Wars beget such anxiety that those not involved in the fight for survival at the front engage in endless emotional torment and speculation.
This is a tactical, individual reaction within a viral environment, so as individual anxiety achieves mass adoption, it acquires strategic significance. And today, that mass adoption is guaranteed by the still largely ungovernable new technologies of instant perception dissemination.
Even at the battlefront, the response is visceral and tactical. Survival there depends on innate human response, not on detached, dispassionate assessment. That “dispassionate assessment,” supposedly guiding the strategic management of war, is left to the detachment of leadership. But what if there’s no “dispassionate assessment,” no “detachment”? And what if the accumulated emotions of an engaged polity achieve such mass that dispassionate assessment is, in any event, swept aside, and all judgment and management on the war become driven by the hysteria of the crowd?
It’s easy to miss the point of any war in which we become embroiled.
Just as no military plan of attack survives intact beyond the first shot, so does war engage the heart. The mind is left, pushed aside, to quiet, if it can, the clangor of self-doubts. The mind, indeed, doesn’t even survive the frenzied mental overture to the war; the heart, being stronger, wins.
It’s always one great task of governments in war to suppress questioning—reason—by firing a barrage of imagery designed to ensure that the heart, our emotion, dominates our actions and that the mind is relegated to some dark corner; the longer-term truth takes the hindmost. We have no time for it when the press of war is upon us.
Indeed, at all times, governments seek to engage emotions rather than minds. Emotions reduce the holder to an immediate, tactical framework, demanding urgent gratification. This is a bloodlust that brooks no reason: Feed the crowd; give it circuses.
Those “concerned spectators” of war, professional or amateur, then attempt to read the tea leaves of dispatches and let their hopes and fears—their biases and need for reinforcement that they belong to the righteous and victorious side—interpret the chaos of piecemeal reporting.
It’s all to little avail and causes more harm than good.
These spectators become passionate without knowing the causes or direction of the conflict; less still do they know where it should go and what it may mean.
No consequences are envisaged but the idyllic dream of victory, not even a realization of what victory means.
The farther from the battlefront and the farther from deeper, impartial knowledge of all parties to the conflict, the more the signals of war are misunderstood, misread, and willfully subordinated to prejudices. The adversary is demonized and disrespected and, therefore, willfully misunderstood.
Thus, no good can be made even of sound intelligence, for it’s corrupted by the recipient’s interpretation.
For this reason, I haven’t opined on the recent war news: the alleged statistics, the “moral certainties,” and the “likely outcome” of the dispute, ostensibly just between Ukraine and Russia. As I say, it’s ostensibly between Ukraine and Russia because those nations have paid the biggest price in the loss of human souls. There are other players who prod the bear or throw coins to keep the entertainment alive.
That there are, in any event, bigger and more important wars afoot is a reality that garners little attention. There are longer perspectives in global affairs that are of greater importance than the “visible spectrum” of conflict, which now dominates the passions. None of these overarching issues receive attention because they don’t satisfy the cravings of observers on either side of the conflict: cravings for a perception of certainty, for the emotional relief offered by apparent moral absolution, and for the vanquishing of foes we have built—even created—in our own minds.
So why attempt to speculate on the Ukraine–Russia war’s daily vagaries? There’s no valid intelligence that affects the strategic frame of it. In other words, we can’t get sufficient accurate information on all relevant aspects of the war to form a balanced assessment.
There are fundamental historical factors at work: the truths of historical trends and the dictates of geography. So the outcome will be what geography and history and a dash of chance—disruptive factors—have determined it will be. As Omar Khayyam remarked in his “Rubaiyat”:
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a jot of it.”
What are these fundamentals? They include—in the context of this war that now obsesses societies and distracts them from more important realities—Russia’s great geography, resources, and industrial depth and Ukraine’s comparative lack of those.
This determines, even apart from the historical stoicism of societies on both sides, the endurance of the combatants.
It means that Ukraine’s ability to wage war—when a quarter of its population has fled, never to return, and many of its combat-age men have been sacrificed—and its continued combat effectiveness exists only as a fleeting gift from sponsoring and mercurial powers.
There’s no evidence as yet, even through the prism of the carnage, that Russia has been sufficiently strategically weakened that it might lose the war, even though it has become angry as a nation and its future changed, in some ways, for its longer-term strength; in other ways for its longer-term isolation. Yet it has always been isolated.
And why should the foreign gifts to Ukraine persist, especially when they can now be ill-afforded by the donors? Continued outpourings of their treasure clearly jeopardize the ability of the donors—particularly the United States and the UK—to prepare for a possible conflict with a more serious threat—communist China.
Why should the people of Ukraine, or (more significantly) their generals, continue to tolerate a political leadership committed to continuing war when no territorial gains have been made? Indeed, the territory continues to be consolidated by Russia in what was, only briefly in history, Eastern Ukraine, a region despised and deliberately ostracized from modern Western Ukraine.
Why would several heads of government—specifically of the United States, the UK, and Ukraine—so demonize their opponent that negotiation becomes difficult when there’s no prospect of an overwhelming success by either side unless by absolute physical annihilation of its opponent? Why was negotiation so rejected by the political leadership of the United States, the UK, and Ukraine from the beginning of (and before) the conflict, and, instead, the deliberate threat to Russia of the expansion of the NATO alliance to Moscow’s doorstep thrown out as bait to make the Russian bear react?
Why did the leaders of the United States and the UK, in particular, work so hard to create a new Cold War, which drove Russia into the arms of China’s communist regime, knowing that this would work against the West’s long-term interests and would need to be undone at some future date? The lessons of the 1972 initiative to break the Sino–Soviet alliance are apposite.
Wars rarely commence through the application of logic, but more from the inflammation of passions and the passionate misinterpretation of evolving events. And yet wars produce unanticipated outcomes, largely because wisdom and history aren’t consulted. The Russia–Ukraine war has already produced unanticipated outcomes, not because they weren’t foreseeable but because we chose to not foresee them.
We never, in fact, took the time or had the discipline to foresee them because we were mesmerized by the pieces moving on the game board.
Do we love circuses more than survival? Quite clearly, we do.
