign to degrade the Ukrainian power grid and infrastructure, or if it will also launch a bona fide ground offensive. Conditions for a winter blitz are not yet favorable.

That said—and the spontaneous Christmas Truce of 1914 on the Western Front not withstanding—holidays and weekends in December have often been favorite times to launch attacks. George Washington’s audacious raid that became the rout known as the Battle of Trenton was launched on Christmas night in 1776. In 1973 the Israelis were taken by surprise by the Egyptians and Syrians on Yom Kippur. And of course the U.S. Pacific fleet was caught off guard on a Sunday morning in December 1941. The Ardennes Offensive—the Battle of the Bulge—was launched by the Germans on a Saturday a little more than a week before Christmas, 1944. They took advantage of the frozen ground when winter came early that year.

Of course given that speculation about a Russian offensive is being bandied about even on a source as marginal as this one on no basis greater than an understanding of history, what I read and see in the news and commentary, and some basic facts in the public sphere, there is little hope of the Russians achieving surprise. Thus in military terms, it may make no difference when it comes beyond considerations of the weather and logistical factors.

It is doubtful that the ground is frozen in Ukraine (tanks do better on hard ground), especially in the southern portion of the war zone. Therefore an armor-tipped Russian offensive may not be in the offing over the Holidays. But, if it is coming at all, it may be in the early months of the New Year.

By Michael F. Duggan

I came across an interesting nugget of Holiday history in Michael Grant’s collection of biographical sketches, The Roman Emperors.

After the protracted period of crises in the middle decades of the 3rd century, Rome rebounded through a series of military victories. The most notable of the emperor-generals of this period was Aurelian (not to be confused with Marcus Aurelius), who governed during A.D. 270-275. Although he only ruled for five years, he was one of the outstanding military men in of Roman history, and one of the notable emperors of the later Roman Empire (unless you mark the later Empire as beginning with Diocletian in 284).

In domestic affairs, Aurelian favored the monotheistic Sun cult, Sol Invicus, that was rising (no pun intended) at the time along with Christianity and was its great benefactor. As Grant puts it: “His birthday was to be celebrated on 25 December (which was eventually a bequest of the solar cult to Christianity, converted into Christmas day);”¹ his actual birthday was September 9. Given that recent scholarship places Christ’s birthday as possibly being in the spring, it is curious that the 25th of December would be celebrated for both the Prince of Peace and one of the most warlike Romans, whose nickname was “Sword-in-hand.”² Oh, bitter, irony.

Of course the proximity of the day to the winter solstice also made it easier to convert traditional pagans to the faith that became Rome’s official religion under Constantine a number of decades later. It all makes me wonder about fertility symbols like eggs and rabbits and their connection to Easter.

Note
1. Michael Grant, The Roman Emperors (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 187.
2. Grant, 188.

By Michael F. Duggan

With Russian reservists arriving or soon to arrive at the front in eastern Ukraine, it is possible that a winter ground offensive is in the works. One also hears the argument: given that the ongoing drone and missile campaign appears to be degrading the Ukrainian infrastructure at the onset of winter, and that a massive land assault could bringing NATO units directly into the fight while risking increased casualty rates even without a wider war, Russia may choose to stake its chances on the air offensive alone. If this is true, it is also a gamble.

My father was a career combat infantry officer, and while he readily conceded the importance of airpower, it was always secondary and adjunct in his estimation. Tactical air superiority gave ground forces a powerful advantage, and strategic bombing was always impressive in terms of scale. But it was “boots on the ground” that won wars.

As time went on, there were exceptions to this rule; the NATO air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 appears to have been decisive without the introduction of Western ground forces. Likewise the aerial portion of Operation Desert Storm all but destroyed the Iraqi Army and might have been decisive had the war continued. Although the trend toward something like decisive air war under certain circumstances is more than suggestive, as of now Desert Storm and Kosovo are exceptions.

The Nazi Blitz of September 1940 to May 1941 only steeled British resolve, and the massive allied bombing campaigns over Germany are believed to have not been decisive in winning the war on the European front in WWII. Likewise, the B-29 fire raids on Japanese cities spread horror and suffering, but in spite of the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, they did not by themselves end the war. The tonnage of high explosives dropped on North Korea and North Vietnam boggles the mind, and yet these air campaigns did not break the will of the people in either country. The regimes in Hanoi and Pyongyang remain in place.

