The answer is never The Guns of August – no matter what the question may be. That famous-but-stupid 1962 book is a bugbear of mine since it represents the apex of purple prose masquerading as history. Barbara Tuchman got a Pulitzer Prize for it, but it was laughably bad as history on the day it was published (see also: The 1619 Project), and it’s only gotten worse over the past six decades. I don’t know any historians of World War One – being one myself, I know a lot of them – who regard Tuchman’s book as anything but awful, yet it remains the go-to volume for midwits worldwide seeking to pontificate about 1914 and the collapse of the European order.
There’s been plenty of that on Twitter/X/Whatever since Russian President Vladimir Putin restarted his aggression against Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, unleashing the deadliest European conflict since the last world war. Like clockwork, whenever the hideous Russia-Ukraine war takes a turn, armchair strategists cite Tuchman’s book ominously, implying that World War Three is just around the corner. Think 1914, but with nuclear weapons.
One of these days, I fear, the midwits will be right. That day may be approaching fast.
Americans broadly remain blissfully oblivious regarding how close to World War Three we are and have been since early 2022. Repeated warnings from U.S. military and intelligence leaders about this dire state of affairs, which this newsletter reported in detail, with looming war against Russia, or China, or Iran – or worst of all, Russia, China and Iran – have fallen on deaf ears. Not to mention that, given the parlous state of America’s military, amid recruiting and retention problems, shortages of weapons and munitions, plus the anemic condition of our defense industrial base, the Pentagon would be hard-pressed to prevail in even one major theater war, while it would almost certainly lose, probably fast, when confronted by three of them at once.
This alarming strategic situation keeps failing to register with the public, even in an election year. Americans seem not to care that World War Three looms, while the Biden-Harris administration, whoever is actually running it, is eager to distract the public from the geopolitical catastrophe they’ve sleepwalked America into, while allowing our military to further degrade.
During the first, and likely only, TV debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris this week, foreign and defense affairs came up remarkably little, given the world crisis that we’re in, not to mention that the commander-in-chief role is any president’s top job. Mounting tensions with China got short shrift, Taiwan was barely mentioned at all, while Israel’s war against Iran and its terror proxies was almost entirely ignored. The Ukraine war was mentioned, albeit in the expected partisan way, with Harris citing how much military and political support the Biden-Harris administration has provided to Kyiv to resist Putin’s aggression (while unsubtly reminding that there are 800,000 Polish Americans in the vital swing state of Pennsylvania). She added acidly, “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.”
Trump retorted that, if he’d been president, Putin would have “never, ever” reinvaded Ukraine, while accusing the Biden-Harris administration of the weakness displayed by their disastrous retreat from Kabul in August 2021, which encouraged Russian aggression, what Trump termed “the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country. And by the way, that's why Russia attacked Ukraine. Because they saw how incompetent she and her boss are.”
No liberals want to hear this, but Trump has a point. It’s not a coincidence that Russia invaded Ukraine the first time in early 2014, when Barack Obama was president – Putin and his retinue saw Obama abandon his own Syrian “red line” and assessed, correctly, that they could move against Ukraine without risking direct American pushback (as some of us understood at the time) – then reinvaded it in 2022 on Joe Biden’s watch, months after our shambolic Afghan bugout, yet the conflict remained frozen during Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump added with his usual bluster, “I'll get the war with Ukraine and Russia ended. If I'm president-elect, I'll get it done before even becoming president.” That seems exceedingly unlikely, but Trump’s unwillingness in the debate to demand Ukraine’s victory in the war, as the bipartisan Washington, DC, foreign policy elite requires as a litmus test, set off the usual neo-everything alarm bells.
Trump portrayed himself as the peace candidate, and he made clear that he understands the grave global crisis that we’re in, at least at some level, repeatedly citing the risk of World War Three: “Now you have millions of people dead and it's only getting worse, and it could lead to World War Three…We're playing with World War Three. And we have a president that we don't even know if he's -- where is our president?” He added, “We have wars going on in the Middle East. We have wars going on with Russia and Ukraine. We're going to end up in a Third World War. And it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons.”
Some readers don’t want to hear it, but Trump may be right about this. On Pavlovian cue, post-debate, liberals declared Trump to be pro-Putin and perhaps a Kremlin agent of some sort. Having looked into all that for many years, with experienced counterintelligence vision, Trump’s no kind of Russian pawn, and I suspect that he states situationally pro-Putin things because he’s a troll at heart and he knows such statements drive liberals insane. Yet, from a strategic point of view, Trump seems to intuitively grasp something that our entire foreign policy elite cannot.
I’m talking about what professional strategists term the value of the object. Simply put, how much does a country care about another country (including who’s occupying or running it)? Despite nonstop assertions from NATO superfans, who have made an avocation of killing Putin with their mouth, the fate of Ukraine does not, in fact, have vast global implications. I state this as an unabashed supporter of Ukraine in its fight for survival and freedom. However, the geostrategic reality is obvious to anyone who examines global reactions in diplomacy and trade to the Ukraine war: most countries just don’t think this ugly war matters that much to them.
