Geopolitical Musings

The U.S. urgently needs to restore some of its soft power. It has fallen off the wagon of being a country the rest of the world looks up to, and has instead become a cautionary tale.

One doesn't have to be terribly altruistic or idealistic to think so. The single biggest determinant of who wins wars is the allies that each side has in the fight.

Although, the way that you fight when you are the powerful party and the way you fight in an asymmetric battle as the weaker party is very different.

One of the major lessons of the Ukraine war is that the Russian military's conventional warfare capabilities are far inferior to what had been widely believed. While Russia has some advanced weapons, it has proportionately far fewer, its troops are much less well trained, and its leaders are less competent.

The good news that flows from this fact is that everyone can be much more comfortable that the Western European powers, a coalition that has grown larger in the post-Soviet era, together with the U.S. and Canada, would soundly defeat Russia and its handful of allies in a conventional war.

The bad news that flows from this fact is that Russia will be inclined in future conflicts as it has in this one, to maximize the leverage that it has available to it from its possession of nuclear weapons by threatening to use them and possibly by actually using them.

The temptation for Russia to use them will grow even greater because its global economic and diplomatic clout have been greatly undermined by sanctions and boycotts in response to its invasion of Ukraine, and because the rest of the world has been forcefully encouraged to become energy independent of Russia, since energy is the main thing that the rest of the world relies upon it for.

A major development this week has been an act of sabotage by Belorussian railway workers, shutting down rail based logistics support from Belorussia to Russian forces in Ukraine. As sanctions have impaired the quality of life in Russia, and the intelligentsia, as well as many of the powerful and the rich in Russian who aren't in Putin's inner circle, have found themselves out of the loop, dragged into a war that isn't in their own interests, and at grave peril of persecution both from within Russian for dissent, and outside Russia for loyalty, the stream of Russia's best and brightest out of their country is giving rise to brain drain.

The voluntary exile of dissenters and opponents from Russia, together with crackdowns on those who dissent without leaving, will no doubt help Putin to consolidate power at home, as will the fact that the world seems united against Russia providing a bond to those facing this outside action. But it also means the Russia's economy and society will be much weaker for it, and that untold Russian secrets are escaping to the outside world.

Ten million Ukrainians, roughly a quarter of its population, are now refugees too. It appears that those refugees are disproportionately women and children, with far more than a quarter of them departed. According to a news report from today:

Russian forces appeared unprepared and have often performed badly against Ukrainian resistance. The U.S. estimates Russia has lost a bit more than 10 percent of the overall combat capability it had at the start of the fight, including troops and tanks and other materiel. Western officials say Russian forces are facing serious shortages of food, fuel and cold weather gear, leaving some soldiers suffering from frostbite. . . .

Thousands of civilians are believed to have died. Estimates of Russian military casualties vary widely, but even conservative figures by Western officials are in the low thousands.

On Monday, Russia’s pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, citing the Defense Ministry, reported that almost 10,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. The report was quickly removed, and the newspaper blamed hackers. The Kremlin refused to comment. The Western official said the figure is “a reasonable estimate.”

Russian forces aren't gaining much ground, basically having been stalled out for weeks, but also aren't ceding much ground to Ukraine's offensives. The air space over Ukraine remains contested with daily dog fights between fighter aircraft on both sides and Ukrainian forces harrying Russian aircraft with anti-aircraft missiles.

Russia's poor military performance in Ukraine doesn't just undermine its credibility in future conflicts either. It also depletes Russia's finite resources of military equipment like tanks, warplanes, military helicopters, missiles, and soldiers, especially in the European theater, leaving it less ready for any sequel European conflict to the war in Ukraine. With a weak economy and isolation from international trade, Russia won't be able to easily replace that lost equipment, and it appears to be short of qualified troops to fill the gap as well.

A Russia isolated from the outside world by sanctions and boycotts will still never be as insular as North Korea or Soviet era Albania. But economic isolation and brain drain will dampen its economy and impair its technological capacity. 