Is the current drone and missile campaign the anticipated Russian winter offensive? Time will tell. If this is Russia’s strategy, will it work, and what will become of a Ukraine with great reductions in power and sanitation? Who will pay for and rebuild the Ukrainian grid and other infrastructure? The Ukrainians have shown themselves to be brave, tough, and resilient, but all of the signs point to a long and difficult winter for them. As of now, the Russian aerial blitz appears to be yet another aggravating factor in what has been a humanitarian disaster from the start. With the possibility of the United States supplying Ukraine with Patriot missiles, it has also triggered another round of escalation.

By Michael F. Duggan

It is hard to know what is really going on in Ukraine. In September Vladimir Putin, ordered the call-up of 300,000 Russian reservists. It is likely that these reinforcements are already arriving on the front in eastern Ukraine. Their quality as soldiers is yet to be determined (and to date, the Ukrainians have fought magnificently, and one hears stories of “sheep-dipped” Polish and other foreign troops now fighting with them).¹ But as with the arrival of around 2 million green American troops on the Western Front by the summer of 1918, their numbers may prove decisive. Some sources put the number of Russian troops in the staging areas behind their lines at more than a half-million.²

Sometime in the coming months after the ground freezes—it may be late December, or January, February, or March—the refortified, retooled Russian Ground Forces will probably launch a winter offensive. By virtue of its numbers and reconceived offensive purpose combined with the reduction of Ukrainian energy grids and infrastructure, and with the onset of winter, this push may achieve the Russian territorial war aims in eastern Ukraine and along its Black Sea coast (remember, when analyzing the strategic situation, consider all of the possible resources that both sides may bring to bear). The question is whether or not United States and NATO combat units will intervene directly if the Ukrainian lines collapse. If they did, it would signal the beginning of World War III in earnest.

Postscript December 15, 2022
A friend has suggested that some commentators have proposed a new theory of a possible Russian strategy in the Ukraine war. It states that if the Russians believe they can defeat Ukraine via a protracted campaign of cruise missile and drone attacks, they will not launch an all out land offensive.

Note.
1). Scott Ritter and others have reported that foreign troops are now fighting with the Ukrainians in Ukrainian uniforms.
2). Former U.S. Army officer, Douglas Macgregor, puts the current Russian troop level at around 540,000. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/washingtons-carthaginian-peace-collides-with-reality/

By Michael F. Duggan

As nuclear powers flirt with Armageddon over Ukraine and Taiwan, we must ask: where are the adults in foreign policy?  Where are the John and Robert Kennedys?  The Tommy Thompsons?  Where are the George Kennans?  Where are the diplomats?  It is as if we are in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Curtis LeMay is calling the shots.  

A number of months ago, when I was lamenting the lack of realists in the Halls of Power, a friend recommended reading William J. Burns, the current director of the CIA.  Burns had been a career diplomat—including tenure as the United States ambassador to Russia in 2005-08—and had a reputation for being serious, thoughtful, nonpartisan, and nonideological.  This by itself makes him a rare bird in an age of true believers.  With a few quick searches, I found his 2019 memoir with the encouraging title, The Back Channel, a Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal, and ordered a copy. 

I also found some interviews with Burns on YouTube and was impressed with what I saw.  In the spoken and written word, he is calm, careful, diplomatic, experienced, knowledgeable, and urbane.  A student of history, there is much to like and admire about Burns.  He likes Charles Bohlen and George Kennan and their accomplishments during the early years of the Cold War.  These were all good signs.   

Burns is a public servant of the first order, who, in the words of John Kerry, is on “a very short list of American diplomatic legends,” a list that would certainly include Bohlen, Kennan, and Thompson, and like those men, he is a leading Kremlinologist.  Unlike so many of the big names in contemporary foreign affairs, he is the kind of official whose name evokes dedication and seriousness of purpose rather than ideology, zeal, and intervention.   

Burns was at or near the center of the action during many of the most important moments of one of the most fateful periods of U.S. foreign policy.  This is—or was—the post-Cold War period of U.S. primacy, from its predawn during the Reagan administration until his retirement just as the Age of Trump loomed into sight.  Except for the realist Bush 41/Baker/Scowcroff years, his career was coterminous with the period of economic globalization, foreign policy neo-conservatism, U.S. military hegemony, and liberal interventionism.  Like a realist, he believes that much of foreign policy is ongoing damage control in an imperfect world, and that diplomacy in large measure is the managing of potential train wrecks.

