Here we go again.  The eastern-most expansion of North Eurasians (Russia) is clashing along the frontier of its empire with the western-most expansion of North Eurasians (the United States).  History hasn’t ended, contrary to Francis Fukuyama, the political philosopher who asserted the claim in The End of History and the Last Man, written shortly after the US victory in the Cold War., whose title is all you need to read of the book. No matter how elaborately the claim is argued, it is founded on the false premise that history progresses in a linear fashion to some idealized destination.  The Great Power conflict of the Cold War didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It just went underground for a couple of decades, like a mini-Dark Ages (more on that later).

The ink was barely dry on the first-draft history of the US’s Afghanistan debacle (one which both empires suffered in sequence, Russia first, adding two more exhibits to the proof of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires), before the US provoked a renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine by seducing Russia’s long-standing sidekick (Ukraine) with promises of cooperation and aid, and eventually, NATO membership, i.e., protection under the US nuclear umbrella. Russia has the largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world, estimated at about 6,000 warheads, of which about half are of the ‘strategic’ (i.e., not ‘tactical’) variety, capable of raining death and destruction on enough of the world’s population that they could effectively destroy civilization.  The US has a similar capability.  Russia did not want Ukraine under the US’s nuclear umbrella because it would mean Russia couldn’t use its umbrella to manipulate and control Ukraine, and because it might allow the US to place some of its nuclear weapons closer to Russia.  Ukraine fell for the US’s advances and refused to negotiate with Russia, even as the US pledged there would be no US troops committed to Ukraine’s defense and it had only hinted at, but not yet clearly promised nor yet welcomed Ukraine under its umbrella.

In the late 1990’s/early 2000’s, just as a revanchist* Vladimir Putin was coming to power in Russia, promising to the Russian people much as Hitler had promised Germans almost a century before, that he would Make Russia Great Again (MRGA?), journalist and author Robert Wright was looking around at all the globalizing ‘progress’ humanity was making at becoming organized under a single, one-world, supranational government and wrote a book (Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny) optimistically declaring its inevitability.  Wright ignored that all the national governments thereby displaced would likely not be as happy as him about such a development. There was apparently no end to the giddiness that Cold War victory induced in American academics.  (*revanchist means ‘someone who wishes to reassemble an empire’, not to be confused with revisionist as a WSJ reporter did the other day, which could mean something nearly the opposite with regards to history).

I was rereading Wright’s book as Russia launched its latest invasion of Ukraine.  I couldn’t help but think regarding both Wright and Fukuyama that it must be quite humbling for an optimistic futurist to have one’s sunny, long-range predictions proved false within only a couple of decades (i.e., within one’s own lifetime). I googled Wright and Fukuyama.  It appears neither have issued contrite admissions of error or offered retractions.

Glass-half-full types need to consider what happens if the glass tips over and empties out.  The prospect of the US getting dragged into direct conflict with Russia through the Ukraine war, a conflict that would almost certainly end with the complete and utter nuclear annihilation of both sides and much of the rest of the world, makes Wright’s prediction of a world in which everyone happily (more or less) gets along under one overarching, supranational world governing power seem, let’s just say, a tad naïve. While his basic premise that it was inevitable that human society becomes more complex and intertwined over time is correct, the impetus for the burgeoning social entities thereby created is their own survival and the destruction of their rivals.  Social complexity begets social complexity for the purpose of competing with socially complex rivals.  With each advance in creative and social complexity mankind has likewise advanced in destructive simplicity and effectiveness.  All it takes now is pushing a few buttons and we end up where we began, scouring the Earth for sustenance, perhaps devouring each other (as we’ve mostly killed off the large mammals we hunted to sustain us before agriculture), if there’s enough of us left to make hunting each other profitable.  If there’s no one left to cannibalize, Fukuyama will have proved correct. 