True to type, Russia will probably try to shift a larger share of its economy to military spending while dealing with a shrinking economy with reduced consumer spending, as unpleasant as that will be for ordinary Russians. But even so, its resources for military spending will be limited and the military goods it can produce will be degraded.

All of this will leave Russia with few options to exercise power other than its nuclear arsenal, much like North Korea, but far more potent, and apparently with a leader who seems to be going mad and disconnecting  his entire country from reality, as his grand vision for Russia has turned to ash.

It looks as if even Russian-Chinese relations are falling apart. China's society is healthier and the rest of the world's trade means much more to it than Russia's does. Talk of a Chinese pivot towards the West and away from Russia is growing. China is increasingly surpassing Russia as the number one non-Western power in the world.

China's society may be awash in reality challenged propaganda from top to bottom as well. But its leaders, unlike Putin, do not appear to be crazy.

it seems that there is no foreseeable hope of revolution from within to bring about regime change in North Korea. It is less clear if this is a possibility in Russia, despite the current dominance of the United Russia party and Putin. In particular, in areas where Russia thought it had put down insurgencies for good in the past may, in the face of a perception that Russia's military is overtaxed and the regime is weak, some of those insurgencies could reignite, leading Putin to be more embattled and more prone to take ruthless action.

Also, despite the fact that the leadership in Belorussia has kowtowed to Russia to the point of practically rejoining it in a union again, and despite the fact that the Belorussian leadership has been drifting in a totalitarian direction, it seems from some things I've read that its leadership is much less secure, even if it can swiftly be replaced with the normal democratic process. And, Belorussia is facing many of the same economic sanctions and boycotts that Russia is from its collaboration with Russian in its invasion of Ukraine.

Of course, whatever upside Russia had hoped to gain from its invasion of Ukraine seems to have largely evaporated. International recognition of a bit more Ukrainian territory in areas that are heavily ethnically Russian, a withdrawal of its forces from the remainder of Ukraine, and a partial relaxation of sanctions and boycotts, is probably the best outcome it could hope for at this point, and that is far from a sure thing. Russia has already irrevocably lost more than it can reasonably hope to gain.

In an ideal world, all countries of the world would learn from Russia's debacle in Ukraine that unprovoked invasions of other countries don't pay.

And, let's be honest. While not quite as brazen, U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan weren't terribly honorable or well justified either (and who knows what the U.S. was thinking in the Gulf War when it sought to protect a slave holding monarchy in Kuwait from an Iraqi invasion). But, it isn't as if the U.S. benefitted all that much from those wars either.

When the U.S. finally withdrew from Afghanistan last year, the Taliban regime that had been on the verge of ruling the country promptly replaced the regime the U.S. and its allies had put in place in a matter of days and now rules the entire country. I'm hard pressed to explain how the U.S. benefited from the Iraq War, or the Gulf War, either.

Both wars provided a sandbox for the U.S. and its allies to sharpen their military acumen. But these wars were extremely expensive. The Iraq War gave rise to the Islamic State as a major global adversary. Afghanistan and the Iraq War combined have defanged for Iraq, its most threatening neighbors in both directions.

The U.S. has also gains little or nothing from providing military aid to Saudi Arabia, which is not its friend and is using those military resources to fight a proxy war with Iran in Yemen with horrific humanitarian consequences.

The cost of these foreign wars to the U.S. in lives lost has been relatively modest for two decades of war, although it hasn't been nothing. But the money the U.S. has spent to fight these wars and prepare to fight more wars has been immense. One doesn't have to be a pacifist to recognize that we could spend less and yet use U.S. military might in a way that provides us with greater security benefits.

So, returning to the core questions:

1. How can the U.S. restore its soft power and become a global model again?

2. What is the best way to deal with a nuclear armed and unpredictable and aggressive Russia that is starting to collapse and become dangerous out of desperation?

3. How can the U.S. reduce the immense expense it continues to incur for the military and stop fighting wars it does not benefit from, while remaining capable of military operations that make sense for it?

4. Can the U.S. lure China more into the fold of the developed world? How?