One senses that Burns longs for that one brief shining moment of sensible foreign policy during 1989-1992, when there was still hope for “the new world order,” if not Fukuyama’s absurdly utopian “end of history.”  From early on, he opposed the interpretation of the post-Cold War order as a unipolar world, recommended to the Clinton administration policies that were “careful and realistic,” and “stressed the importance of leading by example” as well as “the perils of overreach,” all good realist principles. (80-81) And yet the period that followed became one of hubris, triumphalism, and squandered opportunities on the part of the United States, and a drift toward a renewal of great power tensions.  If we include 1991, it is a period that saw 251 acknowledged U.S. military actions around the world.¹  As Tony Judt put it shortly before his death, the post-Cold War years “were consumed by locusts.” (Judt, Il Fares the Land, 2010, 138). 

One thus infers that Burns is something like a Bush I era realist at heart, who spent the lion’s share of his career biting his lower lip in the age of the interventionist Blob.  Throughout the book he walks a diplomatic tightrope between being the proverbial good soldier who does not say bad things about former colleagues and interventionist bosses and their dubious policies on the one hand, and the consummate professional suggesting what he believes to be a more sensible direction for U.S. policy on the other.  If he is a realist, or a stripe of diplomat tending in that direction, it is hard to imagine a less comfortable and more frustrating position to be in.  And yet in spite of his moderation and even keel, one senses ambivalence; just because someone embraces the study of history as a basis for policy and a return to diplomacy over knee-jerk intervention does not by itself make him a realist.

Burns writes with a self-deprecating sense of irony and deadpan humor.  He is a good writer.  But in spite of his frankness, he walks a line that leaves one wondering exactly what he believes in other than returning to diplomacy and the general need for a new grand strategy architecture.  Strategy must be based on judgment informed not only by situational dictates and historical understanding, but by the specifics of an outlook, a philosophy of diplomacy, foreign affairs, and power.  Diplomacy is never value neutral; even when it acknowledges the legitimate interests of the other side, it is always based on and serves a perspective.  On the face of things, Burns seems to see both sides—the realist and a more activist points of view—to a fault.  

NATO enlargement might serve as an example.  Burns concedes that James Baker promised that NATO would expand “not one inch” into the former Soviet sphere of influence, but then hedges with a legalism: “the pledge was never formalized and was made before the breakup of the Soviet Union” (as if these things make any difference as matters of establishing fundamental trust and good faith). (55-56) When George Kennan characterized the initial enlargement of NATO in 1997 as “the most fateful error of American policy of the entire post-Cold War era”—one of his many remarkably prophetic observations—Burns saw it “as a little hyperbolic.” (107-111) In light of the war in Ukraine, one wonders if he has come around to better appreciate the accuracy of Kennan’s observation.  

There are, of course, the obligatory unfavorable comments about Vladimir Putin, while acknowledging the times that Putin’s Russia aided U.S. efforts (such as in the early days of the Afghanistan war and then later during the troop surge there, and in allowing President Obama a face-saving way out after he painted himself into a corner with his ill-considered “red line” threat over the use of chemical weapons in Syria) (276, 279, 282, 331-32).  Regardless of how he may or may not feel about the Russian president, he is able to realistically see beyond personalities to the real national security interests of Russia itself. 

This may be attributable to a sense of “detachment” that Burns attributes to growing up as a frequently uprooted army brat (as the son of an army combat officer who was also born in Fort Bragg, raised in a Catholic family and lived in ten places by the time I was eight, I can closely identify with his early years). This distance gave him “an ability to stand back and observe and empathize.”  It also instilled a sense of circumspect, “a reluctance—born of many departures—to get too close or too invested.” (18)  The fact that his education at La Salle University and that his “upbringing bore little resemblance to the caricature of the cosmopolitan, blue-blooded Foreign Service officer” (i.e. “pale, male, and Yale”) may have also provided some immunity to the ideological bubbles, clichés, and groupthink that have dominated for so long in foreign policy circles and which threaten world peace again. (22)

This detachment presumably allowed Burns to realize that a NATO MAP (Membership Action Plan), for Georgia and/or Ukraine would be seen as a direct threat by the Russians.  As then Ambassador Burns wrote in an email to then Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice in 2008:

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of bright lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).  In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views NATO as anything as other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.  At this stage, a MAP offer would be seen as throwing down the strategic gauntlet.  Today’s Russia will respond.  Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze… It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” (232-233, 457-59)

Burns saw the problem of NATO enlargement into Georgia and Ukraine early and fully, realizing that

