Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
In my effort to awake humanity to its extinction in the nuclear war that is advancing upon us, I have pointed my finger at Putin and Xi’s mistaken belief that the way to avoid it is to ignore provocations and wait for Washington to come to its senses.
This shows diplomacy at its highest level, but it is mistaken. The ignored provocations encourage more and worst provocations.
Continue reading “The Ukraine Conflict Is Spinning Out of Control”
Guest Post by John Helmer
Doctors in hospitals for the criminally insane have reported that the sharpest pain patients with superiority complexes suffer is the belief there are others who are more superior than they are. Unless they are stopped, they kill to cure.
US exceptionalism is a disease of this type. The American exceptionalists believe that if the US isn’t conquering and victorious — great again as in MAGA — it is defeating itself because, they think, the US can never be beaten by a foreign adversary on the field — not on the battlefield, nor in the marketplace, nor in the mind and on the page. So this is where the whitecoats arrive today: the Russian General Staff and the Stavka are defeating the Americans on every front, weapon system, intelligence summary, and mind. This has never happened before. Failing to see and understand this is delusional; those who kill to cure this aren’t all hospitalised.
A book repeating the US, NATO and Ukrainian version of how and why Russia’s Ukrainian battlefield campaign began on February 23, 2022, is symptomatic, nothing new. “We have no idea of exactly how the conflict will end”, concludes Owen Matthews (aka Bibikov) in a fresh publication from the state-subsidised printing press of Rupert Murdoch. But “we already know how it will not end. There will be no complete victory for either Russia or Ukraine. NATO is too invested to allow Kyiv to fall to the Russian army… this war will eventually end — with a negotiated peace.”*
Guest Post by Alastair Crooke
Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.
The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.
It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.
Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
It’s been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In spite of claims from the regime and its media allies that Russia was the next Third Reich and would soon roll through half of Europe, it turns out that was never even remotely true.
In fact, things have unfolded more or less just like we predicted here at mises.org:
Continue reading “One Year Later In Ukraine: Washington And NATO Got It Very Wrong”
Guest Post by Alexander Dugin
Russia has changed its paradigm from realism to the Theory of a Multipolar World, has directly rejected liberalism in all its forms, and has directly challenged modern Western civilization, openly denying it the right to be universal.
A year has passed since the start of Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine. It began precisely as a Special Military Operation, it is clear today that Russia has found itself in a full-fledged and difficult war. The war not so much with Ukraine – as a regime, not with a people (hence the demand for political denazification was put forward initially), but first of all with the “collective West”, that is, in fact, with the NATO bloc (except for the special position of Turkey and Hungary, seeking to remain neutral in the conflict – the remaining NATO countries take part in the war on the side of Ukraine one way or another).
This year of war shattered many illusions that all sides of the conflict had.
Guest Post by The Saker
The title of this article is a quote by the famous Chinese general, strategist, philosopher, and writer Sun Tzu who lived 2500 years ago. And while it is true that warfare has dramatically changed over the past millennia (for example, operational art was added as an intermediate level between tactics and strategy), the fundamental logic of Sun Tzu still applies. To grossly oversimplify this issue, you could say that tactics are the means towards an end which has to be defined and the definition of that end goal is strategy. Again, this is ridiculously oversimplified, but for our purposes that is good enough.
The above is highly pertinent to the situation in the Ukraine. But first, a crucial reminder: the Ukrainian military was pretty much destroyed in the first month of the war. Both Andrei Martyanov and myself have written about this many times, but if you want to hear that from another source, I recommend this article by Big Serge on Substack (a good website which I recommend to all). Or listen to the Macgregor videos. And there are plenty more out there (Moon of Alabama is another good one).
Continue reading “Tactics without Strategy is the Noise Before Defeat”