Maybe they’re morally obtuse, maybe they’re just dumb. I am certain that stern moral preaching from wealthy Western elites, perhaps some catchy Davos lectures, won’t convince them to side against Moscow here. In truth, most of NATO doesn’t think the Ukraine war is an existential issue either. Poland and Estonia certainly do, as they should given their long history of nasty occupation by Moscow which ended a mere three decades ago. Warsaw and Tallinn, almost alone in NATO, are making serious military preparations to defend their countries against Russian aggression, and they are right to do so. That virtually nobody else in the Atlantic Alliance is equally worried about Putin and his wrath speaks more loudly than ten million NAFO Fella tweets. Since the Russian military is incapable of pushing Ukrainian troops out of Kursk region, I don’t expect them to be marching on Berlin, or even Warsaw, anytime soon.
Stated plainly, there is no universe where NATO – excepting outliers like Poland and Estonia, who aren’t calling the shots in the Alliance – cares more about who’s running Ukraine than Russia does. Looking at a map clarifies most strategic dilemmas, yet misunderstanding the value of the object is precisely how we got the Ukraine war. As this newsletter explained before Putin restarted his aggression against his neighbor, it was criminally irresponsible for NATO, led by the United States, to pretend that it wanted to admit Ukraine to the Alliance, when it plainly had no plans to do so. That empty promise, an immoral diplomatic charade, only enraged the Kremlin while doing nothing to improve Ukraine’s security. Careless talk costs lives, per the venerable OPSEC mantra.
It's time to move Western discussions about the Ukraine war back into earth orbit, before we stumble right into World War Three due to another needless strategic miscalculation. The root problem is that NATO has no theory of victory in the Ukraine war, to cite another core strategic concept. The best that anyone can deduce, Western foreign policy elites reckon that eventually Russia will just get tired of this attritional slugfest that isn’t producing strategic results for either side, and throw in the towel. Putin is 72 years old – how much longer can he hold on to power? Eventually he will die or become incapacitated, perhaps the new tsar will be overthrown.
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Moreover, there is no indication that any post-Putin regime would be more pro-Western and conciliatory towards Ukraine than the gang of Chekists who have run Russia for the last quarter-century. It might get worse. Westerners seldom realize that most of what passes for “antiwar” sentiment in Russia these days has a right-wing nationalist flavor, in other words, they’re people who are angry with Putin for not crushing Ukraine mercilessly.
The plain truth is that, in any extended attritional war, the side with more people and more resources tends to prevail. Here, that’s Russia, by a good margin, and prodigious amounts of NATO military assistance cannot alter that essential strategic equation. To cite an esteemed cliché, hope is not a strategy, yet nebulous hope in eventual Russian collapse seems to be NATO’s plan. It bears pointing out that the Western ability to assess what’s really going on inside the Kremlin is not very proficient, and nobody should expect NATO to accurately predict what will happen next in Russia. Despite possessing exquisite intelligence plainly indicating that Russia was about to reinvade Ukraine in early 2022, the Biden administration signally failed to deter that invasion (here Vice President Harris played an inglorious role). When this White House says they “got this” when it comes to Moscow, don’t believe them.
Accurately assessing how any war is progressing in real time is highly challenging, even when blessed with high-quality intelligence (as NATO assuredly is). The conflict is strategically, and largely operationally, stalemated. After the embarrassing failure of last year’s overhyped Ukrainian offensive to retake territory in the country’s southeast, achieving modest tactical gains at high cost in lives and treasure, Russia is on its way to repeating that experience this summer, gaining villages, sometimes even a town, at the cost of thousands of casualties. The difference is that Russia can still absorb such losses, at least on paper, while Ukraine is running out of troops at an alarming rate. The fighting resembles the middle of the First World War, when new weapons – then machine guns and rapid-fire artillery, now cheap drones, sensors, and missiles – rendered strategic breakthroughs impossible.
Kyiv accomplished some success with last month’s surprise invasion of Russia’s thinly garrisoned border region around Kursk. This resembles a grand raid more than any sustained offensive, but it’s been deeply satisfying to Ukrainians to make Russians retreat and abandon their territory. This is an embarrassment to the Putin regime, which looks diffident and unsure of itself. Which is why Moscow is now launching a counteroffensive to retake lost ground west of Kursk. Whether Ukraine’s Kursk incursion changes the conflict seems doubtful except in a short-term morale sense, yet incremental wins are still wins, as any seasoned strategist will tell you.
For want of strategic breakthroughs, which neither side appears capable of achieving anywhere along the very extended fighting front, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps asking for more NATO weapons to asymmetrically turn the tide against the invader. Indeed, Zelenskyy’s faith in the ability of NATO-gifted Wunderwaffen to turn the war’s tide is downright Hitlerian. Even though no Western wonder weapons have changed the war’s essential course to date – not M1 tanks, not F-16 fighters, not ATACMS missile systems – Zelenskyy persists.
