Realism and Policy

By Michael F. Duggan

The claim that if you want security you must give up liberty has become a mainstay of the revolt against freedom.  But nothing is less true.  There is, of course, no absolute security in life.  But what security can be attained depends on our own watchfulness, enforced by institutions to help us watch—i.e. by democratic institutions which are devised (using Platonic language) to enable the herd to watch, and to judge their watch-dogs.
-Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 636, n.62

We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissent)

Why do monopolies raise prices while decreasing portions and lowering the quality of ingredients, parts, and services? They do it for the same reason psychopaths do what they do: because they can.   

Governments, like businesses, are not moral or immoral.  Like an nonsocial organism in nature, they are amoral and are only as good as their people, ideology, laws, and actions; a nation is what a nation does, both good and bad.  They will do whatever they can within the law and sometimes well beyond it, limited only by the bounds of the possible.  Unrestrained, they may do what they can get away with, and all governments lie to their people in varying degrees.  They are a necessary evil (underscore both necessary and evil).  Given all of this, what will become of democracy and liberalism in a time when the state is able to follow most aspects of a citizen’s life simply because it can?

Consider the following story.  On July 12, 2012, a 10-year-old girl was walking home from a store with her 2-year-old brother in their South Philadelphia neighborhood.  As they walked by a parked car, a man got out and grabbed the girl, but she fought back and the boy screamed at the top of his lungs.  The man got nervous, got back into his car and drove off.  The whole thing was caught on a street camera and the video was widely circulated on television and on social media.  Realizing the hopelessness of his situation, the perpetrator turned himself in and is now serving 17-34 years in prison. 

Given what could have happened in this incident, it is impossible not to be pleased b they outcome.  Philadelphia Mayor, Michael Nutter, observed that the quick resolution to the case “demonstrates the power of getting information out or having good video.”  ABC news reported a police source admitting that the video “was the catalyst in breaking the case.”

That night I called a friend, a believer in the Fourth Amendment (another happy ending to come out of Philadelphia), and a critic of the surveillance state. I made the point that one could not argue with the results in this case.  His haunting reply cut to the heart of the matter: “Yes,” he said, “I suppose that there are some advantages to living in an authoritarian system.”  As it happens, street crime was not a major problem in Nazi Germany and in other nations under totalitarian regimes.  The question is how far in that direction should the citizens of a liberal republic be willing to go?

It is undeniable that surveillance technologies sometimes work in these kinds of cases and are useful in finding suspects after the fact.  No doubt they also provide a fair measure of deterrent value as well.  I am told that one cannot walk across downtown Washington, D.C. (or London, or New York City, or…) without being off-camera for more than a few seconds.  It turns out we are all TV stars.

But have we given away our privacy too easily?  One of the operating costs of a liberal republic is the higher crime rates that go along with people having the freedom to act on bad impulses.  Rights allow us to do all kinds of bad things. The First Amendment gives constitutional protection to a wide range of lies and deception.  On the other hand, the same technological revolution that wrought today’s surveillance technologies has also created powerful new criminal tools and provides the venues for their use.  It’s a cause-and-effect thing: technology helps create the problem and then provides solutions that come at a cost to our civic lives. 

Human nature may not change over historical time, but cyber technology has created an entire new cosmos for human venality; in all my years I was never robbed on the street, and yet people try to rip me off on the Internet or via robocalls every day (while editing this article, I was interrupted three times by automated calls from unfamiliar organizations).  What happens if security technology and our laws do not keep pace with technology-enabled crime in these dangerous new worlds?  The flip side of this question is: what becomes of a state that knows everything about its citizens?  Like the Vietnamese village of fifty-odd years ago, will a government destroy the foundations of liberal democracy in order to save it?

The cyber world has thus created a situation in which the very enforcement of the law may require the surrendering of privacy and rights.  On the other hand, where the law is not enforced, the law ceases to exist, and the most aggressive and opportunistic elements tend to take over (the later Roman Empire was flawed and corrupt, but by most standards, it was better than the early Middled Ages in much of Europe).         