Geography

If one wishes to understand the Ukraine-Russia conflict, one must first look at a globe (not a map, but a globe).  Turn the globe to center in your field of view the Fertile Crescent, an arc stretching from the coast of present-day Israel in the west (some historians start the crescent-moon-shaped arc at the Nile River Valley), up through western Syria to southeastern Turkey, and over and down along the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys in Iraq.  This is where mankind first developed agriculture.  This is also a chokepoint for migration between Africa, where modern humans originated, to Eurasia, the vast continent to which they initially migrated and flourished.  From the top of the Fertile Crescent arc in southeastern Turkey follow the land north (i.e., don’t take the sea route by going west in Turkey to arrive at the Dardanelles/Bosporus between the Aegean, Sea of Marmara and Black Sea).  Past Turkey, east of the Black Sea, will be Georgia (a former Soviet client state and an object of Russian invasion in 2008), Armenia and Azerbaijan (also former clients), and a sliver of Iran, along with a small mountain range, the Caucasus (from where the term ‘Caucasian’ originates, which means ‘a white-skinned person of European descent’ in American English—exhibiting for the gazillionth time that language just makes stuff up as it goes along).  Upon reaching the Caucasus and passing through Georgia, you have reached southwestern Russia.  Bounded to the west by the Black Sea, the east by the Caspian Sea and the south by the mountains giving the region its name, the Caucasus opens north onto the vast western Eurasian steppe that stretches from Ukraine southwest to Romania and Hungary; northwest to Poland, Belarus, the Baltics and Germany; north to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Finland, and east to the Ural Mountains (after which there’s more steppe—most significantly, that from which the Mongols arose).  The Fertile Crescent to the Caucasus could be considered an upside-down people funnel flowing north, spilling its contents onto the western Eurasian steppe.

The steppe is vast, fertile, and indefensible, the latter because it’s a steppe (i.e., mainly flat) lacking in natural barriers (e.g., oceans, mountains, and even trees), aside from its ample number of waterways, which are both barriers and conduits.  Probably because of its habitability, indefensibility, and migratory importance, it has been the subject of countless wars and battles, in both historical and pre-historical times.  The soil of the steppe has probably been soaked in as much human blood as any other on the planet. Looking on the Wright (bright) side, all that spilled blood must have added to the land’s fertility, no doubt part of the great Panglossian design.

It’s easy to grasp on a globe the vastness of Russia relative to Ukraine, or anywhere else, stretching as it does from eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean.  Just start at Moscow and spin the globe right to left (opposite the Earth’s rotation).  You’ll be halfway around the world before Russia ends.  Better yet, look down at the globe from the North Pole.  You’ll immediately see the Arctic Ocean is ringed half the way around by Russia.  The Soviet Union was even vaster, including Ukraine and a host of vassal states to its west and south.  As the American Vice-President Kamala Harris pointed out when trying to explain the conflict (not to kindergarteners but adults), Russia is a very big country that is invading a much smaller country next to it (paraphrased).  Russia’s population however is not as vastly larger than Ukraine’s as its land area might imply.  Russia has only a bit more than three times the population of Ukraine.  But Russia could easily fit half a dozen Ukraine-sized countries west of the Urals, and probably twice that many in Siberia east of the mountains.  Most of Russia’s population lives west of the Urals, though getting hard statistics on exactly how the population is distributed is difficult.  An educated guess would say Siberia is to Russia as the Mountain West is to the US—sparsely populated outside of a few urban corridors. Or perhaps more aptly, like Canada is to the US; bigger in area but much smaller in population, as the sparsely populated taiga fades north to barely inhabited tundra.

Prehistory (from earliest days until the collapse of the Soviet Union)

The 10th century (from 901 to 1000 ad) is considered by some historians (the lazy or ideologically progressive ones) the darkest of the Dark Ages.  It’s the sort of century where it seemed little ‘progress’ was made in the cultural evolution necessary to reach the utopia that optimists like Fukuyama and Wright promise is culture’s ultimate destination.  But the Byzantine Empire reached its zenith during the age.  Leif Ericson founded the Greenland colony. England unified under a single king and became properly English.  Early in the century, Chinese warlords for the first time used gunpowder in battle; late in the century, the Song dynasty reunited China.  The Mississippian culture got its start in the Southern US; the Toltecs in Mexico.  France granted the County of Rouen to the Viking Rollo, starting the principality that would become Normandy (named for the Normans, or North men, i.e., Vikings). The last reindeer and bear died in Britain while the last lion died in Europe, probably somewhere in the Caucasus.  Closer to our subject matter, the first Bulgarian Empire, a Bulgar-Slavic state, reached the zenith of its power in the Balkans, including in western areas of what is now Ukraine.  And finally, the Kievan Rus’, a state begun as a series of trading and raiding posts on the northern banks of the Dnieper River in the previous century by what’s generally agreed were Norsemen who became Slavicized over time, expanded its reach south to establish its headquarters in Kyiv, planting the kernel of culture that Russia, Belarus and Ukraine would later claim as their own in contriving their origins myths. 