“In many ways, [the Bucharest Summit] left us with the worse of both worlds—indulging Ukrainians and Georgians in hopes of NATO membership on which we were unlikely to deliver, while in reinforcing Putin’s sense that we were determined to pursue a course he saw was an existential threat.” (239) 

In light of events in Ukraine since 2014, and especially over the past year, Burns’ observations appear to have been as prescient as George Kennan at his hyperbolic best.  Although the war is the result of a Russian invasion, when we throw the zeal of highly-placed interventionists like Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland into the mix on the American side, the present war starts to look like a foregone conclusion.  The Russian and Ukrainian chickens have come home to roost, and world leaders have spoken openly about nuclear war.  It therefore seems odd that Burns has expressed concern about the possibility of the war turning nuclear, but has also given a far more conventional, official-sounding line about the conflict.²

Another example of his ideological ambivalence may be reflected in his curiously eclectic bibliography, which, at just under six pages, is not especially long for a 500-page book.  Alongside old-school realists like Bohlen, Kennan, and Kissinger, and more recent realists like Andrew Bacevich, James Baker, and Anatol Lieven are titles by Neocons like Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan, liberal interventionists like Madeline Albright and Anne-Marie Slaughter, and economic globalists like Thomas Friedman, John Ikenberry, Strobe Talbott, and Fareed Zakaria.  Perhaps he is just including works of people he mentions as well as players he does not mention (he calls Francis Fukuyama a “star” while noting elsewhere that “history did not end in the 1990s”).  The alternatives are that he either gives credit even to views with which he disagrees, or else he is a man who is moderate and rational to the point of being open-minded about everything at all times, which might be another way of characterizing a person who does not really believe in anything or does not want others to know what he believes (an odd thing for someone who took the time to write a lengthy memoir).  True believers may be the most dangerous animals in the foreign policy forest, but those who entertain everything are their enablers. Perhaps he is just giving all sides their due.   

In other words, Burns, in all of his detachment, is a hard person to pin down.  Certainly he does have an outlook, but at times it must be inferred.  On the face of things, he seems to be like John Lewis Gaddis (whose classic Strategies of Containment and Pulitzer Prize-winning George F. Kennan: an American Life are both in the bibliography as is his overly-reductionistic The Cold War: a New History)³ in wanting things both ways.  In Burns’ case this would be cautious, interest-based realism and economic globalization.  And yet one cannot say, for instance, that the containment of Kennan and the “rollback” of Reagan’s hardliners both won the Cold War (as Gaddis appears to do), given that they are at fundamentally at odds with each other.⁴  I would say that realism and economic globalization are similarly at odds with each other.    

Burns admits that the unipolar moment is over and that the period of the post-primacy world has arrived. (397)  But what does this mean about his prescriptions?  After all, one does not have to be a realist to take an honest accounting and admit the failure of an overreaching, overly militarized U.S. foreign policy.  One does not have to be a realist to learn from mistakes.  Therefore, is this memoir just about learning from mistakes, or is it a chance for Burns to finally assert what he believes after so many years of being a loyalist to the Department and the nation, regardless of what he believed about the policies he served? 

The conclusion of his memoir, ostensibly in response Donald Trump’s evisceration of the State Department, is equally a plea for a return to a foreign policy architecture founded on diplomacy after four decades of militarized foreign affairs, undeclared wars, bombing campaigns, and other forms of intervention that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousand of people around the world.  But what shape would this diplomacy take and to what end?  Burns yearns for a workable diplomatic policy framework comparable to Kennan’s containment, which, in spite of a fair amount of alteration, expansion, tampering, and outright vandalism by lesser men, still resulted in a satisfactory resolution of the first Cold War.

Burns observes that “Fashioning a strategy for the post-primacy world is no easy task” (401).  I take issue with this point and would suggest that a frame for a grand strategy may be more straight-forward than he realizes.  It has always been there, if we had taken the time to see it.  The ideology of true believers had obscured it to many in policy circles.  It still does.  Rather, the difficulty would be in implementing it, and in deprogramming, overcoming, or superseding an entire foreign policy establishment—The Blob—committed to the rigid, heavy-handed, cliché-ridden ideologies of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism.  Burns essentially says as much, but as with so much of his book, it is understated (“The preaching of the Gospel by the foreign policy ‘blob’ continues unabated—often unpersuasive and sometimes a little self-righteous;” a little self-righteous, eh?). (418)  Even as understatement, such an observation does not conceal his discontentment and a desire for a new direction.  While disagreeing, he is thus not subversive to the establishment (nor is he a departmental partisan vying for funds and influence with the Department of Defense), but rather is diplomatically constructive.  He is like a man trying to turn around an ocean liner with a hand tiller.

