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Author: Ian Welsh Page 11 of 400
If you want to demilitarize a country you can do it by treaty, or you can do it by fact. Germany was demilitarized after WWI, but it retained the ability to build a large military and eventually did so.
The Russian view is that Ukraine needs to be demilitarized, de-Nazified and made neutral, it will otherwise remain a threat to them.
The demilitarization strategy is fairly simple: kill or disable everyone who can and will fight. This has been a grinding war, but at almost every stage Russia has had air, drone and artillery supremacy. It has taken great care to disperse attacking troops and to keep its own casualties down.
Casualty ratios are a matter of great dispute, but I cannot imagine that the side with air, drone and artillery superiority is taking the most casualties. I would guess the exchange rate is between 3:1 and 6:1. Once again, we won’t know until some years after the war.
Ukraine’s population is crashing. Pre war it was 42 million, as of 2023 it was probably 28 million and there’s no way it is not even lower now.
So to a large extent Russian tactics support the goal of demilitarization. Even if Russia could do “big arrow”, why do them before the Ukrainian military is ground to dust and Ukraine is demographically exhausted? Win the war, but fail to end Ukraine’s ability and willingness to fight and there’s just going to be another war.
Which is why anything but a neutral Ukraine, genuinely neutral, or a Russian satrapy is also unacceptable. Ukraine wasn’t and isn’t part of NATO but that didn’t keep NATO from using it as a cat’s paw against Russia. If Russia wants a defanged, safe Ukraine on its border, it’s no longer just about staying out of NATO, true Austrian cold war style neutrality will be required.
And the since the neo-Nazis who are influential in the military and government, despite their small numbers, will never not be hostile to Russia, Ukraine has to be be de-Nazified. Out of the military, out of power, and either dead or in prison for a very long time.
Demographics isn’t the only thing which creates capability to fight, of course. The more of Ukraine that Russia takes, the weaker Ukraine will be in the future. What is particularly important is to take the entire coast and landlock the Ukrainian hump, but farther West Russia takes land, the less of a threat Ukraine is to the Russian heartlands.
Smaller population, worse geography, no Nazis anywhere near power, no allies to feed it weapons and help it fortify, and genuinely neutral: these are Russia’s post war goals for Ukraine.
These are maximal goals, and they require a completely defeated Ukraine, likely one that signs an uncoditional surrender. If they can be accomplished with a negotiated surrender, fine, but if Russia is wise it will fight till it gets the terms necessary to defang Ukraine and make it useless as a Western catspaw.
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As I said, day one, Russia was going to win this war if it wanted it enough. Russia’s advance is slow, but it is certain and it is NOT going to be reversed unless the US declares war, which is NOT going to happen. The Ukrainian army is finally nearing collapse, which I’d expect some time next year. The war will last another two years at most, I’d guess.
Peace will be made under the terms Russia wants, or the war will continue. Ukraine is still fighting, but everyone with the least lick of sense knows it is going to lose. Ukraine will have to accept the terms imposed on it, because if it doesn’t Russia will just keep going.
Trump’s peace plan (ostensibly) as floated in the WSJ was essentially a frozen conflict with a twenty year guarantee of not joining NATO. That’s not going to fly. Ukraine will be a demilitarized neutral state at best, if it won’t surrender it’ll be defeated and have a government imposed on it. The Russians will not cut any sort of deal with the West which requires the West to “keep” the deal. They believe that the West is “agreement incapable”, that is, that it will not obey any deals it signs if it doesn’t want to (as it didn’t obey the Minsk agreement) so no peace treaty which requires western enforcement or has Western troops in any part of Ukraine will be acceptable.
Russia has done just fine out of all this. Its people are happy and optimistic, its economy is booming and it’s now the 4th largest economy on PPP GDP terms and probably third in realistic terms: it has tons of resources, food, tech and a decent amount of industry, and it will handle climate change better than most nations. It is locked into the Chinese orbit as a junior partner, but China doesn’t spew contempt at Russia 24/7 the way the West does and has for my entire lifetime, nor slam it with repeated sanctions. (The sanctions started way before the war, and were mostly justified on the basis of “Russia shouldn’t run its own internal affairs the way it chooses. And the poor, poor oligarchs.”)