The Kievan Rus’ leader Vladimir the Great punctuated the end of the dark century by adopting Christianity as the Kievan Rus’ official religion, leading the whole city of Kyiv to the river for baptism.  He probably chose Orthodox Christianity because of the importance of the Byzantine Empire (which was Orthodox Christian at the time) to Kievan Rus’ trading and raiding imperatives.  The Kievan Rus’ were to the Byzantine Empire what the Germanic Barbarian tribes had been to the Western Roman Empire, antagonists in part, but exploiting to great profit their proximity to the Empire and its wealth.

10th century history is a riotous, complicated mess, especially regarding the Kievan Rus’ and the area of what is now western Russia, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine that the Kievan Rus’ proto empire came to encompass. Looking at it now from the span of a millennium away is like looking at the canopy of a jungle from above and trying to tease out the path each branch of each tree and vine took to make it to the sunshine.  But dismissing the century as dark because there was no single ascendant political entity keeping a tidy catalog of events from which to concoct a narrative is to favor just-so narratives of historical progress to a destination over twisted, contorted and confused realities (and to ignore the Byzantine Empire).  The truth of eras dominated by powers like the Roman Empire are as twisted, contorted and confused as were the Dark Ages, but great power scribes and historians neatly distill things for posterity in ways that make them seem less so.  Sometimes the best history is written in the genes.

The Yamnaya were unknown to history until science developed the capacity to sequence ancient DNA. In the southern reaches of the area dominated by the Kievan Rus’, archaeological, linguistic and most prominently, genetic evidence, now points to a quasi-nomadic group of pastoralists arising there around 5,000 years ago (3000 bc) and spreading west, east and southeast.  Much like the Mongols 4,000 years later, the Yamnaya leveraged an adaptive advantage for warfare on the steppe into expansion and conquest.  (The Yamnaya perfected the art of horse-drawn carts to facilitate movement; for the Mongols, it was horseback archery.)  Both empires killed or enslaved the male populations of their conquests.  We know because their legacy Y chromosomes disappeared. Upwards of 90% of today’s West European males carry Yamnaya Y chromosomes.  As for the Mongols, there’s an estimated 16 million men living in areas that were conquered by the Mongols who today carry just the Great Kahn’s Y chromosome.  Presumably, there’s at least as many more carrying the Y-chromosome of other Mongol warriors and chieftains.  Russians and Ukrainians share almost enough Yamnayan DNA to be brothers, carrying (respectively) an average of 46.8% and 42.8% of Yamnayan autosomal DNA. To illustrate the impact the newly-discovered Yamnaya had on history, it is considered likely they are the source of the Indo-European language family from which all the Germanic (including English), Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Greek and Albanian languages are derived.

The Mongolian Golden Horde swept west in the 13th century, conquering and subjugating the Kievan Rus’, devastating its centers of power (Kyiv, e.g.) and bringing its states and principalities into the largest land empire the world has ever seen.  The Tartars, as the Kievan Rus’ knew them, ruled nearly two hundred and fifty years, but left the conquered to their own devices, happy to simply collect tribute.  During Mongol rule, a new polity centered on Moscow arose from the Kievan Rus’ ashes. When its ruler, Ivan the Great, refused in the late 15th century to pay Mongol tribute and the Golden Horde had by then become so decadent and weak that it could not force payment, a fledgling empire was born.  A half-century later, Ivan the Terrible (the Great’s grandson) rebranded the polity the Tsardom of Russia. After a succession crisis (the Time of Troubles) Michael Romanov was elected Tsar by a council of nobles (1613), beginning the dynasty that would last until the 20th century. By the end of the 17th century, Russia stretched from eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean.  Early in the 18th century, Peter the Great again changed the country’s name, this time to the Russian Empire (though its leaders would still be called Tsar, echoing the Caesars of ancient Rome), modernized and westernized its economy, established an oceanic navy for the first time in its history and founded St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea coast as the Empire’s new capital. 