So what would a workable and sustainable framework for a post-primacy American grand strategy look like?  In my opinion—and this in my model and not Burns’—it would have to be situated in the broad ideological expanse between hegemonic internationalism and “Fortress American” isolationism.  Such a proximity would allow the United States to adopt the posture of a vigorous regional world power while maximizing the best geopolitical real estate on the planet—its own.  This would also allow the U.S. to continue to function as an international world leader and to honor its treaty agreements, without succumbing to the temptation of unsustainable imperial overreach.  Significantly, it would allow the U.S. to disengage from parts of the world where it is not wanted or needed and where its very presence is destabilizing or otherwise problematic.  The view that the U.S. must choose between inward-looking isolationism and unrestrained imperial internationalism is in fact a false choice.  The debate over the role of the United States in the word founded on extremes of autarchy and empire is in fact a discussion with a wide and fruitful middle ground, and it is between these unrealistic poles that a reasonable basis for grand strategy will be found. 

As a robust regional world power with capable air, land, and sea forces to match, the United States would be able to protect its vital interests.  It would still be able to function as a world leader in international coalitions to preserve peace and order and to restore the status quo in instances where the territorial sovereignty of a nation has been violated by another.  Such a role would also provide an effective stature for fostering the international cooperation necessary to address the unfolding world environmental crises.  Above all it would allow the United States to re-embrace its noble diplomatic tradition that served us so well in the days before the time when the first option to complex problems was a Spec Ops team, a Tomahawk missile, or a B-52 strike. 

What specifically would this strategy look like and what would we call it?  The answer to both is consolidation; the US would embrace a more sustainable traditional role as the dominant power of the lesser “World Island” of the Americas, while remaining one of the community of world powers in the multipolar world already upon us.  It would quietly survey the world and judiciously determine the nations and regions it would be willing to defend.  This list would be a dramatic reduction of the current open-ended one.  If “consolidation” is too uninspiring a name for this new grand strategy, then perhaps the more elaborate, history-based moniker Neo-Hadrianism will do.  This name, which I first used in an article in 2013, is taken from the second-century Roman emperor who sought to preserve Roman strength via consolidation after the Empire had grown too large and unwieldy.⁵

The book’s subtitle is A Memoir of an American Diplomacy and the Case for its Renewal.  But what is “the case”?  Is it that the ideology of 1993-2022 is mistaken or is it the damage to the State Department wrought by Donald Trump (who knew nothing about foreign policy and was little more than a temporary, partial distraction from The Blob?), or both.⁶  The immediate target is Trump—an obvious, flailing target—but he also appears to be gunning for the tried-and-failed Blob—the foreign policy community of the post-Cold War period.

In his conclusion, after criticizing Trump and The Blob, Burns gives some indication of what he would like to see take the place of neoconservative and liberal intervention.  He still embraces a robust role for the United States and the projection of power, but it is the softer power of diplomacy and economics.  He favors the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and presumably other one-size-fits-all multilateral agreements. (405).  In other words, he may be prescribing a globalist world based on diplomacy rather than on hard power, intervention, and nation-building.  He is a diplomatic globalist with perhaps some realist leanings. 

So who exactly is William Burns and what is his vision for a post-primacy American role?  Is he the very picture of the consummate diplomat and career professional?  An intimate observer—an insider—and critic of the now unraveling post-Cold War unipolar moment?  A closet realist finally able to say what he really thinks? 

Perhaps he is all of these things.  The State Department—like the military—is an organization in which loyalty to the program is the highest and most unquestioned principle.  It is also a community where the only thing as important as loyalty is discretion.  A friend of mine suggested by way of historical analogy that he may be a latter-day version of John Hay: a loyalist, but a moderate, rational, sensible one.  In his historical novel Empire, Gore Vidal portrays Hay as the consummate public servant who subordinates his personal opinions to the mission of the team and the policies of the time.  Is this Bill Burns?   

My sense is that Burns is a man of honor who has dedicated his life to the mission of the government and agency during his tenure, regardless of whether or not he always agreed with it.  In this he is also like that paragon of the good soldier, Colin Powell.  Unlike Powell, Burns still has time to do what is right, regardless of the mischief wrought by lesser people, by ideologues.  Regarding the two flashpoints that threaten a third world war—Ukraine and Taiwan—he also has the opportunity to do a historical great good by defusing conflicts that would likely turn nuclear if they became direct great powers wars.  The question is whether he is situated to do so as head of the CIA.  

