ukraine war

Fools Pick Fights That Aren’t Their Own

/ geotrickster / 7 Comments

I was originally going to write this post anyway before all the Gaza Strip stuff happened. I was simply waiting to get back from an international trip before doing so. That a new round of fighting between Israel and Palestine broke at the tail end of my trip only added from my desire to write such a thing. And while I know it would get more attention if I published it externally at some official publication, I feel few would allow me to say what I really want on the subject.

Every tribal war or local territorial dispute now has taken on global dimensions due to media saturation, the universalist claims of the American state, and the existential rhetoric its opponents adopt in response. This leads to a massive distortion in what people regard as self-interest, rejecting rationalist prudence for a crusader mentality of whatever the pet cause of the day is or ones personal/psychological vendettas.

People who live in North America for instance, but have no friends or family in either Israel or Palestine, are deeply invested in a tribal ethnic war that has no bearing on their life. Or, would have no bearing on their life were it not for the risk of outside power escalation. And the primary driver of outside power escalation is of course countries (and their publics) wanting to ‘do something‘. This is why interventionist states and their mouthpieces in the press are so obsessed with human rights narratives. They are always seeking to manufacture consent for the next intervention. It is increasingly obvious that in order to care about peace and stability one must not embrace, but renounce, the human rights focused view of the world.

While I am sure a large amount of the religious fanfiction of some cultures draws them like flies to shit when conflict in the Levant breaks out, this region is hardly alone in attracting this kind of attention. Having a national interest based discussion about Ukraine in North America, for instance, is always buried under layers of posturing bullshit about democracy, clashes of civilizations, and whatnot.

The obsession with tallying ‘War Crimes’ is a big part of this and may be central to this kind of rhetoric. The problem is war crimes trials are always by necessity victors justice, and without trials the concept has no meaning but a kind of whine. Power differentials make the concept situational as we know certain people will be punished and others not. Furthermore, such discussions feed into a false belief that war can be tamed and functions as a kind of courtly jousting match on a predetermined field. But in an era of mass urbanization, high explosives, and existentially justified stakes, this is impossible. Any war is a war on civilians and therefore the point of ‘war crimes’ is moot. To support a military operation is, inevitably, to support war on a society, not just its front line military. Considering the logistical network required for militaries to function this is both logical an inevitable. But it also means that to support a war means, undeniably, support for war on civilians and all that entails. This is why I personally support only a very few military operations even though I am not a pacifist. In my adult life I have only directly supported counter-ISIS and counter-Al Qaeda operations. And yes, this means I was fully supporting the demolition of places like Aleppo and Raqqa. Nor did I have the gall to pretend the policies I was advocating were actually for the good of the people being bombed, because no such policy can be good for everyone. The very existence of foreign policy presupposes the obvious observation that there are multiple groups of people with divergent interests.

The political center and its lapdog journalists, in love with war as they are, are actually made more hawkish by their faith that war is a controllable, even chivalric force of social change. Their maudlin humanism is not a hypocrisy except in rhetoric, it is a natural extension of their world view of treating war as transformational and moral rather than the breakdown of order and the failure of diplomacy. But some, even going back to Sunzi, warned us of the truth from the start: War is always a failure and a dangerous roll of the dice, even when it is necessary. That is why it must be kept to a minimum even though it is always prepared for as inevitable. But when it is embraced, it is only rational to embrace it to the maximum. If you believe a war is necessary, you believe the attempted demolition of another society is necessary. At least have the honesty to admit it. All people have a place where they reach this point. It is dishonest to deny it. And becoming squeamish when your faction does not behave in the way a suburban commentariat wishes just shows your views are superficial at best, calculated for social prestige at worst.

But let us not just pick on the centrists. The past month has shown us the worst spread of leftoid and rightoid thought across the board. Our entire culture is unprepared to seriously engage with nuance and restraint. Earlier, a moronic English language spokesperson for the Ukrainian military threatened U.S. citizens for criticizing involvement in the war. Even a cursory examination of this person’s past reveals a sadly predictable pattern: the lost soul in search of a cause who wanders the world looking for a fight that isn’t theirs. Having finally found one (a war which, since the failure of the first Russian offensives anyway, is basically now one of local territorial control) the foreign volunteers have adopted as a cause above and beyond their empty listless life in an attempt to find meaning they are too weak to make for themselves. A lack of self-cultivation leads to radicalization abroad.