Aggravating all of this is the fact that some of our national first principles are at odds with each other.  Equality and liberty, for instance: the more that equality is enforced, the less freedom; the more freedom, the less equality.  It is the same with freedom and security.  It is like a seesaw or a balance scale: the less that law is enforced, the more crime; the more the law is enforced, the less freedom.  The trick is to strike a tolerable, workable balance of rights and security.  And yet the power of the new technologies have forced situation of accepting a choice of either security or victimhood.  In the minds of many people addicted to their smartphones and other high tech face magnets, privacy and rights never enter into the equation.    

Even where security features are in place, safety is not guaranteed, and you may end up losing both your freedom and security.  All 19 of the September 11^th terrorists were caught on security cameras, and, although surveillance footage helped identify them after the attacks, they were still able to destroy the World Trade Center towers, hit the Pentagon, and kill everybody aboard Flight 93.  Likewise, the United States military could see every square inch of Afghanistan from space, and yet for 20 years Americans still came home in body bags before the Taliban took control of the country in 2021. 

Is the future one in which liberal democracy is replaced by a techno surveillance state as a lesser of evils in a dark Manichean world?  Are we already there?  The difference between Big Brother in the novel, 1984, and the estates of the modern surveillance state and its corporate allies—whether it is banks, businesses, and social media tracking your preferences and transactions via algorithms, local jurisdiction speed cameras, or a centralized government—is that Orwell could have never imagined the power of the technologies that watch or otherwise follow us today; Big Brother’s creepy, yet blandly attractive, know-it-all Little Sister, Alexa, is already a permanent guest in tens of millions of households.  But even this is small potatoes relative to what is already possible.  The level of surveillance in nations like China shocks the conscience. 

Some people shrug off these concerns with the argument: if I am not doing anything wrong, why should I care if intelligence or law enforcement agencies are watching me or accessing my DNA (and the related question: why shouldn’t the businesses and financial institutions I use know my preferences)?  The problem is that you might get a government you don’t like and who does not like you (and the businesses you patronize may share your information with less savory organizations).  If the past 7 years have shown us anything, it is the vulnerability of republics to illiberal demagogues and factions.  If an authoritarian government were to take over, it will be too late to change things.  It is probably too late already, given the power of today’s surveillance technologies and the amount of personal information out there.  And given human nature, if the technology exists, is will be used and abused.  

There is also a broader theoretical question here: at a certain level of technological development, does privacy, and therefore freedom—cornerstones of a liberal constitutional society—become impossible to sustain?  Although it is hard to know precisely what that tipping point is (and it may be well behind us), I suspect that the answer is yes: surveillance technologies will render liberal democracy a thing of the past. 

As with the private enforcement of local, state, and federal laws, and incarceration for corporate profit, domestic spying should never be condoned in a democracy, especially for profit.  Just as human misery should not be monetized, nor should private information.  These things are fundamentally harmful to the health of a liberal republic.  They are by their nature corrupting.  It is bad enough when a government continually spies on its own people, but to make such practices profitable not only cements them into place, it is also a long stride toward authoritarian rule.  Because the Internet has become such a pervasive part of our lives, it is easy to forget that one of its primary purposes is intelligence gathering against those of us who use it.    

Without law and the order it provides, there can be no freedom, privacy, or rights.  But things have gone too far, and we are like the frog in the parable that is slowly boiled to death as the heat is turned up gradually and without its noticing.  In writing this, I am reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonishment, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” And yet because of the scale and ubiquity of today’s technology, I suspect we are well beyond that in practical terms.  And with AI and quantum computing (and hacking) about to come into their own, I suspect that things could get much worse over the coming years (in which case, these may be the good old days). Even without these things, the post-liberal techno state is already upon us. 

By Michael F. Duggan

With so much attention focused on Bakhmut, it is easy to forget that the Ukrainian front is 600 miles long—roughly 125 miles longer that the Western Front in World War One—and that fighting is occurring at many points along that line. One of those places is a bulge around the town of Avdiivka.

