by Conrad Black
It is easy to lose sight of the fact, but as 2024 begins, the underlying correlation of forces between the Western Alliance spanning Central and Western Europe, North America, India, Australasia, Japan, and parts of the Middle East is in good condition and is more than competitive with its rivals and adversaries.
After two years of war in Ukraine, Russia appears to have suffered approximately 400,000 casualties, which in comparative population terms would be about a million casualties in the United States. Their military has been more unimpressive than at any time since the Russian armies collapsed under the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Having persuaded the world, including the incompetent American former chairman of Joint Chiefs, General Milley, that they would occupy all Ukraine within a month, they have only succeeded in occupying approximately one-fifth of it. The spectacle of a gang of mercenaries quitting the Russian ranks and being cheered by the public as they purported to march on Moscow was not an image-building event for the Putin claim of a swiftly reviving Russia, resuming its place at the top table of the world’s nations.
Rather, Russia has flunked out as a great power at a cost to the United States of only five percent of its annual defense budget going to Ukraine and with no one except the brave Ukrainians taking casualties against the Russians. NATO has been revitalized, and its great bloodless victory in the Cold War has been reinforced, provided the Ukraine war ends reasonably promptly and with borders redefined close to the present military facts on the ground.
Though this has rarely been expressed explicitly, the West has always had two objectives in the Ukraine war: To prevent, firstly, a Russian conquest of Ukraine, or even of so much of it that it had no chance to become a viable and successful country, and, secondly, to do so without driving Russia permanently into the arms of China and rendering our long-term objective of welcoming Russia into the Western world unattainable.
Because Ukraine never existed as an independent country, and approximately one sixth of its population is Russian-speaking, though not necessarily possessed of any ambition to be Russian citizens, Russia has some legitimate interest in Ukraine. What is at issue in the present war is not only the confirmation of Ukraine’s status as an independent sovereign country accepted as such by Russia, but also the preservation of the largest single element in the great and almost bloodless strategic victory won by the West in the Cold War: the definitive separation of Ukraine from Russian control.
If the West had stood by and done nothing as Russia gradually, clumsily, and brutally reoccupied Ukraine, the world would have been confirmed in the view that China and Russia were more than happy to propagate, that the Western alliance is a sham, a worn-out task with no will to defend its declared values and legitimate interests.
Even now, if the United States’ aid to Ukraine, either as part of the congressional Russian roulette game involving Israel and the southern border, or because the know-nothing Paleolithic isolationists in the Republican Party prevailed with their insane theory that there was no legitimate American interest in the outcome in Ukraine, it would be an incitement to attack every perceived soft point all around the fringes of the Western alliance.
General Eisenhower, then the founding commander of NATO, declared when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1949: “We will have 10 more Koreas if we don’t respond forcefully now.” The same reasoning still obtains, and the challenge to the West is to define our legitimate interests correctly and confine them to what is practically defensible and does not constitute impetuous overextension.
It is unutterably galling and disappointing to see otherwise intelligent Republicans rejoicing in Ukrainian difficulties and virtually cheering on the Russians in order to heap more obloquy on the Biden administration. There comes a time when the national interest must be supported and the conduct of the Biden administration in Ukraine already provides plenty of political ammunition for its domestic opponents.
The president began by assuming the war was hopeless and practically inviting the Russians to take at least a few provinces from Ukraine and then offering Ukrainian president assistance in abandoning his position and fleeing his country. When the Ukrainians responded vigorously and successfully, President Biden then gloated in what he took to be some sort of vindication of himself and promised that the Russian economy would collapse, “the ruble will be rubble,” and commending the virtues of regime change in the Kremlin.
Unfortunately, since then there has been no indication of the future of American policy in Ukraine other than ”whatever,” and implicitly, “as long as it takes.” There is no sign that the United States has determined with allies what level of support it is prepared to give ultimately and how long it is prepared to wait to see where the battle lines end up.
For the West to make its point, it need do no more than salvage the unconditional independence, guaranteed by Russia and NATO, seriously and not in the cavalier and dishonorable way of earlier such guarantees of Ukraine, and then translate much of its military assistance into economic and political assistance to help build Ukraine into a strong Western nation in Eastern Europe, another milestone in the eastward expansion of the Western world.
The eastern boundary of those areas embracing Western values-democracy, the free market, and freedom of religion, would thus have moved a thousand miles in only 30 years from the western border of East Germany to the eastern border of an internationally recognized Ukraine. Of course, the other important strategic development as the year begins is Israel’s systematic destruction with full cause and justification, of probably the nastiest terrorist group in the world.