I used to analyze patterns of extremist recruitment for jihadist networks when I worked for the U.S. government. It is interesting how many of the psychological identifiers are in place for western Ukraine volunteers. Downward mobility, an obsession with culture war and global teleology, the desire to erase one’s own personal insignificance by joining an existential cause beyond themselves. When these people come home, mark my words, they will destabilize their home countries. They are the new Freikorps, or Japanese army officers after the Siberian Intervention, or jihadists. Their jihad is Reddit (or Azov) and their connections and sense of entitlement make them a domestic danger. At the very least they should be put under surveillance. And for me, a general opponent of the surveillance state, to say that means I am very serious about the danger these people pose to the rest of us.

The right, if anything, has beclowned itself even more than the left and center. At least Ukraine ties into great power competition and therefore is a national security issue of some kind. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can’t even do that unless you think Saudi Arabia and Iran are global powers…an odd thesis. For years I have been warning the realism and restraint community (who has been rightly happy with more republicans listening to its argument than at any time in generations) that this was a fair-weather situation. I told many people, again and again, that the second something happened to Israel you would see the Bush/Cheney marriage of evangelical end times prophecies and neoconservatism come roaring back to the surface like it had never left. That happened this week. All the Big Tough Guys who pose about being better than the pussy humanists now shriek about seeing the face of war brought to their darling little pet nation, Israel, the nation they have sworn allegiance to above that of their own. This transferred nationalism allowing them to go to places the regular old kind at home is inadequate for. The conservative love of a country which could be considered the biggest ‘welfare queen’ in American history, one that bombed the USS Liberty and constantly schemes to involve Washington in more Middle Eastern quagmires, is a masochistic and yes, quite cucked, affair. Any utility this alliance once had ended with the end of the Cold War, and it now serves only as a burden. Yet these sentimental rightoids cannot stop themselves. Its the Bible Country and its under attack! Tom Clancy would want us to be the heroic protagonists of this new Battle for Civilization! The Left Behind series is now real- get ready to RAPTURE!

And these American Pied Noirs are just waiting to see their Biblical fever dreams reenacted at home as well as abroad. Once again, surveillance is needed. In a rational state without delusions of Imperial Globalism, that’s what we would do. We would treat people more interested in fighting other people’s battles as inherently dangerous and unstable, and merely waiting to bide their time to import those battles back home. The historical record on these type of people is very clear on this point. At the very least their antics should be tracked and publicly documented on public forums.

Conflict zone interest should be categorized on a location-based capacity. The further something is located from you, the less relevant it is. Its ability to impact you only worsens the more things get involved. Anglos are taught from birth to see all struggles as global and good vs evil, but they are inevitably local, contextual, and tribal. They can be everything and existential if you live in or near a place, but are not if further afield. The true danger of globalization is that every struggle can become globalized.

Conflict is both inevitable and eternal. Understanding this, the only rational conclusion is containment, not intervention. Containment is not pacifism and requires both vigilance and force, but it can and will reduce the spread of outbreaks of violence. Those who wish to make local conflicts go global are complicit in making the world a more awful place, be they hawkish politicians or these psychological damaged war tourists. Diplomatic wisdom is being rooted more in place, in a very real physical sense, than being rooted in some Platonic-Manichean realm of battling ideals. It is spatial relationships that should concern the makers of foreign policy, not dreams of world transformation.

Global Regionalization and a Polydirectional Pathway to Peace

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment

I recently gave this exact lecture at a conference in Buenos Aires organized by Nueva Sociedad, the Fredrich Ebert Foundation, and Torqada Di Telli University. I am going to leave the text here.

The Ukraine War dominates the field of international relations and conflict analysis like no event since perhaps the fall of the Soviet Union. Its effects are truly global despite being extremely limited in the geographic scope of its combat. A combination of NATO’s relentless expansion ever eastward and Russian chauvinism towards its former satellite states and near abroad have plunged the world into once again worrying if a crisis in eastern Europe will drag powers from across the world into an ever spiraling situation outside of anyone’s control.

Here is where I diverge with the many analysts who comment on the danger of geographically fractured geopolitics. This present struggle is, and should remain, a European War as much as possible. Particularly now that it has devolved into a territorial dispute more than its likely original objectives- which was a full scale regime change operation planned in Moscow to be carried out in Kyiv. The worst case scenario feared at the outbreak has subsided, and now the worst case scenario has become further international escalation. Increased regionalization is in fact a good thing, as it presents an ability to keep conflicts local and compartmentalized rather than have them immediately reach the status of global crisis. 