Located few miles northwest of the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk, Avdiivka had a pre-2014 population of around 32,000, meaning that it is, or was, about half the size of Bakhmut. It is an industrial town notable for the Avdiivka Coke Plant, the largest of its kind in Ukraine. The salient around the town is immediately north of what was the Donetsk Sergei Prokofiev International Airport, destroyed in the 2014-15 fighting. It is about 56 miles south of Bakhmut.

Avdiivka saw heavy fighting in the Donbas War in eastern Ukraine beginning in 2014. It was captured by pro-Russian forces during the spring of 2014 and retaken by the Ukrainians that summer. The town was the site of a pitched battle in early 2017. Although Avdiivka is mostly destroyed, and most of its civilian population has left, its industrial significance and recent history explain much of its importance to both sides.

As with Bakhmut, the Russians may see it is a possible strategic gateway to points west. The attacks in and around Bakhmut and Avdiivka now appear to be prongs of their larger offensive. Their strategy seems to be focused on these two strong points with a goal of drawing Ukrainian units and resources from other sectors thus thinning out the long defensive line. If the defense of Bakhmut is any indication, the Ukrainian defenders of Avdiivka will fight with courage, skill, and tenacity.

There is also a large salient forming north of Bakhmut around the city of Sivers’k.

Postscript, February 15, 2024
The fall of Avdiivka now appears to be inevitable, and the grinding Russian offensive all along the line continues.

By Michael F. Duggan

Ninety years ago this past Monday, the newly inaugurated Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first Fireside Chat, “The Banking Crisis.” Roosevelt would shepherd the nation through the Great Depression and give us Glass-Steagall and the FDIC and would reregulate the economy. The result was a quarter-century of unparalleled prosperity following the Second World War.

After the financial collapse of 2008 and the depression that followed (don’t let anybody tell you that it was a “great recession;” it is a depression that still persists in large swaths of the nation), we got the Dodd-Frank Act, which required that banks act responsible with your money. That act was repealed in 2018, and banks have apparently gone back to their old risky behavior. Now a number of banks have collapsed or are in trouble, and once again we are left wondering how far it will go.

How do you like deregulation now?

By Michael F. Duggan

In previous postings, I conjectured that the fight for Bakhmut would be a hybrid of a grinding Western Front offensive of the First World War, and an Eastern Front encirclement offensive of the Second World War. I stand my this assessment, but would like to clarify the former part of my prediction.

During World War One, there were two primary kinds of offensives. There were attrition offensives, like the German attack at Verdun and the resulting battled that lasted from February 21, 1916 to December 18, 1916, and there were attempted breakthroughs, like the British Somme Offensive of July 1, 1916 to November 18, 1916, and the German Spring Offensive of March 21-July 18, 1918 (there were also diversionary attacks that sometimes turned into major actions in their own right). The Battle of Bakhmut, with its slow, grinding character, appears to have the qualities of an attrition offensive with the likely goal of a breakthrough, thus making it a hybrid of both kinds of Great War offensives (it may also divert attention and resources from other parts of the front).

There is something obscene to the logic of attrition, where the goal is to outlast the enemy by maximizing their casualties, and turning salients into kill zones. As with Verdun, the attackers at Bakhmut know that the defenders, who have shown incredible courage and skill, will hold out as long as possible, and that they may choose death over withdrawal or surrender. This is the danger implicit in defending a position of great symbolic importance, and one wonders why the Ukrainians don’t fall back to prepared positions west of the town (like the German Hindenburg Line of 1917). As it is, a hole in the line at Bakhmut could open up the rest of the Donetsk Oblast to the Russians. It might allow them to roll up the rest of the line. It might do both. It might do neither. Although the tide of war appears to be favoring the Russians at this point, nothing is certain in war, and it is possible that a war of position and stalemate will persist regardless of which way the battle goes.

What we do know is that Russian gains in and around Bakhmut can be measured in terms of yards. We can speculate that, like a grinding First World War offensive, both sides are taking horrendous casualties. The question is the degree to which the outcome will be strategic or symbolic or both and what will follow.