After Peter the Great died, another succession crisis ensued and the Romanov dynasty biologically (if not politically) most likely ended with the accession in 1762 of Catherine the Great, a German princess without dynastic connections who had married an heir to the throne (Peter III) who was summarily dispatched (killed) shortly after his accession (perhaps by Catherine’s supporters). Catherine initiated a Russian version of Europe’s Enlightenment while further expanding and modernizing the Empire.  Her grandson, Alexander I, established Russia as one of Europe’s Great Powers with his defeat of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861, two years before slavery was abolished in the US, but it proved insufficient.  The same stew of dissatisfaction that freed the serfs simmered for decades, finally boiling over with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 in which Russia’s last emperor, Nicholas II, abdicated the throne. The Bolsheviks, not satisfied that they were safe from the Romanov dynasty’s return by their exile in Yekaterinburg (i.e., Catherine-burg in English, named after Peter the Great’s wife, Catherine I, in western Siberia), executed Nicholas and his entire family in 1918.  It wasn’t an outlandish concern.  An episode early in the 17th century saw Ivan the Terrible’s son, Dimitry, rise from the dead twice (in the form of False Dimitry I and False Dimitry II), to claim the throne. 

Russia’s modern era began when the Bolshevik revolution resulted in four states, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and the Transcaucasian SFSR joining in 1922 to form the Soviet Union, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the USSR, which would last just shy of seventy years.  During its three score and ten, the Soviet Union entered an alliance with, then was invaded by, Nazi Germany, which it eventually unconditionally defeated; put the first man in space; crushed revolts of its Warsaw Pact clients, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; invaded and humiliatingly departed Afghanistan, and most importantly for today, acquired a nuclear arsenal sufficient to destroy the world several times over.  The nuclear arsenal remains, now in the possession of the Russian Federation, the rump of the Soviet Empire.  During the first decades of the post-War era, the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in a cutthroat superpower competition and nuclear standoff known as the Cold War.

Relative to Russia, Ukraine has very little history as an independent state.  It shares its cultural beginnings with Russia in the Kievan Rus’ state that collapsed with the Mongol invasion. From there, the land that eventually would become modern-day Ukraine was ruled by whichever Central/East European power was ascendant at the time, from a Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth (circa 17th century), to the Russian Empire (variously), to a brief independence after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 before becoming a founding member of the Soviet Union in 1922.  During the Soviet era, the Holodomor initiated by Stalin in the early 1930’s starved several million Ukrainians to death.  Ukraine later hosted some of the fiercest fighting of World War Two between Germany and the Soviet Union.  During the Soviet era, there arose a nationalist movement among Ukrainian exiles in Canada that attempted, with some success, to weave a unique national identity for Ukraine from the threads of its history. 

Post-Cold War History

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. All its former member states, including Ukraine, declared their independence and there was nothing to keep them from it.  Russia, the core of the empire, fell into an anarchic sort of dog-eat-dog capitalism that reduced professional classes to shop vendors and street sweepers and menial laborers to homelessness and starvation.  As routinely characterizes anarchy, a few strongmen grew obscenely wealthy and powerful, in this instance via looting the country’s vast natural resources with the help of what remained of the Russian government. The law of the taiga (the Siberian version of the jungle) ruled.  Zero-sum (winner take all) transactions prevailed as the state reverted to the semblance of a chiefdom (something to which humans aren’t logically destined according to Mr. Wright). While Western political philosophers condescendingly and patronizingly declared that mankind’s historical progress had reached its destination with the ascendancy of Western values, Russia reverted to barbarism. (Ukraine’s post-Cold War experience was, in the beginning, similar to Russia’s).

After eight years of Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic rule as Russia’s first elected president, Vladimir Putin was appointed Prime Minister (by Yeltsin) in 1999, then was elected President in 2000.  He served for eight years before reverting to Prime Minister in 2008 (because of term limits), then was reelected to the presidency in 2012, where he has served since, pledging that he won’t seek another term when the present one expires in 2024. 

