July 11-12, Battle of the Boyne, Vilnius, and the Fate of the World
I have always considered the Battle of the Boyne celebrated on July 12 each year as Orangemen’s Day in Northern Ireland to be a grotesque, sickening display of the might of an imperial proxy (i.e. Ulster protestants dependent on the imperial power of London) that swaggers its drunken way through the urban deserts of the centuries’ suppression of catholics of Northern Ireland, too long abandoned by a bought-out bourgeois elite in Dublin.
The NATO summit in Vilnius that ends on that same day, July 12, fills me with comparable dread, as the nauseatingly disengaged elite of Europe pay continuing obeasance to their imperial Washington Master, in flagrant display of their presumed superiority before the used and abused masses of the collective west.
We could call the proxy conflict between NATO and Russia being fought over the lives, as some analsts contend, of upwards to 200,000 Ukrainian lives (20,000 dead and wounded since June 4th) a war between peers. It actually isn’t. Across most if not all significant categories of weapon Russia currently enjoys vaster production capacity. Were China to join the conflict in a moment of extreme exigency for Russia, which it would have to do in order to protect its own longer-term survival as a sovereign power, then the total disparity between NATO and its EurAsian opponent would be vaster still.
Russian shell capacity is far greater than that of the entire collective west combined. And even if its artillery power was less than that of the west a major shortage of shells would render its artillery useless. As it happens, Russian artillery is certainly comparable with that of the west, although strict comparisons need to take into account multiple variables that include barrel diameter, precision, rate of use, speed of firing, rate of barrel deterioration as a result of both range and pressure (the bigger shells and the longer the range the more pressure there is on the barrel, and greater pressure requires more frequent replacement and repair of barrels), etc., not to mention non-technology factors such as the length of training, expertise and experience of operators, and the degree of integration of artillery systems with all other components of the battlefield, and, above all, the intelligence that informs battlefield tactics, strategies and operations and the human motivation to execute such intelligence.
Russia has significant advantages in that it can replace and repair far more conveniently than is the case for Ukraine, which has to resort to facilities in Poland (as evidenced also in a recent dispute between Poland and German over Lepoard II repairs) and, perhaps, other countries or countries that originated the weapons systems in question. There is a problem of range. With longer range weapons - as might be the case with MGM-140 ATACMS (which have yet to be provided to Ukraine by the west) - Ukraine has a much greater choice of targets, whereas longer-range targets may be of less interest to Russia for so long as it commits to operating only within Ukraine.
We might conclude that this is not a peer-to-peer conflict and that, instead, it is currently an unequal conflict in overall conditions that favor Russia for various reasons that I allude to above and that I have discussed in many previous posts. (So far this week the general story is one of multiple Ukrainian attacks on the front. There are nearly all repelled, except perhaps in one or two cases south of Bakhmut where Russian fortifications are relatively weak. These take places simultaneously alongside Russian advances in the direction of, but staying strategically short of, the seizure of towns such as Seversk, Kremanna, Avdievka, Vuhledar and elsewhere).
But even were to assume that this is broadly a peer-to-peer conflict I think we would still be underrating many less easily measurable factors: these would include the speed with which one party can capture, reverse-engineer, recreate, and improve on the “advanced” weapons that have been deployed by the opposing side and perhaps to distribute this knowledge not only to its own forces but to the forces of its allies, with long-term ramifications in the competition for geopolitical influence and control. I believe Russia has excelled at this, as has one of Russia’s allies namely, Iran. This in turn has implications for Iranian ability to outmanouver its rival for power in the Middle East, Israel, and for Russian and Iranian assistance to Syria against the forces of the US (still robbing Syria blind of Syrian energy and agricultural resources in the north-east), Israel (regularly bombing Hezbollah, Iranian and Syrian forces with impunity inside Syria) and Turkey (which controls the jihadist-dominated north-west around Idlib, but with which Syria may soon enter into negotiation).
The NATO summit meeting in Vilnius will be presided over, still, by Norway’s Jemns Stoltenberg. He stays in place for another year given a lack of sufficient enthusiasm for Ursula von der Leyen - currently president of the EU and a former and disappointing minister of defense for Germany - and for Britain’s Ben Wallace who tried to stampede the US into gifting F-16s to Ukraine.
The summit, as I argued earlier this week, will prove a litmus test as to whether the collective west would prefer a win-lose trajectory (in which, to its chagrin, it will turn out to be the loser), a lose-lose trajectory (of escalation to nuclear annihilation of the species), or a win-win trajectory that acknowledges, celebrates and nurtures a multi-polar world, one that can assemble its strengths in time to reverse the worst effects of climate change. There are indications that support any one of these three.