By Michael F. Duggan

Watch Bakhmit. Some of the most significant battles of the World Wars involved salients, promontories jutting into enemy territory, and this may prove to be the case in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The first large-scale offensive of the independent American Expeditionary Force in the First World War was launched at the St. Mihiel salient in September 1918.  In December 1944, an unexpected German offensive created a burgeoning “bulge” in the Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, France, and Luxemburg.  You destroy salients by nipping them off at the base combined with direct assaults elsewhere.  In both cases, these salients were reduced in part by coordinate attacks on either side at the point where the bulge joined the line (the Germans were withdrawing from St. Mihiel at the time of the American attack, so the task for the U.S. forces was perhaps less costly than it might have otherwise been).

The Bakhmut salient is somewhat different from these historical examples. Rather than denoting a previously quiet sector (like St. Michiel and Verdun) or a the result of surprise offensive (like the Ardennes) into Russian-held territory, the protruding nature of the Bakhmut salient is the result of Russian pincer movements on either side of the city, an encirclement conducted largely by the Wagner Group (whose December strength of around 50,000 is the approximate equivalent of two corps). Following the fall of nearby Soledar in mid-January, it has been the result of ongoing Russian attacks and the magnificent defense of the small city by Ukrainian forces (the town has been under fire since the middle of last May).  The Russian goal is to presumably cut it off, force its surrender, or destroy it outright as an enemy pocket.  The strategy appears to be one that was favored initially by the Wehrmacht and then the Soviets on the Eastern Front during WWII.   

During the second half of the war, the Soviets became expert in large-scale pincer movements: pin down the enemy in the front, encircle on both sides, and then close the circle or wait for its defenders to capitulate.  The Eastern Front moved westward by a series of these battles, some of them in Ukraine.  It became the signature operational strategy of the Red Army, and some of these actions were among the largest and most costly battles in history. The Germans never developed an effective counterstrategy to this approach, and encircled areas became kill zones before being completely reduced. The present offensive around Bakhmut has the characteristics of a WWII pincer/encirclement offensive and a slow, grinding WWI offensive with gains measured in meters. To date the casualty rates are supposed to have been horrendous.

In a war that is going well, encircled units may be relieved before destruction.  This was the case of the 101^st Airborne Division at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (the Screaming Eagles were surrounded within an enemy salient that was quickly reduced). If relief or withdrawal are not possible, encircled units,—besieged and cut off from supply lines—have three choices: a fighting breakout to the rear, surrender, or destruction.  On the Eastern Front, the Soviets used combined arms attacks supported by massed rocket artillery, Katyushas—the horrifying, shrieking area weapons that the Germans called “Stalin’s organ”—to reduce encircled sectors.  If the present Russian offensive grinds on, as it is expected to do, and an orderly withdrawal from the area becomes impossible, then these three options may become the only choices left for the Ukrainian defenders of Bakhmut. If the town falls, it could spell disaster for the side that fought so well to defend it. The best option therefore, may be to abandon the city and fall back to stronger defensive positions, as the Russians themselves did at Kherson.  

Although the Russians will press their offensive at multiple points along the front, the town is seen by both sides as a linchpin of the war. Russia and Ukraine are both committing massive resources to the fight. Why?  Except for the fact that it is an administrative center—perhaps the equivalent of an important county (raion) seat (with a prewar population around 71,000, it is slightly larger than Rockville, Maryland)—in a salt mining area and a crossroads town (like Borodino, Gettysburg, and Bastogne), what is its strategic importance? 

From what I understand—and accurate information is hard to come by—both sides may consider the town to be the gateway to western (i.e. unoccupied) Donetsk.  Taking Bakhmut would therefore allow the Russians to move on the larger cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk and securing the rest of the Donetsk oblast. Some commentators have speculated that a Russian victory at Bakhmut could mark the beginning of the end of the war—a latter-day Stalingrad on a smaller scale. But again, it is hard to tell. At least one observer (Scott Ritter) has pointed out that Bakhmut is a strategic strong point in the line. Thus the Russians appear to be violating the Napoleonic precept to avoid an enemy in a prepared position. If the Russians do break through there, it is difficult to say how the U.S. and NATO would respond, but it might signal a new and extremely dangerous phase of the war.  The town has also become an important symbol for the brave Ukrainian resistance, and winning there appears to have become a matter of national pride for both sides.  Casualties are supposed to be horrendous. It is a microcosm of the war.