The continued existence of Hamas as the ruling entity in Gaza would make it impossible for Israel to reach a durable peace agreement with the Palestinian entity that fanatically and even suicidally opposes the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. The Biden administration has undermined by the concessions that it made in 2020 to the Sanders left and all the woke and racist extremists who crowded into that party under its wing, sacking America with ”peaceful protests” that cost scores of lives and billions of dollars in the summer of 2020 while Democratic municipal governments defunded police.
The administration is now trying to maintain the support of that morally bankrupt element while still pitching to the sensible majority of Americans and Democrats that accepts the right of Israel to respond to October 7, 2023 as the United States responded to December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.
Victory in Gaza, an acceptable settlement in Ukraine, and constitutional regime change in Washington, and there will not be another word for many years of the decline of the West or the twilight of America.
First published in the New York Sun.
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3 Responses
Mr Black shows his age once again with his rather quaint belief that the old liberal values of his youth still prevail in the West. Consequently, he cannot deviate from the “brutal dictator Putin bad, Ukraine & West good” narrative. So, as usual when you set out to look for what you wish to find, crucial facts are missing from his analysis.
First, the statement “Having persuaded the world … that they would occupy all Ukraine within a month” is nonsense. Putin’s invasion was always going to be a limited operation with the aim of securing the Eastern territories of Ukraine occupied primarily by ethnic Russians (persecuted for 10 years) and to install a regime in Kiev to govern a Ukrainian rump state which was not heavily influenced by hard-line nationalist Ukrainian militias. The possibility of realising a land bridge to the Crimea can be debated. These aims are evidenced clearly by the size of the Russian invasion force and Putin’s own statements.
Anyone looking for the “why” won’t find it in Mr Black’s version of events. There is zero mention of the Western coup in 2014 when a democratically elected Ukrainian government was overthrown in a US-funded “colour revolution” with direct interference by US diplomats. He also omits the now amply demonstrated Western contempt for the post-2014 Minsk accords, on the basis of which Putin negotiated in good faith. And of course Mr Black ignores entirely the multitude of broken Western promises about Nato expansion from the 1990s to the present day. Putin drew a line in the sand with Ukraine. The analogy would be the US not tolerating Russian military specialists training the Mexican army & arming nationalist militias (e.g. the Azov battalion & Right Sector in Ukraine) in that country and persecuting US citizens there.
The fact of the matter is that Ukraine falls under Russia’s sphere of influence. And the West has no vital interest there. Furthermore Ukraine is not a democracy: it is a thoroughly corrupt country ruled by a handful of oligarchs – not unlike Russia in fact. Yet the West persisted with provoking Russia and after Putin invaded Ukraine, deliberately intervened (via fools like Boris Johnson) on at least 2 occasions to stop Ukraine negotiating an end to the conflict.
The sheer folly of all this is now apparent. Harsh economic sanctions which were going to “put Russia out of business” in a few months have backfired: it is the West, especially Europeans, who have been hit hardest. After a few initial setbacks, Russia found new markets for it’s energy exports and the Russian economy has been operating ever more efficiently on a war footing. On the other hand, the limitations of Western economies have been exposed: they cannot even produce enough artillery shells for a middle-size country like Ukraine! American blowhards like Senator Lindsey Graham gloat about Americans not having to die in this “weakening of Russia” endeavour. Ukraine, meanwhile, has suffered some 500 000 casualties so far and around 15 million people have left the country, most never to return. The much-vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023 was an abject failure & there are ominous signs that the Russians are preparing their own offensive for the Spring. Putin may well end up getting more territory than he intended originally.
But the most egregious consequence of the Ukraine war has been a diminishing of the standing of the US and the West in the world. The US has succeeded in driving Russia into the arms of China. And the freezing of the assets of the Russian central bank in early 1922 was a self-inflicted body blow: who could ever trust the US again in matters financial? Certainly not the expanding BRICS alliance. They are now actively examining – and implementing – policies to de-dollarize their economies, and who can blame them? It could well mean the end of American (and Western) hegemony in the world. To say what we have seen is feckless foreign policy is far too kind. The whole debacle in relations with Russia (and other nations) from 1995 on has been an exercise in how NOT to conduct international diplomacy.