I would contend that this war has harmed Russia far more than it will ever help it, even if Russia emerges from the maelstrom with actual territorial gains. Its plans to dominate the European energy market are wounded, its military is shown to be badly in need of major logistical and tactical level performance reform, and many countries known for close relations with Moscow are more suspicious than ever before. Especially Kazakhstan, whose growing oil wealth contrasts with the sword of damocles that hangs over its decision making by a bellicose Moscow and a Russian-majority population in its northern territories. Meanwhile, countries like Turkey and China are making the most of the situation to act as interlocutors between disputing powers. This reflects the increased competitiveness of strategically located middle powers, of which the Eurasian landmass has many. This factor is as important as the rise of China, considering how Japan, Indonesia, India, Iran, Turkey, Germany, and France all exist in a shatterbelt of regional power projection.

But Russia’s blunder has not just adversely affected its own position in a multipolar world. It has also exposed the fragility of an increasingly elderly Postwar Order. Cold comfort on a grinding attritional battlefield perhaps, but a very real faultline between the United States and its European allies on one side and much of the rest of the world on the other has been clearly exposed. Much of this divide stems from an over-reliance on sanctions by Washington, ironically undermining the very global trade the United States claims to be vital in upholding. Despite alienating many potential partners in the Global South, the amount of U.S.-led sanctions imposed on trade in the world consistently doubles with every new Presidential Administration, despite the provable fact that sanctions have a higher failure rate than they do successes. Concerns from abroad at this destabilizing behavior go largely unheard in the halls of DC. This is largely due to the immense imperial hubris of the U.S. and the ideological indoctrination of many of its junior allies who have come to believe such self-comforting ideas as “the end of history” and an eternal march of linear progress towards market economics, democratic norms, and other culturally specific and historically contingent elements falsely marketed as universal to the human experience. Such a world view makes every international crisis a global battle of ideas and thus existential. But to most of the world, the only thing existential about various faraway wars are the damage it does to international stability, and the dangers of being strong-armed into various great power alliance networks. 

Allow me to bring these themes to a more local context as befits our present location. I will start with a literary reference. 

In Gene Wolfe’s quintet of novellas known as The Book of the New Sun, the majority of the events of the story take place in a far future state known as the Commonwealth. This declining South American-based adoptive monarchy was once a vast interstellar empire, but now is a besieged continent-sized political entity centered around a massive capital city known as Nessus…which is strongly implied to be the future Buenos Aires. This state has its own massive internal problems but generally seems less odious than the sea monsters that lurk in the ocean or the massive northern power known as Ascia, which is invading it. 

A fascinating thing about the Ascians is how they speak a language no one can understand. This is because it is entirely based on political slogans and analogies related to their ideological worldview. For example, if you wanted to begin a story with the phrase “Once upon a time,” in Ascian, you would say “In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was to be found everywhere. The will of the Group of 17 was the will of everyone.” Being so committed to a utopian vision of how the world works, the Ascians can no longer communicate with anyone outside of their ideological bubble. Warfare seems to be the only form of international relations left to them.

This is what ‘The North Atlantic world’ (as well as some elements of Eurasianist Russia) seem to be increasingly becoming. Obsessed with false analogies over ‘Appeasement’ and ‘The New Cold War’, they have lost all contact with the local, regional, and national interests that still constitute survival for the countries of the Global South. But much like the Commonwealth in Book of the New Sun represents the potential for an alternative divergent from its ideologically maximalist neighbors, so too do parts of the Global South show us a way to handle faraway crises and keep them local.

The Non-Aligned League in the Cold War is an interesting example of trying to opt out of superpower-rivalry dominated politics, but it lacked any kind of geographic continuity and was really more of a statement of intent than something viable. But the future of the southern hemisphere in general looks better for such experiments in stability and peacebuilding than any other region, particularly South America. 

While South America is in the Western Hemisphere and thus will always need to factor in (ideally positive) relations with the behemoth known as the United States, it also exists at a safe distance from most of the world’s conflict theaters, and has a unique history of comparative geopolitical stability when it comes to peer-to-peer diplomacy. Sure, events such as the War of the Triple Alliance, The War of the Pacific, and the Chaco War have all occurred here, but compared to any other significant landmass with multiple nations sharing borders, this is positively pacifistic. Considering that the general trend of the future seems to be towards a re-regionalization, and most of the revisionist powers are in Eurasia, this trend of relative international stability in South America is likely to continue in the near future. And perhaps even come into greater self-direction as the U.S. directs more and more of its efforts towards East Asia and Europe. Most competition, struggle, and therefore military effort in the world will be in Eurasia, giving places further out a time to breath and find their own way forward.