Putin accreted power like people go bankrupt—slowly, then all at once.  It was probably his reelection in 2012 that solidified his all-powerful hold on Russian government. Russians, having had an awful experience with democracy under Yeltsin, seemed eager to trade a bit of democratic freedom for some autocratic, even Stalinist, order and security.  (In Wright’s terms, grown weary of all the zero-sum transacting, they opted to submit to a strong ruler who could promote mutually beneficial, i.e., nonzero-sum, relations.)

Just as the Treaty of Versailles created Hitler, the collapse of the Soviet Union created Putin.  To go along with the humiliation of the Russian people’s greatly reduced circumstances (most of them anyway), they’d lost the pride they’d had in belonging to something big and historically important.  The privations of Soviet socialism at least had as their justification a proclaimed (if dubiously) higher purpose.  But with the collapse of the Soviet experiment, and the Russian Orthodox Church already having been squashed to virtual extinction by godless communism, the people had nothing left in which to believe.  Putin set about to give them a country in which to believe and of which to be proud, while at the same time revivifying the Church.

Putin has many times claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.  A century that included maybe 20 million Soviet dead (maybe more) in the Great Patriotic War (World War Two); Stalin’s purges and famines; the Bolshevik Revolution; defeat, sort of, in WWI; defeat (not sort of) by the Japanese in Manchuria. Russians were quite busy in the previous century, living interesting lives, as if under a Chinese curse.  (But they probably wouldn’t appreciate my saying that.  Russians and Chinese don’t usually get along so well.  Or didn’t, until Xi realized that if he allied with Putin just before Putin invaded Ukraine, he’d look like the tame, sane autocrat by comparison. At least until he invades Taiwan.)

NATO, the Cold War alliance ostensibly created to defend against Soviet aggression after World War Two, became, along with the European Union, a post-Cold War alliance to economically and militarily isolate and overwhelm Russia.  It has steadily expanded eastward, relentlessly adding former Soviet clients and member states to its rolls.  States that have joined NATO since the fall of the Soviet Union include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1999; Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in 2004; Croatia and Albania in 2009, and finally the Republic of Northern Macedonia in 2020.  In response to Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, two more states, Sweden and Finland, applied for NATO membership.  Aside from Belarus and (nominally) Ukraine, with the accession of Finland, NATO will touch every western border of Russia, from the Artic to the Black Sea.  The governing premise of the Alliance—that an attack on one state will be considered an attack on all (Article 5 of its charter)—has yet to be tested in the European theater.  With eventually 32 ‘independent’ states in the NATO alliance once Finland and Sweden join, the chances are high that the first test will be when one NATO state attacks another.  But the more important question is whether a Russian nuclear attack on a NATO state would induce retaliation in kind.  If Russia dropped a tactical nuke on the Republic of Northern Macedonia, would the US retaliate in kind, risking its own security? France and Germany recently made direct overtures to Putin to negotiate a settlement of the Ukraine war, perhaps revealing a sliver of light between the interests of the US and the countries it shelters under the NATO nuclear umbrella.

On December 5, 1994, the US, Great Britain, Russia and Ukraine signed what became known as the Budapest Memorandum.  Ukraine agreed to give to Russia all the nuclear weapons remaining on its soil from its Soviet days, in return for which the US, Great Britain and Russia agreed to protect its independence, territorial integrity, and sovereignty.  All three of the US, Great Britain and Russia have broken their promises to Ukraine; the US and Great Britain for failing to protect Ukrainian independence, territorial integrity, and sovereignty; Russia for invading and annexing Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and more extensively, in 2022. But the Budapest Memorandum was not a treaty, just a feel-good statement of intent backed by nothing.