Mr Black glibly states that the Ukraine war has cost the US “only five percent of its annual defence budget“. More nonsense! The money going to Ukraine has not come out of the normal defence budget, rather, it has been requested separately through Congress. In any case “defence budget” in the US is now a meaningless term: the Pentagon has not passed an audit for at least 6 years! The propaganda about the Russian economy collapsing in a few months succeeded in directing around 125 billion dollars of US taxpayer money towards the Ukrainian war effort. And the results have been demonstrably paltry! Now, after nearly 2 years, US citizens experiencing precipitously declining standards of living as they navigate their own country’s crumbling infrastructure have every right to question what the purpose is of sending more billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine. The fact that some 8 million illegal immigrants have entered the US over the past 3 years will not help change minds: are Ukraine’s borders more important than the United States? No wonder close to 60% of US adults think it would be wrong to authorize the dispatch of more vast sums of money toward the Ukrainian black hole.
As for the “Western values” Mr Black lauds, he has clearly not been paying attention these past few years. Such values barely exist anymore: censorship, religious intolerance, crony capitalism all go unpunished. Major decisions affecting the lives of all citizens are frequently taken by unelected (even invisible) bodies. “Elected” politicians, meanwhile, seem capable only of endless virtue-signalling and display a stunning lack of awareness about how ordinary people live. In short real democracy is hanging on a thread in the West. If Mr Black doubts all this I suggest he pay attention to what is happening in Germany this week. The fact that these events will not be properly reported by any of our “democratic” media – if at all – says everything we need to know about the state of our democratic values.
I don’t know where Black gets the idea that he’s an authority on the Ukraine’s place in the world.
Just because he owned a few newspapers and has moved through elite circles doesn’t make his views any more convincing.
Ukraine belongs in mindset to the Slavic culture and although nobody in the media acknowledges it they are NOT Western peoples.
Their religious beliefs are a schism of eastern and western Christianity (in the main) and they should more properly be aligned with the major political forces of Eastern Europe than with the West.
They are laden with a history of hardship, suspicion and bendable borders and so sell themselves to the best bidder of the times.
If the West (read the U.S.) had taken advantage of the peace dividend from the end of the cold war we wouldn’t have any of this because Russia should have been invited into the major political pacts of the west. (As Noam Chomsky himself said in an interview some time back, although I’m not a particular fan of the man.)
But instead they continued to pile up threatening military forces and hardware right up to Russia’s doorstep. And with the enticement of Ukraine into the NATO umbrella they would have moved even closer, cutting off Russia’s major military base in the Crimea.
What would you do if your neighbour got together with his friends and suddenly set up a gun sight in his yard pointed at your house?
The news never reports the large scale siphoning off, by Ukraine, of Russia’s gas and fuel exports.
They never mention a completely engineered election, followed by theft on an Olympic scale by the oligarchs, who then sent their loot to the West.
Did the West see one iota of improvement in their infrastructure or social programs as this money flooded in? No, because the people who stole it divvied it up between their small circle of friends and politicians. There was no “higher cause” for their theft, there was no Robin Hood philosophy.
Not a shovel was lifted, more people were living under bridges than ever before.
As our friend Arthur C says above, it is unbelievable that we are sending billions of dollars over there, unaccounted for, (and quite often not even counted, just given out in wads of $100 bills) while our own freeways are clogged to stopping point, our airports are a disgrace, our city centers just a morass of despair.
Most important of all, the dispossessed of our population are suffering almost as much as they did during the Great Depression.
The other truth of the matter is that the lives of the average Ukrainians wouldn’t change that much under Russian rule, they might even see an improvement, because Mr Putin would feel obliged to send them back some of the royalties that they’d get from increased output from their oil and gas plants.
The Government is no more repressive (although more ruthless) than our own woke infested parody and at least they have some moral standards.
It would also improve the plight of the world economy if the underreported fossil fuel partnerships between Exxon and the Russian Government had the shackles taken off under a warming relationship with the two powers.
Energy would start to flow again.
They will never be blood brothers but they have shown in the past that they can work together in a way where the world benefits.
If we can get these two countries on a working path then we don’t have to worry so much about the hegemony of China.
Regarding accountability for the billions of dollars sent to Ukraine, one point I failed to mention above was the “Ukraine Aid Oversight Act” introduced by Senator Rand Paul in July last year. The aim of this bill was to “extend the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s (SIGAR) oversight authority to supervise American spending to Ukraine in order to detect and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse“. In other words to provide taxpayers with an accurate accounting of how their money is spent in Ukraine. On the face of it, this was a perfectly reasonably course of action; rather obvious one would think, in any matter where large sums of public money are dished out to foreign entities. Yet the US Senate blocked this amendment.
As the (former) Special Inspector General for Afghanistan pointed out after the vote: “The U.S. has sent more money to Ukraine in one year than it spent in Afghanistan over 12 years“. This little reported event tells you everything you need to know about the kind of people now running the United States.