Again, this was always the most likely outcome and everyone who thought otherwise refused to look at the very simple differences in size, population, resources and industry between the two nations.
As for Ukraine, the best deal they could have gotten was offered by the Russians near the start of the war, but they believed NATO and the US and Boris Johnson and thought they could win. The result is going to be a much weaker and poorer Ukraine, probably with half the pre-war population.
Meanwhile sanctions, instead of harming Russia, boomeranged and hurt Europe far more than Russia, and have contributed to Europe’s ongoing de-industrialization.
Nobody in power the West or Ukraine has anything to be proud of in how they handled this. Even the depraved argument of “let’s fight to the last Ukrainian and weaken Russia” hasn’t worked, instead Russia is stronger than it has been since the fall of the USSR.
*Golf clap*
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The Great Depression was cause by a demand problem: there wasn’t enough demand for goods, prices crashed and so did employment.
The policies put in place by the New Deal were almost all intended to increase demand and prices. Farm support, social security and so on. Elites were slaughtered by the great crash of 29 and the Depression. Not all supported the New Deal, in fact many don’t, FDR bragged they hated him. But obviously FDR had elite support.
This chart shows what happened:
I think that’s pretty clear. Union membership soars with new Deal, plateaus, then slowly declines. Elites after WWII were not nearly as scared, the economy was good, and Truman’s veto was over-ridden when an anti-union bill which made foreman inelligible for union support passed.
Over time public support for unions also declined. What happens is that those who remembered the depression and the time before it age out: we’re not talking GI, we’re talking Lost and older generations. The GI saw the depression, but they didn’t experience the roaring 20s. They didn’t get what life was like before all the wage, price and demand supports put in place by FDR.
But the mid 70s these people are out of power: not only was there a wave of deaths, but in the 70s there was a movement to replace them in Congress. The incomers wanted process fairness, not outcome fairness and they replaced the old timers. (Matt Stoller has written about this extensively.)
Soon afterwards the neoliberal era dawned, and its intention was to make the rich richer and everyone else poorer: to crush wages, ostensibly to deal with the supply shock by stopping people from consuming goods and services which required petroleum products. Children of the 70s supply shocks, they were terrified of inflation and figured that rich people don’t produce inflation which matters. (This is before the era of private jets.)
In general all successful political action requires some part of the elite to support it. It doesn’t have to be all, it doesn’t even have to be a majority (it wasn’t during the New Deal) but it must exist. Popular support is a power source, but it requires transmission and an engine to turn it into action.
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There’s been a lot of attention, much of it apocalyptic, paid to Trump’s election, but Trump is just a symptom of one of our three main issues.
In order of importance, they are:
- Climate Change and Ecological Collapse;
- Mass disabling, largely due to Covid; and,
- The End of the Western Era, and the collapse of American hegemony.
If we manage a nuclear war during the collapse of American hegemony, it’ll turn out to have been the most important issue, but I’m betting we’ll avoid it. If I’m wrong, you won’t be able to tell me so.
But just as important as warming is the collapse of biodiversity, loss of habitat and species. We are able to live and live well because other species form the network of life, which keep the atmosphere breathable, soil fertile and feed us. Worse, we just don’t understand these systems, we can’t create the simplest of biospheres: if it goes awry, we will have a hell of a time fixing it, and the loss of genetic diversity means a vast swathe of scientific advances will be cut off, especially medical advances.
(The below #s are from 2018, the situation is accelerating, and will be worse now.)
Average case scenarios for climate change and ecological collapse mean billions of deaths for humans a world with a significantly reduced carrying capacity. Recovery, especially of species, will take so much time that on the human timescale, it might as well be “never.”
Meanwhile, the Covid epidemic continues and we’re at risk for other viral plagues. If Covid just killed people, that would be bad, but the mass disabling is a huge problem and even people who aren’t symptomatic have suffered real damage.
