The recent letter published in the New York Times from a collection of former national security advisors (they include Jack Matlock and Jeffrey Sachs) calls for a US strategic diplomacy (in the absence of any diplomacy at all) that is adult enough to recognize that opponents are rational and have real interests that are as every bit important to them as ours is to us. It then immediately stumbles at the first gate namely, by blaming Russia for its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine.
This inability to dig beneath cliche superficiality on the single most important principle that underlines the war is shocking testimony to the stubborn determination to be wrong that is manifested by practically ever western expert on this issue who enjoys any crumb of mainstream status. They believe that a system of international law that is essentially the product of imperial powers, that is infused with agents of those same powers, educated and propagandized by them, a system that is not set up to even recognize the tool of war most commonly wielded by those powers namely, regime change, is the immutable word of God.
Putin launched the SMO precisely because he was intelligent enough to confront and defy the reality that the west was relentlessly working towards just such a conflict and that, as Machiavelli once observed, the longer he refrained from acting then the more disadvantageous his ultimate military plight. Not just that, not just the fact that the fount of inspiration for the US military industrial complex, RAND, had in 2019 explained precisely how it would seek to dismember Russia through manipulation of its Ukrainian proxy, not just western disregard for over thirty years of strident Russian attempts to articulate its concerns over NATO’s purposeless drift to the east (purposeless, that is say, unless the intention was indeed dismemberment of Russia) and acknowledgment from responsible western diplomats like Jack Matlock and, at that time, William Burns, that Russia’s concerns might indeed provoke conflict….Not just these considerations, I say, but that Ukraine, under the leadership; of NATO’s unscrupulous and duplicitous protege, and heir to the US-instigated coup d’etat of 2014, Zelenskiy, did everything it possibly could to bring about a war: sabotaging the Minsk agreements, currying favor with NATO at every turn, begging for admission, being so very helpful to NATO in staging aggressive wargames along Russian borders, talking about having nuclear weapons, building up fortifications over eight years in prepation for war, with NATO aid, assistance and weapons, killing more and more of its Russian-speaking citizens in the Donbass, augmenting the size of Ukrainian armed forces along the border with the people’s republics, and not just in numbers but in the variety of Nazi brigades that they incorporated.
This culturally-determined mental defect (exhibited, as I say, in the letter to the New York Times) constitutes the reason first, why Russia and now the Global South which, with China, have lined up on the side of Russia, will not accept any compromise in this conflict that fails to address, head-on, what are the objectives of Russia: Ukrainian neutrality, De-militarization, De-Nazification, and integration of the Donbass into Russia which is where it always should have remainbed. It continues to make sense to respect Russia’s term for its actions of February 24, 2022 precisely because the SMO is not a war in the conventional sense. If it was a war in the conventional sense then the SMO would not have confined itself to the mainly pro-Russian oblasts of the Donbass and would not have fought a slow grinding war of attrition over many months even while it is obvious that Russia has all along had the means to obliterate and overrun all major power centers in Ukraine with a million man army, artillery and air force, with or without the intervention of western weapons.
This is why chatter about demilitarized zones that will supposedly “freeze” the conflict along the glorious lines of the Korean “solution” (or worse, along the lines of the border between Turkiye’s area of occupation in Syria and Damascus controlled territory) is simply silly and wishful thinking. The Korean experience is not historically appropriate because North Korea, while it had secured a military advantage, did not have nuclear weapons, while of course the US did have them and may well have used them.
The intent behind talk in the west of a frozen conflict is to allow NATO’s soggy leadership a quick spell at the dry cleaners before it re-emerges just as is it appeared yesterday, almost childlike, on the sad platform of the only nuclear attack in history that was fired - as calculated as it was unncessary - by the USA (needless to say). There, crisp suits and sharp dresses belied the utter deficit of wisdom in this motley crew, the empty vessels of a materialistic, corporate-fashioned, privileged and know-nothing elite whose main contributions to the sickness of their world is a simplistic and self-serving ideology of neoliberalism, cultivated air of self-righteousnes and self-importance, deference to fossil fuel, permanent enrichment of the arms industry, reckless disregard for nuclear danger, and massive extension of wealth inequality between nations, races and social classes.
Russia has defeated Ukraine in Bakhmut. Ukrainian counter-offensives to the north and south of Bakhmut have the typically Zelenskian PR function of distracting both western media (who need no help in being confused) and their audiences from the reality of Ukraine’s defeat in Bakhmut, just as constant media chatter about this or another Ukrainian pinprick attack on Russian forces distracts attention from the dire ruination of the entirety of Ukraine by constant Russian missile and drone attacks. Western journalistic waifs - grievously orphaned from a two hundred year journalistic legacy of holding power to account - mumble on about how Russia is about to run out of missiles.
The distractions work. They utterly numb readers and viewers to the intelligent conbsideration that yet another “wonder weapon” (F16) will be as ineffective as the last, so long as it does not in some way trigger nuclear armageddon. Media cacoon these creatures in the wet fantasy that theirs is the best and the most virtuous of all possible worlds - they are indeed a “chosen” people. Chosen, that is, by the errors of their collective imperial pasts to cling pitifulluy to shrinking wealth, supress their instincts to protest and restlessness, submit to egregious censorship of the most mild of elite-threatening disagreements (by virtue of Intelligence penetration and corruption of both legacy and digital media platforms), and more..all in the vortex of a burning planet whose flames and fumes are ever more difficult to ignore.