Postscript, May 13, 2023
Over the past few days, Ukrainian forces have made gains to the immediate north and south of the Bakhmut salient. The Russian strategy of the past few months now appears to have been similar to that of the Soviets at Stalingrad: to bleed the other side white.  

Postscript, May 21, 2023
Russian sources are reporting that Bakhmut has fallen.

By Michael F. Duggan

By June 1864, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was tired of war. The 23-year-old brevet colonel, formerly of the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, had twice been shot within an inch of his life—through the chest at Ball’s Bluff on the Potomac near Leesburg, Virginia, and through the neck at Antietam—and almost lost his foot to a ball from a Confederate canister shell at Chancellorsville. He had seen many of his friends killed or wounded in the war (Holmes was convalescing in Boston during the battle of Gettysburg, where the 20th would lose 10 of its 13 officers, killed and wounded). In almost four years of fighting, 20th suffered 409 killed, the fifth highest number of casualties of all regiment units in the Union Army.

In January 1864, Holmes was made aide-de-camp to General Horatio Wright of the second division in the Union’s VI Corps (Wright would become corps commander on May 12). His job as a staff officer turned out to be almost as dangerous as that of a combat officer, and he was frequently on the firing line. By late spring, with his period of service nearly up, Holmes decided that he had had enough.

More than anything, it appears to have been Grant’s Virginia Overland Campaign of May and June that got to him. On May 11, Holmes wrote to his mother “Today is the 7th day we have fought, not pitched battles all of the time of course, but averaging a loss I guess of 3,000 a day at least.”¹ In six weeks, the Army of the Potomac would lose just under 55,000 men. Holmes would muster out at Fort Stevens in Washington, D.C. on July 17, 1864. He had more than done his share and would go on to become the greatest legal thinkers in U.S. History and our greatest Supreme Court Justice.

With 110,000 men, Grant realized that he could sustain twice as many casualties as Lee (with 60,000-65,000 men) and still win the war. Union battlefield defeats—although significant—were secondary relative to the overall strategy of destroying Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The idea was to latch on to Lee like a bulldog and not let go. In spite of significant losses at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, the greater numbers of the Union Army ultimately prevailed. One hundred seven years ago this Tuesday, the Imperial German Army attack Verdun, knowing that the French would defend it to the last man. Such is the hideous logic of attrition.

The population of Ukraine is now estimated to be below 37 million, and is perhaps far lower. The population of Russia is around 145 million, almost four times as large, with a traditional industrial/extractive economy capable of autarchy and supporting a war effort indefinitely. If Russia’s offensive takes on the slow, grinding character of a 19th or early 20th century offensive with modern weaponry, as it it expected to do, it seems likely that even with heavy casualties, they will win.

When I think of a war of attrition, it is the Western Front of the First World War that comes to mind. It was a tragedy—a catastrophe. But it was also a crime. The politicians on both sides knew what was happening in Flanders and Picardy. The final campaigns of the Civil War were judged to be necessary measures in what had become an existential war. By the end of the war, the South was in ruins but would eventually win the peace after the failure of Reconstruction in 1878. Grant was called a “butcher” by some. We can infer that the war in Ukraine is heading into a particularly destructive phase and one that could easily morph into a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. Larger numbers are not always the determining factor of a war, but in Ukraine, they may be suggestive (and some independent Western sources are reporting that Russian losses to date may be considerably lower than the numbers reported by the mainstream media). If the war remains limited to Ukraine and Russia, the side with the greater numbers will likely prevail. The other alternative is a festering war of position.

At this point, the only position for a rational person is one favoring peace talks.

Note
1. Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire, Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 114.

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/