Personally, as a citizen of the United States, I look forward to more Western Hemisphere cooperation, which builds off of a mutual desire to keep the stability of the region and prevent outside powers from dividing it. North and South America, taken together, represent an immense supercontinent which is eminently defensible by sea, and which contains three major global chokepoints on maritime activity, the high Arctic, the Tierra del Fuego, and the Panama Canal. It cannot be bypassed, something that cannot even be said for Eurasia. I believe there is a more realistic possibility for mutual security and prosperity here than there ever could be in either Eurasia or Africa. Indeed, this overlooking of the immense geopolitical potential of the Western Hemisphere is a subject I would like to research to a much deeper level in the future. (Anyone also interested in this, please feel free to contact me directly).

However, for obvious historical reasons, countries south of the United States cannot exactly trust its good graces. For now, no matter what future the hemisphere as a whole holds, South America must plan for itself. And the dangers of the present global moment of multipolarity offers opportunities to those far from the core regions of global rivalry, so long as the continent continues the trends begun in the 1990s by pursuing constructive mutual relations with each other. In fact, these should be deepened precisely because remaining reliant on faraway imports, globe-spanning supply chain networks, and the like risks turning a position of distance into one of isolation. But, building upon a legacy of self reliance, I believe that South America, collectively, can continue serving as an example of what geopolitical maturity and regional stability looks like.

The long term prospects I feel bullish about are that South America has many countries with clearly defined maritime interests and large port facilities, enabling participation in what has been a centuries long turn towards oceanic commerce being the most efficient form of economic activity across the globe. This is coupled with productive yet sometimes remote interiors. Most of the problems faced by South America have to do with these often coastal-facing countries having ill-defined borders in geographically challenging frontiers and seeking to manage demarcation of resources and land with neighbors. But with much of the population far from these potential clashing points, there exists less fuel to treat disputes as existential or ideological in nature. This has enabled a level of sober statecraft in diplomacy to take root that has prevented a major war from breaking out here for a much longer time here than happens elsewhere. Should South American governments continue the trend of pursuing regional cooperation outside of alien and globally-maximizing alliances, it is they, and not the ‘North Atlantic,’ Beijing, or Moscow that will serve as the most instructive example of responsible statecraft for smaller powers in the near future.

In his book ‘Imagined Communities’, Benedict Anderson postulates that despite most historians ignoring the trend, it was the wars of liberation in the Americas, and in particular in South America, that really invented the modern concept of a nation-state as we know it today. Not founded so much on unified ideology or romantic ethno-centrism as the common Eurocentric narrative goes, this first modern nationalism was a result of newspaper print runs and collective arrangements being limited by often forbidding geography, and people realizing that their experiences had diverged from that of the sprawling empires that they were birthed from and their inevitable global wars. 

As the various revisionist regional powers gear up for a new round of competition, and the previously hegemonic United States struggles to adapt to multipolarity, it is precisely this confluence of localism and stable regionalism that will come to delineate the more successful regions from the ones consumed by struggle. As too much dependence on the far abroad is replaced by more regional and secure connections less likely to be disrupted by a cascade of distant wars, other parts of the world might take note in turn, reducing the ability for regional wars to go global and enabling more nations to choose their battles judiciously, away from the requests to partake in economic or even military crusades far away from their interests. 

If I may end with a quote from Argentina’s most famous founding father, Jose de San Martin, ‘You will be what you must be, or else will be nothing.’

Thank You.

Losers and…’Winners?’…of the Ukraine War

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment

Building off of my past post about 6 months ago which was reacting to my first big geopolitical prediction fuck-up, I would now like to list how people are fairing in the ongoing war. I would have much rather done this at the end of the war, but an end is not in sight so now is as good a time as any.

The two losers of the war are Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine, obviously, because the war takes place in their country and is doing all kinds of untold long term destruction. Russia, because to make such small gains on an immediately adjacent and much smaller nation with a flat land border when one has so many military advantages is quite simply embarrassing. The Z-oid cope was that ‘well actually the advance on Kiev was a big feint.’ This is bullshit. It involved too many troops, special forces, and necessary goodwill from Belarus to be anything but an attempt at regime change decapitation. And it failed miserably in front of everyone. The vehicular losses were enormous and the damage to the morale and prestige of the Russian army immense. Now, the war swings back to advantage Russia because of its more narrow focus and one cannot underestimate their advantages at staging a comeback here, but Russia will be incapable of large scale conventional military offenses elsewhere for some time due to the need to replenish stocks of arms and army formations. Ukraine meanwhile, despite having lost so much and no doubt posed to lose much more, has also had gains. A previously fractious society has found a new civic nationalism and unity. An unexpectedly strong military performance implies that much like Finland in the Winter War, even a quantified loss could be a thing of pride going forward. Nevertheless, there is no way to classify being a country sized battlefield but as a loss.