Current Events Leading to War

The Ukraine-Russia War did not start in February of 2022, but eight years earlier with the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 that came after Ukraine ousted, in a February 2014 coup popularly called the Revolution of Dignity, its Russia-leaning President, Victor Yanukovych, who had suspended (at Russia’s behest) preparations for Ukraine’s membership into the European Union.  The coup was openly supported (and presumably covertly supplied and aided) by the US.  Russia immediately invaded and annexed Crimea and soon after civil unrest in southern and eastern regions of Ukraine (most likely instigated by Russian infiltrators) erupted in what became a long slog.  The War in Donbas, the area from where Yanukovych had drawn most of his support and was thereby more pro-Russian, was still simmering when Russia reinvaded in 2022.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba signed in November of 2021 the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership, a non-binding (in the sense that like the Budapest Memorandum, it didn’t rise to the level of treaty) expression of feelings detailing how wonderful each thought the other was, how much they individually and collectively hated Russia, and how they would each work together to get Ukraine a spot under the US nuclear umbrella, i.e., membership in NATO. Shortly afterward, Russia expanded its troop buildup along the Ukraine border, a buildup that had begun in March of 2021 and been continuing in fits and starts since. On February 20, 2022, Russia reinvaded, this time in the north around Kyiv and in the east around Kharkov, which has so far failed to accomplish much for Russia besides the conquest of Mariupol, a port city on the north coast of the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine, in territory under the de facto administration of the Donetsk People’s Republic (a breakaway state loyal to Russia).  Russia has however succeeded, at least momentarily, in galvanizing NATO solidarity.  And Putin has provided the Biden Administration with a scapegoat to lay the blame for its myriad ineptitudes upon.  According to the Administration, it’s ‘Putin’s inflation’ that’s driving gas prices to the stratosphere.

Though practically inviting Russia to invade by acknowledging its inevitability, the US nonetheless feigned surprise when it finally came.  President Biden claimed that Russia was ‘committing genocide’ and that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s elected president, ‘must go’, each utterance later retracted as gaffes by the American President’s handlers.  The US initiated a new round of economic sanctions (the first having begun in 2014).  Among other measures, the US froze Russia’s foreign exchange account holding some $600 billion US dollars in reserve, an action bound to reverberate across the foreign exchange markets for quite some time, possibly even to the point of imperiling belief in the dollar as the reserve currency of choice.  (Why store wealth in dollars when the US government believes itself free to confiscate dollars anytime it likes?)  The Russian ruble, after an initial plunge, inexplicably soared relative to the dollar, trading now (late May 2022) at a level higher than it was prior to this latest invasion. 

The EU tried to get its member states to agree to boycott Russian oil and gas, but they balked, settling only on Russian coal, which is immaterial to their energy needs. The US boycotted all three, but inconsequentially, as the US gets practically none of the oil, gas or coal it consumes from Russia. The US has tried to identify, isolate and sanction Russian oligarchs friendly to Putin but it’s hard to know how successful or effective its efforts have been.  The US recently passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, including for weapons and humanitarian needs, to go with roughly $13 billion spent already, mainly on weaponry.  Poland offered early in this second round of the conflict to give Ukraine 28 MiG 29 fighter jets through the US, if the US would resupply it with US F-16’s. Poland did not want to be seen as directly donating the aircraft to Ukraine but apparently neither did the US, as the US refused the offer, citing logistical complications and the danger of escalation.  On a visit to Kyiv a few weeks after this latest invasion began, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the US’s goal in supporting Ukraine is “…to see Russia weakened to the degree it can’t do the kinds of things it has done in invading Ukraine”, which helps explain the assortment of weapons the US has been willing to provide Ukraine. As the US doesn’t seek a Ukraine victory, but only a Russian weakening, the mix of weaponry must be finely calibrated to ensure they’re not too effective.  Apparently multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) fit the bill, good for extending the conflict but not so good that Ukraine might leverage them to victory, as the US has recently agreed to supply them.

Analysis

In some respects, this is a garden-variety clash along the frontiers of empires (the US and Russian) to determine where the precise line of demarcation lies. That the US isn’t doing any of the actual fighting makes it no less a clash between the US and Russia (it could be said between NATO and Russia, but the US is NATO, so why obfuscate things?).  The US provoked Russia to invade and enticed Ukraine to resist the Russian invasion so it could use Ukraine to do exactly as Secretary Austin described.  But weakening Russia militarily was incidental to the main objective.  As often occurs, domestic politics wagged the foreign policy dog.  The US’s primary motivation for provoking the conflict was protecting US defense industry funding from the threat posed by the Afghanistan debacle.  The defense industry needed a replacement war and a reason for taxpayers to forget Afghanistan.  Provoking Russia to extend its Ukraine invasion provided it. Putin’s impetus was less clear (Russia being ‘a mystery wrapped in an enigma’), but the Russian state generally needs constant war to unite its people and justify its depredations.