This chart is from 2023, so it’s behind the curve, but it indicates the issues. (UK)
There’s no particular reason to expect this to end. We aren’t doing anything about Covid. Here’s a projection chart:
Having to care for large numbers of disabled people at the same time as everything else is going to shit is… bad. Very bad. There’s a reason why assisted suicide is becoming legal.
We could do something about Covid. Many things. But we refuse.
The End of the European Era is probably a good thing, but world hegemonic transitions are nasty. The last one led to two world wars. The Chinese are striving mightily to avoid “Thucydides trap.”
The Ukrainian and Gazan wars, plus the Yemen blockade which is part of the Gaza war are best seen as part of the death throes of the American empire. But it’s not just America which is losing power, Europe is shedding industry, has fallen behind on technology and is in serious, probably terminal decline.
The Western era, which is four to five centuries old, depending on how you count it (the case for 4 centuries is that in 1500 the Ottomans and Chinese were still vastly powerful) is coming to an end. China is re-taking its place as the most important nation in the world. I’d argue it has already done so. Russia, which has been Europe facing and European aspirational for centuries now looks East and is a junior ally of China’s.
China doesn’t want war with America. It doesn’t need a war. Absent a war, it’s already won, it just has to sit back and watch America continue its decline. Trump is not going to “make America great again”, that ship has sailed. What needs to be done to make it happen are policies (including real industrial policy and a collapse of asset prices and rent, plus increases in real wages) which are anathema to most of America’s elites, and which, in any case, they are incompetent to implement.
But hegemonic powers rarely go easy into that long night, and a world war is entirely possible. American elites don’t want to lose their pre-eminence, and they still have a powerful military (or think they do) and a lot of nuclear weapons.
So this transition period is one of great danger, potentially for everyone in the world.
These are the three big issues, everything else is trivial in comparison. Trans rights, wokeism, AI… whatever, are all rounding errors on these three issues.
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The worst of it is that we’re not going to handle the first one: climate change and ecological collapse. We’ve already made that decision. Even if we immediately started doing everything right, they’re now self-reinforcing, and we aren’t going to do everything right. Trump, after all, ran on drill, drill, drill. The Chinese are doing more than anyone else, with a massive build-out of renewable energy, but their system is still an extractive and polluting industrial economy with massive freeways and so on.
The only “good” sign is one that many are bewailing: collapsing birth rates. Human population is in clear overshoot, and it needs to be reduced. Yes, in theory we could increase Earth’s carrying capacity so that a massive population decrease wouldn’t be necessary, but we’re not going to.
Ecological issues are in the bucket of “fix them or nature will fix them for you” and we’ve chosen not to.
Keep these three issues at the forefront of your mind, your analysis and your planning for your personal future. Compared to them, everything else barely matters.
The right is strongly pro-natal. Some of it is for religious reasons, some of it is because they want to control (no, don’t even, the constant talk of male leadership leaves this unquestionable), but a lot of it is that they figure if they out-breed their opponents they’ll win.
Now if you’re talking ethnicity or “race” this is indisputable. Want more whites, or latinos, or whatever, if you breed less than others, that’s going to tell.
But when you’re talking ideology and culture, it isn’t.
The anti-abortion right thinks that out-breeding will work for them, but out-breeding only works if the kids you’re popping up keep your beliefs.
Now this all very nice, and the numbers don’t look too bad, but there’s more to it than nominal membership. If you call yourself Christian but believe in abortion rights and contraception and women’s equality, you aren’t what the Christian “right” is looking for, are you?
Basically flat. What about by age?
Huh. Doesn’t look so good, does it? If you raise ’em and they don’t stay with you and you can’t convert non-members very well…
Whatever the deeper causes, religious disaffiliation in the U.S. is being fueled by switching patterns that started “snowballing” from generation to generation in the 1990s. The core population of “nones” has an increasingly “sticky” identity as it rolls forward, and it is gaining a lot more people than it is shedding, in a dynamic that has a kind of demographic momentum.
Christians have experienced the opposite pattern. With each generation, progressively fewer adults retain the Christian identity they were raised with, which in turn means fewer parents are raising their children in Christian households.
Now America’s still a very religious society. Far more so than Europe or most of the rest of the developed world.
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But replacement rates aren’t just about popping up babies and raising them with your beliefs. You have to be able to keep them once they’re adults. And seculars have been very, very good at converstion. Even back when everyone still said they were Christian, notice that abortion became legal, women got legal rights, contraception spread and so on. People said they were Christian, but if the Pope or their pastor said “no condoms, no pill” they ignored them.
Most people enjoy having sex. Most people, at least at some points in their lives, want to have a lot of sex, and want to do it without worrying about suddenly having to raise kids or having to go thru pregnancy.
(I often suspect that the most vehement anti-contraception and anti-abortion activists are people who are closet or in denial gays, or essentially asexual. “Sex is a duty, if we only have to have it to make babies, I won’t have to have it so often.”)
But the larger point here is that replacement rate for anything but biology is determined by ideological reproduction rates. If you can’t keep the people you raise in your ideology, then popping out more kids isn’t the solution.
Early Christians out-produced pagans, but if they hadn’t been able to keep their kids Christian: if pagans had been good at converting them, well, they would never have won.
What Christianity offers, in the US, is the church community. Church groups are one of the few social support groups left. If you need help, the church will often step up. And that makes it odd that the stickiness rate started declining in the 90s, just as government support also started a serious decline and as good jobs became harder and harder to get.
But there are other factors. One is that seculars, starting in the 70s, offered a better deal to women: a lot better deal. You could have your own bank account when married, you had no fault divorce, you could get that abortion and you didn’t have to always do what your husband said, nor did you have to marry just to get support.
Part of the secular offer became a lot better for half the population.
At the same time Christian ideology became less and less appealing. It was around the late 80s and early 90s that the hard-core Christians really began to win internal battles and made being anti-abortion the #1 litmus test, moved towards hardcore natalism and heavy parental authoritarianism with plenty of beating of children. Oh, and when all the “male leadership” stuff cropped up.
This is a better deal for some men (the one’s who like keeping their kids and wife under their thumbs with force) but it isn’t a better deal for a lot of women and kids. And when the kids grow up, well, all that heavy handed authoritarianism, justified by religion doesn’t make them think fondly of religion.
The community support deal within Christianity is a good one, but if the price is domestic violence, corporal punishment, an inferior position for women and less sex, plus more pregnancies whether you want them or not, plus more dangerous pregancies, well maybe the cost of that social support is too high?
Reproduction of groups and ideologies over time isn’t just about who bears more kids, it’s about who keeps them. If “give me the child and I’ll give you the adult works” you’re golden, but if it’s breaking down, well, you may just be producing the next generation of your ideological enemies.
Breeding isn’t enough. The life you offer has to seem better than what your opponents offer.
Churches should be cleaning up. As the last solid community support structure the offer something that almost no one else does. But at the same time as this became true they decided to be anti-sex, pro-hitting children, and for women to be subordinate to men.
Weird that more and more people don’t want that life.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Elon Musk will be in charge of the effort by Trump to cut government waste.
Problem is, most government workers actually do something necessary. The last time a government seriously slashed government workers, under Clinton, all that happened is that contractors were hired to do the work: and contractors cost more. Nor has there been any real increase in federal employees in decades. In fact, as a percentage of the US population, federal government workers are in decline.
Besides, if you’re going to actually go after waste, you need to hit the Department of Defense and allow things like Medicare negotiating drug prices.
Government is a profit center for private business, as Musk, whose businesses (especially SpaceX) run on subsidies and government contracts well knows. Musk’s savings will turn into money for the rich and corporations.
A few genuine “savings” may be made by slashing enforcement of things like environmental laws, but they will be paid for in different ways.
Oddly, the best way to save the government money would probably be to reduce use of contractors and hire more government employees and the best way to improve the top line would be to hire more auditors for the IRS and have them go after the rich.
The real world isn’t the world of outraged right wingers, alas.