This brings us to the more mixed bag. People who are not outright losing but who are not winning per se either. This is where I would lump in the United States, the United Nations, and many small developing nations. The United States because the immense cost of bankrolling Ukraine’s fight (something overwhelmingly borne of the US with its allies contributions barely noticeable, comparatively). This is a cost paid for the benefit of a non-allied nation and one that should never be an ally considering there is no sustainable solution but a neutral buffer Ukraine. While the U.S. is obviously sabotaging Russian efforts in the country, it risks being sucked into a perpetual involvement right on the border of Russia which badly stretches U.S. advantages and commitments for something that could only be a burden down the line. The United Nations, meanwhile, shows it could play a role in negotiating the end of the war but also at the same time shows off its immense impotence and irrelevancy when actual crisis occurs involving major powers. Finally, smaller nations-especially those who unwisely decided on crash course industrialization at the cost of their local agricultural sector have shown just how enslaved they have become to the global market and the vagaries of fate. If one’s food supply is suddenly a conflict zone everything can go wrong. That being said, the shock of this will almost certainly cause many of these countries to diversify their economy and open up more opportunities for agriculture to be internationally viable in the global market. Right now they suffer, but many of them will find new opportunities going forward if they are wise. Re-localization will not destroy globalization but it will return geography to the forefront of conceptualizing supply chains.

I also want to include myself in this mixed results faction. Because while I totally screwed the pooch on if the war would happen in the first place, the reason I thought it would not (outside of the Donbass anyway) turned out to be right. I thought, considering the increasingly battle hardened army and changing attitudes towards Russia in Ukraine since 2014, coupled with the influx of many heavy weapons meant that a major conventional war in Ukraine would become an enervating quagmire for Russia. Having come to this conclusion about a year before the war broke out, I thought if this looked apparent to me Moscow would also see it too. But the level to which Putin’s government apes Bush Era cult of positivity and stifling of dissent in the higher echelons is truly impressive. If anything, Russia has performed even worse than I expected-and I expected their performance to be far worse than most others did. So, I got the outbreak wrong, but the course of it I got more right than most people-with the majority opinion among analysts seeming to be “Russia will attack and will roll right over Ukraine.” Mine was “Russia will not attack because it would become a suppurating horrorshow right on their border.” Well, Moscow should have listened to me.

So out of all of this, who actually is winning? Who is gaining at a far more noticeable rate than they are losing? This list is the smallest of all. And I’m avoiding talking about defense contractors because no matter the war they always win. This would be the NATO alliance, for finally having a purpose and renewed relevance again after decades to merely exist as an arms buying network, China, for having inherited an even more compliant and subordinate Russia tied to its interests and providing alternatives for people to get around NATO aligned sanctions on that country, and above all Turkey. It pains me immensely to give Erdogan credit in anything but he really has played this crisis extremely well. His country is a rival with Russia yet he has personal rapport with Putin. He allows rich Russians to park their assets in Turkey while still supplying Ukraine with weapons and logistical support. Turkey’s ability to close the Straits into the Black Sea gives it the critical geographic leverage of the conflict and everyone knows it. Its above-average but significantly affordable and easy to maintain Bayraktar Tb2 drone is being ordered all around the world by countries that could not afford more shiny models, ushering in a new era of Turkish influence by exploiting the niche of practical-yet-technical that is going to be the major growth market in most countries. If current trends continue it will be in Ankara, not Moscow, Washington, or Kiev, that the biggest gains of the war are likely to be made.

As the world keeps moving away from unipolarity it is worth keeping in mind that this does not mean a return to US-China-Russia of the 1970s and everyone else waiting with bated breath. It actually means countries like Turkey, Iran, Japan, India, Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa will increase their roles between the shatter zones of the great powers. You can read more about this here. This process is only accelerating because of the war and Turkey is the first country to make such overt gains. Policymakers in Beijing, DC, and Moscow best factor this in for their future calculations.