Provoking Russia is a dangerous way to ensure that US defense industry funding retains a robust level.  The US empire has been expanding since the collapse of its previous rival, the Soviet Union, and now laps the shores of the Soviet Union’s Russian rump.  If the US goes too far pressing its advantage through Ukraine, it risks pushing Russia to extreme measures. Though Russia chose the war, it can’t now lose it.  Losing the war would threaten Russia’s existence.  It will therefore do what it must to keep from losing, including resorting to nuclear weapons. With inherently asymmetrical motivations between the antagonists (the US doesn’t care about Ukraine or about winning the war, it just wants to give Russia a black eye while protecting its defense industry funding; Russia doesn’t necessarily care to conquer Ukraine, but can’t lose to Ukraine), probably the best outcome would be a stalemate and negotiated peace that acknowledges Russian sovereignty in the Donbas regions of eastern Ukraine.  The worst outcome would be the US failing at calibrating its support of Ukraine’s war effort so badly that Russia feels threatened to the extent it resorts to nuclear weapons.  No matter how it goes, good outcome or bad, Ukraine loses.  Zelensky’s stubborn-headed ‘heroism’ is doing nothing but getting Ukrainians pointlessly killed, though the US defense industry is undoubtedly grateful for their service.   The world might lose along with Ukraine if the US overplays its hand.  Sun Tzu advised to always allow an enemy an escape route.  If the US doesn’t allow Russia an escape route, World War III may be the result.  And as Einstein observed, if there’s a World War III, World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

A personal note

When I served in the US Army during the Cold War I was conditioned to hate Russians.  Though I knew next to nothing about Russia, having never met a single Russian and having never studied their history or culture, I thought I was cool for slapping a ‘Russia Sux’ bumper sticker on the Jeep CJ-7 I drove around Ft. Rucker during flight school. Six years later, in 1991, somewhere along a sand berm in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian desert where the borders of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait meet, I realized the Cold War and my conditioning to hatred of Russia had all been a big lie.  The US was as responsible for the Cold War as was the Soviet Union (perhaps more so, because the US had less certitude in defense industry funding than did the Soviet Union).  For the US, keeping the Cold War pot of antagonism simmering was a means to ensure defense industry coffers were always full.  How did I come to the realization?  Because I was busy ‘defending the Constitution’ against a tinpot dictator thousands of miles away who had no means whatsoever of threatening the US or its Constitution.  The Cold War had ended in the worst possible way for the US military industrial complex (MIC), i.e., with the collapse of its funding foil the USSR, and it needed another funding mechanism.  So, the US invited Saddam to invade Kuwait (look it up), and voila, there would be no swords beaten into plowshares.  The US is doing it again with Russia and Ukraine.  The end of the forever war in Afghanistan meant new justifications for sky-high military budgets were needed so the US turned back to Russia, demonizing and vilifying an old foe to keep defense industry profits rolling in.  I thoroughly hate what my country is doing, as much as I hated it when my service concluded with a war to keep defense contractors and generals profitable and relevant (I did my sworn duty in the first Gulf War then requested and was granted a full and honorable discharge upon my return).  But this is a far more dangerous game the US is playing, more dangerous even than the game it played during the Cold War.

I’ve tried to be as objective in this analysis as I could but admit to despairing at seeing real lives and property being destroyed, again, just so the MIC has an enemy to support its continued profitability and relevance.  Is the prospect of a couple of years of flat profits so terrible for defense industry contractors that Ukrainians and Russians must die by the thousands? Couldn’t we just give the defense industry the money without them having justify it by helping to kill so many innocents?  My despair is misplaced.  History teaches that even were this war rejected for its blatant basis in profiteering, another would arise soon enough.

I wish Wright and Fukuyama weren’t wrong.  I wish that mankind was progressing to some enlightened state of being where everyone got along with everyone else for the mutual benefit of all.  But man is a wolf to man (Freud).  People cooperate only when a competing group of cooperating people compels them to it.  War is the clearest expression of mankind’s innate ‘unsocial sociability’ (Kant, as quoted by Wright). Great Power warfare, i.e., the clash of empires, is the fullest expression of mankind’s nature.  Contrary to Wright, world war is the inevitability to which ever increasing social and technological complexity will always lead.  Fukuyama’s history will have ended when the last man has succumbed to its depredations.