The Vilnius deliberations come at an extraordinarily sensitive moment in the conflict, one in which I think it probable that Washington is backing off from further escalation (including from support for, or from turning a blind eye to, Ukrainian terrorist machinations over ZNPP) in the form of an overt form of direct participation of NATO in the conflict. I would argue that NATO is already directly involved and is the single most important influence in determination of the conduct of the war from the point of view of the collective west. Article 5 is already a cruel charade, both because, in effect, Article 5 has already been effectively invoked (illegally because Ukraine is not even a member of NATO and is unlikely ever to become so in the time that is left for the survival of NATO as a meaningful institution) and because, even if it were invoked formally, it would make little difference to the end result other than to cause even more loss of life, equipment and chattels. Russia would still win.
The deliberations will likely occur before it is all too obvious and comes to be accepted, even in the west, as a self-evident truth that the Ukrainian counter offerensive (UCO) is a debacle and that Ukraine, entirely dependent for its survival in any form on the west, has only another few weeks (say to the end of August) before it has drained its human reserves (put by some at 100,000, far fewer than are available to Russia), stocks of western weapons (the UCO has already likely eaten up a third of these) and shells, before it reaches the point of complete collapse.
Some voices at Vilnius may encourage a more determined effort to negotiate with Russia so that the western negotiatiors are not arguing from a position of total debasement. Others will want a continuation of the same mess for as long as possible (which, as I indicate above, is not for very long at all). Others - backed behind the scenes and with all the resources (political, economic, monetary) at the disposal of the lobbyists for the weapons industries and the MICIMATT generally, barely distinguishable from the neocon cabal that controls Biden and Washington - will call for escalation.
That Russia, whose economy, as I argued yesterday, is looking a lot healthier than that of Europe’s right now, may emerge from the conflict far stronger than it went into it, is hardly a surprise any longer.
The main consideration is: what kind of power will Russia’s be?
Mainstream, alternative, and radical media are still very much exercised with the Prigozhin affair, with what they assess to be the solidity or the fragility of Putin’s position, and with what the Prigozhin attempted coup says about the nature of contemporary Russia.
Several days ago I concluded that the Prigozhin affair had effectively concluded (a position I share, by and large, with Scott Ritter who has written very informatively on the topics of Prigozhin and Wagner). I admit to some doubts on this score. Much that we did not know before is becoming clearer, but there is still enormous scope for further clarity. Today, there is considerable media chatter about the fact that Prigozhin appears to be in Saint Petersburg as often as, or even more frequently than, he appears in Belarus, even though the agreement negotiated between Prigozhin and Putin via Lukashenko seemed to suggest that were he to return to Russia Prigozhin could expect to be arrested, tried and executed.
There are still many questions concerning what exactly happened on the M4 freeway from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow on the day of the coup attempt. There are still many questions as to what exactly is going on at the upper echelons of the Russian Ministry of Defense and in the relations between the generals and Putin. These are all legitimate and important concerns, although we should note that Moscow’s dismantling of Prigozhin’s business empire, including, very importantly, his media empire, is far advanced. It is not totally implausible, given the extent of his empire and its interpenetration with State structures and State finances, that Prigozhin is safeguarding his position by agreeing to cooperate in the process with Moscow and needs to be in Russia in order to do this.
Even while some western media like Newsweek are concluding, suprisingly, that the Prigozhin affair has strengthen Putin, some pro-Russian sources like John Helmer in Moscow are, suprisingly, worrying that it may have weakend him.
This debate relates to a domain of contest in which Putin has played his hand with great deftness over the past quarter-century namely, the contest between the State and the oligarchs, one in which the oligarchs submit to the political authority of the Kremlin in exchange for State tolerance for their business activities. Those who do not play along with this game come to a bad end - as it seems Prigozhin may, or is maybe still seeking to avoid.
We may wish that such a balance between independent political forces and independent capitalists could be struck in countries of the collective west where, instead, the business classes largely choose the successful candidates for, and then dictate to, political authority, subject to their perpetual, distracting, minor squabbles (think Facebook vs. Twitter).
Which of course raises final but supremely important questions in the context of what kind of world do we want the “multipolar” world to be: what kinds of political structure will this order embrace, what kinds of dissidence will it protect and tolerate, and whose social interests will it prioritize?
In opposing the gross idiocy of western leaders, their environmental incompetence, and their reckless flirtations with nuclear annihilation, I do not presume to pass naieve, positive endorsement for everything that Russia represents. Far from it. I certainly do not presume to slip past, unnoticed, the enormously important challenges of what are we to regard as “social justice,” “equality of opportunity,” and our preferred institutional arrangments for the contestation of ideologies, interests and ideas which, from what I can see, are likely not that much less problematic in Russia and in China than they are in the collective west which, of course, has made a horrifying balls-up of these issues over the past half century - in no small measure thanks to the policies of President Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, the very polices that birthed the monstruous Neocons.