His latest demand is for permission to expand the use of certain NATO-supplied precision weapons, above all Anglo-French Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles, which Britain already gifted to Kyiv. Highly accurate out to 300 miles, the Storm Shadow has only been authorized by NATO to be employed by the Ukrainians on their own soil, i.e. land occupied by Russia. The missile strikes fear into the enemy, and they have sunk several Russian naval vessels and killed significant numbers of Russian military personnel, notably by taking out high-value command posts (the dead have included generals and admirals).
Kyiv is itching to fire Storm Shadows inside Russia, to destroy command and control nodes, airbases, logistic sites, and related targets which are enabling Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine. This argument conveys both military and moral logic: the border doesn’t exist for Moscow, why should it to Kyiv? London has been inching towards green-lighting Storm Shadow strikes inside Russia, while Washington has remained reluctant to escalate NATO’s involvement in the war. However, amid reports this week that Secretary of State Antony Blinken is preparing to allow Kyiv to employ the missiles inside Russia, the conflict may be about to take an abrupt course change.
Moscow has been signaling for months that it views Storm Shadow strikes inside Russia as a game-changing event, indeed a “red line” for the Kremlin. Russia’s argument is that the missiles aren’t just supplied by NATO to Ukraine, rather the West is providing Kyiv with the logistical and real-time intelligence support required to target Russians with them. While the pilot launching the Storm Shadow is Ukrainian, almost everyone else in that deadly missile’s kill-chain comes from NATO. Just as Kyiv has a point here, so does Moscow.
Russia recently announced that it is lowering the threshold for the employment of nuclear weapons in response to “the escalation course of our Western adversaries” in Ukraine. Since CIA Director William Burns last weekend let drop that Russia was much closer to unleashing tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine in 2022 than was publicly stated at the time, we should assess that Moscow has kept them on the table. In truth, we know they have, and a few months ago leaked documents from the Russian defense ministry revealed that the Kremlin’s threshold for employing tactical nuclear weapons – which fundamentally are viewed by Moscow as just a bigger boom than conventional fires – is far lower than previously believed.
Along comes Vladimir Putin himself to offer some horse’s-mouth clarity on Russia’s position on this vital issue. Yesterday, in a last-ditch effort to intimidate NATO into not accepting what Moscow views as serious escalation in the Ukraine war, which is expected to be announced today, Russia’s president made remarks on camera that firmly established his position. Mincing no words, Putin stated that Storm Shadow strikes inside Russia would be tantamount to a declaration of war by NATO. He explained:
If this decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries in the war in Ukraine. This is their direct participation. And this, of course, significantly changes the very essence, the very nature of the conflict. This will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are fighting Russia…Therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. It is a question of deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict or not.
There you have it, folks. When a guy who hates the West and possesses several thousand nuclear weapons says NATO is choosing “war” it’s time to notice. Predictably, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer rapidly pushed back, stating while headed to Washington that Russia “started” the conflict in Ukraine and can end it “straight away.” Last week, CIA boss Burns channeled the Western elite’s consensus view and explained that Putin is a “bully” whose nuclear saber-rattling should not be taken literally.
Perhaps, or perhaps not. I think we may find out rather soon.
This newsletter explained before anyone else that Putin’s aggression against Ukraine wasn’t a whim or an act of madness, rather the logical outcome of a strategic worldview in the Kremlin which assesses this struggle as an existential one against the decadent, postmodern West for Russia’s very survival, where Ukraine is merely the battlefield. This conflict is a spiritual-civilizational fight, a religious war in our terms. Putin publicly stated that the West is in bed with Satan over a decade ago, but the West somehow missed this.
Maybe his words today represent a mere ruse, a way for an embarrassed Putin to save face as Russian troops have yet to dislodge Ukrainians from Kursk region. Perhaps this is a face-saving gesture by a scared Kremlin that worries it’s slowly losing the Ukraine war. Chekists love their deception and disinformation.
Or maybe Putin just told the Russian people, on the record, that he won’t allow the West to attack Russia directly without suffering grave consequences. Over two millennia ago, a wise Chinese sage warned about putting your enemy on “death ground,” where he feels he’s fighting for survival and therefore cannot compromise. Mass death then becomes preferable to humiliating surrender. To allow one last strategic aphorism: the enemy always gets a vote. The enemy is an animate object with agency and his own view of things, including his own interests.
Strategy, properly understood, has its own logic which isn’t easily susceptible to the fickle whims of politics, parties, and personalities. Few Western leaders grasp this, I sadly must attest (yes, I do know this, because I educated a bunch of them). The same political and military idiots who gave us the catastrophic Afghan defeat, which they still insist was a flawless act of massive genius, are managing nuclear escalation in Ukraine. I remain perennially partial to the Zen Master and his admonition about coming to conclusions based solely on the present moment and imperfect intelligence. As always, we’ll see.