Part of Zelensky’s “plan for victory” is to lobby its Western allies for strikes deep within Russian territory using long range weapons, presumably to attack Russia’s economic infrastructure and win a more favorable negotiating position. But strategic strikes alone have never won a war: neither the Allies truly earthshaking round-the-clock bombing campaign against Germany nor the U.S.’s on North Vietnam enough to secure victory in either conflict. Even in the era of drones and electronic warfare, there are no “wonder weapons.” Ultimately, troops just have to win battles and take territory. [my emphasis] (1)
The notion in the US that nuclear weapons are magical win-a-war-instantly devices is based on a US-centered triumphalist reading of Japan’s surrender soon after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb strikes.
What is conveniently left out of that version of the story of Japan’s surrender is that in 1945 the Soviet Union, in line with its commitment to its allies – and, of course, its own particular calculation of national advantage – had entered the war with ground troops and was sweeping through the northern part of Japanese-occupied Korea. Japan wasn’t just facing a couple of big atomic bomb blasts. It was also in the process of being rapidly defeated on the conventional battlefield at that moment.
Ganz also quotes Ben Conable from the War on the Rocks blog arguing, “While history is not necessarily predictive, at least the cases of Afghanistan and Chechnya (in 1994) suggest that Russia’s biggest vulnerability may lie at the intersection between battlefield casualties and economic strain.”
It’s true that after nine years and a few more weeks of fighting, the USSR decided to give up on the war in Afghanistan. After crowing about that great Cold War victory for a decade of so, the US embarked on its own version of that adventure – and took 20 years to decide it wasn’t worth it anymore. So, taking advice about Afghanistan from American warhawks should be regarded a dubious proposition. The Soviet war there has “been cited by scholars as a significant factor that contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.” (2) Although I suspect there is a lot of wishful thinking in that conclusion.
Also, this is a good time to ask again: have the economic sanctions produced the kind of devastating “economic strain” that its optimistic advocates expected? Uh, so far, no.
With a vision of Cold War triumph on the brain, hawks like Conable think that it may be a great idea to stick it to the Rooskies for as long as we (the West) can. After all, it’s Ukrainians and not Americans that are paying the price in death and devastation. Ganz also isn’t too impressed with that line of argument:
If this business about demonstrating resolve and “commitment” sounds fishy to you it’s because it was part of the same Cold War thinking that got us increasingly entangled in Vietnam. And with all due respect to the author, this sounds a little like “cope” as they say online.
The best case scenario that I can see, far short of victory according to some on the Ukrainian side, is that Zelensky’s plan includes a way to give Russia another bloody nose, making peace negotiations somewhat more favorable to the Ukrainian side and making the sacrifices of this terrible war bearable for the Ukrainian people. Withstanding the Russian invasion in the first place was a heroic feat that rightly earned the world’s admiration: it’s already a great victory in its own right. It would be a tragedy indeed to see that accomplishment squandered by either a lack of hope or a lack of realism. [my emphasis]
I’ve had a feeling for a while that US Ukrainian policy is more-or-less on autopilot: keep giving them more weapons to keep the current war going as long as possible in hopes that it will be another (imagined) “Afghanistan” for Russia. At this point, that approach of continuing the war indefinitely instead of trying to arrange some kind of armistice that offers both hope for Ukraine and a new sense of realism about the actual military situation looks more like the West repeating the United States’ failure to judge the Afghanistan situation more sensibly during our two-decades’ adventure there.
As Ganz argues, “With less men and materiel than Russia, Ukraine’s options are limited. It seems highly likely that they will have to sacrifice territory in any prospective negotiation.”
As the old military saying goes: Hope is not a plan. Nor an exit strategy, nor a war-termination strategy.
Notes:
(1) Ganz, John (2024): Ukraine is Losing the War. Unpopular Front 09/27/2024. <https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/ukraine-is-losing-the-war> (Accessed: 2024-30-09).
(2) Soviet–Afghan War. Wikipedia 09/27/2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War&oldid=1247994825> (Accessed: 2024-03-10).
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