As for the immediate future, he is right about the desirability of a return to a policy architecture based on diplomatic primacy.  The first orders of business must be de-escalation: backchannel talks to tamp-down the foremost dangers posed by the Russo-Ukrainian War (really the Russo-American War) with a pledge of Ukrainian neutrality and to halt NATO enlargement, and then the relaxing of tensions in the South China Sea by a drawing down of U.S. forward presence in the East Asian littoral waters (U.S. naval predominance in the South China Sea makes about as much geographical sense as Chinese naval predominance in the Gulf of Mexico).  As long as innocent passage and the free flow of maritime trade are not threatened in the Asian shipping lanes, it is irrelevant who carries the biggest stick among nuclear powers there.  Other important issues demanding diplomatic attention will include engineering a unified global approach to the unfolding crises of the environment.    

As the world teeters on the nuclear brink, let us hope that cooler heads, like Burns, are working behind the scenes, and that he is living up to the title of his book.  Perhaps he is already involved in back channel talks through a third party, like Turkey.  We can only hope so.  Without a settlement, the war can only end with world catastrophe or as an open-ended festering sore that could escalate without a moment’s notice. 

As I have written elsewhere, the problem with the Great Game is the game itself; it is a stupid and egotistical distraction and one that the world can no longer afford.  Nuclear brinksmanship is by its nature an insane manifestation of the game and is even more so in the hands of ideaologues who have caused or exacerbated so much of the trouble in the world over the past 30 years and who are still laboring under a delusional ideology.  

With the Russian withdrawal from Kherson being widely characterized as a Ukrainian battlefield victory (as opposed to a consolidation of the Russian lines as hundreds of thousands of reservists arrive at the front), and with the war aims of both sides fundamentally at odds with each other, there is less and less reason for either to sue for peace.

In a dark, Hobbesian world, diplomats are the responsible adults in the room.  It is time for a grownup to take a decisive stand before it is too late.

Notes
*I wrote most of this article in early October.  Since then others, like former U.S. arms inspector Scott Ritter, have also suggested that Director Burns would be the best person to initiate a diplomatic dialog in Ukraine.  It now appears that Burns is talking with Russian counterparts about the war in Ukraine.     

1. https://mronline.org/2022/09/16/u-s-launched-251-military-interventions-since-1991-and-469-since-1798/.
2. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-nuclear-weapons-burns-cia/31804539.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6M4W-OB6Ak 
3. Regarding the reductive nature of Gaddis’s book, The Cold War, a New History, See Tony Judt’s review “A Story Still to be Told.  https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/03/23/a-story-still-to-be-told/
4. It was Kennan, containment, and the intrinsic flaws in the Soviet Union that brought down the latter and to think otherwise is to dangerously misread the record of 1947-91. Unlike insiders like John Paul II and Lech Walesa, conservative heads of state like Reagan and Thatcher had little influence behind the Iron Curtain.                                                                                                              By the 1980s, the USSR had been dry rotting for decades—perhaps since the death of Stalin.  Nobody except for a few old true believes and virtually no young people believed in the old ideology.  By the time of the Reagan administration, the Soviet Union was like a once-ferocious dinosaur about to drop dead of a coronary.  Reagan had nothing to do with this, and his tough talk, at best sped the collapse of the USSR by a matter of weeks or months.  In retrospect, it would have been more sensible to have brought about its end more slowly.
5. https://realismandpolicy.com/foreign-policy-articles/  
6. There is no contradiction in opposing Donald Trump and the foreign affairs Blob.  As Stephen M. Walt notes, the foreign policy elite was horrified at the election of Donald Trump.  He writes “In March 2016 former State Department counselor and Johns Hopkins University Professor, Eliot A. Cohen organized an open letter signed by 122 former national security officials that denounced Trump’s views on foreign policy, described him as ‘fundamentally dishonest,’ and judged him ‘utterly unfit to the office.” Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, 4.                                                   It should be noted, as Andrew Bacevich does in his 2020 book, Age of Illusions, that Trump, himself, is a symptom of trends of the post-Cold War period, a byproduct of bad domestic, economic, and foreign policies.  The off-shoring of jobs caused by globalization that led to the rise of nationalistic populism, was in large measure the result of neoliberal globalization with pan-spectrum military hegemony as its bulldog.  Without trying to sound like a 1950s science fiction movie, Trump may be rightly regarded as “The Son of The Blob.”  He is the unintended spawn of policies of the Reagan, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations.