Fogs of War
The Xi visit to Moscow of course underlines the solidifying of Sino-Russian relations, a trend that has been developing systematically for almost a decade but which has been greatly accelerated by demonstrations of western leadership incompetence (e.g. Trump’s trade war), and western nefariousness (since for ever, but China has only begun to understood the dynamics and to care about it in recent years, as in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and, of course, Ukraine, to name but a few) and western decline (politically, commercially, militarily).
The one sensible thing that Donald Trump had to say about the world back in 2016 was that the US should consider forging better relations with Russia. Hardly rocket science. But simplicities are enough to shake the foundations of the Military Industrial Incubus, otherwise known as the USA which, without Russia, would be missing a half-way, faintly, credible enemy to justify its perpetual stealing of US taxpayer money. Within weeks Clinton came up with the scam of Russiagate, a hilarious potpouri of lies about how Russians hacked the DNC servers (they didn’t, there was an internal leak, and even the security agency hired by the DNC to prove that it was Russia couldn’t come up with the proof), how Trump did dirty things in a Moscow hotel (he didn’t; low grade “opposition research” by a former M16 agent invented this one on the basis of hearsay), and all kinds of other rubbish that western media for the most part swallowed wholesale and further exaggerated, for a timespan of no less than four years and about which they have still to level with world opinion about what they did and failed to do.
Trump would have been extremely bad news for the world at any time, but he did not collaborate with Russia. Instead of charging him with the foolishness of which he was most certainly culprit (not least, his aggressive disregard for the fact that humanity itself was and is now - only more immediately - in danger of dying as a result of fossil-fuel engineered climate change, and his gleeful eagerness to help along the process of ecoside), the media could only come up with a lie, because the lie was told them by Clinton and the “liberal” establishment she represented.
So the world’s one chance of better relations with Russia - so as, perhaps, to fend off an alliance between Russia and China that might have made the US decline less precarious and the world a happier place, Trump was cornered by all the Mueller nonsense into being as tough as possible with both Russia and China, thus vastly accelerating the speed of progress of the Sino-Russian alliance. The more extemist neocon policies advocated by Trump’s successor and his poodles in the State Department and Pentagon, several of whom are deeply entrenched in the corruption-riden quagmire of the Ukrainian coup regime, are, as we speak, helping solder this alliance into the hardest steel.
And, to be frank, it could be a much better (multi-polar) world for it, provided (it is a big, and serious proviso) that the USA does not insist on nuclear annihilation for all - its most imaginative, if most dangerous, contribution to democratic ideology since the club of rich guys who founded the USA worked out a practical method for sharing the spoils of genocide and conquest without the help of Britain.
NATO has represented a comparable leap of democratic imagination: a bringing of European nations together under US military tutelage against an imaginary enemy (once the Soviet Union had conveniently collapsed with the help of US-asset Yeltsin), requiring members to convert to western warfare and western weapons systems, greatly augmenting the weapons market for, principally, US weapons manufacturers who today, with Europe, supply 60% of the world’s weapons. Not only this, but NATO serves to create the wars (e.g. Ukraine) that are necessary to compel its members to use their (so very expensive, because so “modern” and “advanced”) weapons, and to order more of same when their stocks run low, which is happening right now. New orders to the US weapons manufacturers who, having run low on their own supplies (thanks to “just in time” invention of oligopoly capitalism), must create new production facilitiates at even more vastly inflated prices, on the pretext of growing demand and diminishing supply.
This for-profit model may have met its match against the State-directed machineries of its key opponents who produce far more, just as modern or advanced and maybe more, at far lower prices, far more quickly, to troops who are adequately trained in same. Indeed the transition for Ukraine from Soviet era to western weapons turns out to be a mix blessing at best, as we see each passing day of the “stalemate plus slow Russian advance” artillery, attritional model of warfare in Bakhmt, Avdievka, Kupiansk and Vuhledar.
Which is not to say that there are not significant sources of pushback from Ukraine, which is in receipt of the last of western weapons splurges, fighting under the US/NATO sword of damocles that warns Ukraine that if it fails to turn things around before summer and make NATO look good, then all will be lost and the west will cease to care. The financial crisis now threatening Europe will do nothing to change this schedule.
Ukraine has launched numerous small counteroffensives along various stretches of the overall front in recent days and weeks, of which some are likely to be of a reconnaisannce nature to test out the strength of Russian forces. One of the most recent of these involved a crossing of the Dnieper, possibly indicative of the concentration of Ukrainian forces in Zaporizhzhia. There is a strong likelihood of a Ukrainian counteroffensive in Bakhmut - as early as this week - making use of Ukraine’s remaining estimated 20,000 to 30,000 troops in the Bakhmut area. It is also clear that Ukraine has continued with preparations for its long-announced intention to launch a counteroffensive from Zaporizhzhia down through Melitopol, Mariupol to the Sea of Azov. These plans have been long in gestation and Russia has expended considerable resource in artillery, air defense, bombers, tanks, men and fortifications to resist.
It does appear likely that within the next couple of months, perhaps sooner, the long-term fate of the war will be determined. Unless Xi and Vlad produce a rabbit out of the hat, sufficiently bouncy as not to depend on anything sensible from Washington (a near impossibility), the fog of war will be particularly dense for quite some period of time.