Events in diplomatic halls and European battlefields since the Crocus City Hall attack (22 March 2024) have not served the crusading cause of NATO well. One might even speculate that, yet another US miscalculation has backfired on Europe. The Ruin of Ukraine is accelerating, and NATO can no longer hide the blood on its hands, indeed the blood pooling at its feet.
There are growing admissions that Ukraine is defeated, and its frontlines are about to collapse. Its mobilization has failed. Its electricity system is vulnerable. John Helmer (the veteran Australian Moscow correspondent) writes:
"This is a type of siege by electricity. The Kiev regime will be unable to reinforce or resupply the eastern cities, and there will be no Russian ground advance; no Mariupol, Bakhmut or Avdeyevka battles; no electricity until capitulation."
Dancing with Bears, 1 April 2024
Ukraine’s deceptions and corruptions have caught up with it. President Zelensky’s legal term of office is about to expire, and there is no plan for a succession, at least not a constitutional one. By the end of the month the last fig leaf will fall from Ukrainian democracy into the mud of its black earth.
There are troubling signs, while the Russian investigation of the incident and arrest of its perpetrators and organisers proceeds, that Ukraine and its American, British and European Union sponsors may, subject to the results of the investigation, have played a direct role in contracting and financing this act of terror.
There are revealing denials and inconsistent smokescreens from American officials. We warned them, but we did not warn them. We have nothing to do with it, and we know with bluff certainty that Ukraine has nothing to do with it either. Pinky promise. Just like we said with NATO not moving one inch eastward. Two fingers crossed behind our backs.
We are approaching the collapse of illusions I anticipated in February 2023, in my first published piece in Pearls and Irritations, The West’s Grand Illusions in Ukraine.
Perhaps the American and allied leaderships believed their own propaganda that they could win any war when they provoked this war by trying to take Russia’s Queen on Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard. But at least now some ‘realists’ are speaking up, if covertly in the corridors of Washington. The Rand Corporation paper on ‘Avoiding a Long War’ warns that inflated optimism about success in the war will extend the war, and that the war is not in the interests of the USA. It politely rebukes Secretary of State Blinken as ‘too narrowly focused on one dimension of the war’s trajectory.’
Overconfidence about success in war provokes war, makes for long wars, and springs from the grand illusions of national elites. Geoffrey Blainey made the point in 1973 in Causes of War, and the Rand Corporation report and the ‘realist’ faction in America cite him today.
Of course, many critics (including my modest podcast) have exposed these illusions since February 2022. Jeffrey Sachs. John Mearsheimer. Paul Keating. Tony Kevin. Geoffrey Roberts. Seymour Hersh. Many, many more who are shamefully attacked as ‘Russian propagandists’.
Truth will disperse the illusion. It may take weeks. It may take months or years. But, at some stage, there will be a reckoning. The end of World War I was not good for the deluded European imperial elites. The end of the war in Ukraine will not be good for the imperial American elites. They have spent too long spinning the virtual realities of manipulated news – ‘America makes its own reality’ – to deal with the realities of a changed multipolar world.
They have been exposed as incompetent in waging war with a peer, in fielding diplomacy with independent nations, in framing economies that serve people not bubbles, and, finally, in telling their own people the honest truth. Tragically, the grand illusions of this leadership elite will outlive the conscripted soldiers of Ukraine, that dispensable nation that betrayed itself in search of American glory.
The West’s Grand Illusions in Ukraine (Feb 22, 2023)
If the USA, NATO and Australia were better led, these countries would sue for peace now. They would ask Russia now to state its desired terms. They would begin to talk and keep talking for as long as it takes to negotiate a peace with Russia.
But the ideologists of American Supremacy do not do diplomacy. If you can watch one clip of geopolitics discussion this weekend, then watch this discussion with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs about the utter failure of US diplomacy. He reveals his private advice to the American leaders and direct observation of the duplicity and dishonesty of Emmanuel Macron. He also points to the scholarship on Britain’s wickedly long and senseless history of Russophobia.
For me personally it has been a challenging week, and at the last minute I had to defer my initial plan for this week’s article, on the wonderful historical fiction and crime TV series, Babylon Berlin. I promise I will return to that soon.
So, I decided to reach back to a “Flowers of the Mind” series that I wrote on my Burning Archive blog in 2021. This material has not been published elsewhere, and not in either of my books that used my earlier blog posts. I found there, in a fragment written in 2021, an uncanny piece of advice on how this terrible war could have been prevented and how even today we can return to dialogue and diplomacy, and make, as Bismarck advised, a good peace with Russia.
From The Burning Archive, Flowers of the Mind series late 2021
Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: the Battle for Europe, 1807-1814 (2009) is a masterpiece of history. It won the Wolfson Prize for History, and I finished reading it this week. It transforms the understanding of the centrality of Russia to nineteenth century Russia, and indeed the defeat of Napoleon, not only in the retreat from Moscow, but the chase to Paris.
The book is uncannily prescient for today's world, and indeed the events of this week as the Biden-Putin phone call leads to the effective acceptance by at least one faction of the American Empire that it will not send troops to Ukraine. Russia has more assertively demanded in effect a treaty to end the Cold War legally and to stop the eastward expansion of NATO that America has led since the victor's ruses of the early 1990s.
To end the century-long Cold War, for real, America needs to withdraw from Europe, and to allow Russia and the rest of Europe to find its true security. The leaders of the Western alliance may do well to read Lieven's book and his closing reflections on how Alexander I of Russia liberated Europe and defeated the aggressive ideological empire of the day, Napoleon's France. Alexander's overriding priority was to end Napoleonic control of Germany. As Lieven writes:
"The basic point was that Alexander was convinced that Russian and European security depended on each other. That is still true today. But perhaps there is some inspiration to be drawn from a story in which the Russian army advancing across Europe in 1813-14 was in most places seen as an army of liberation, whose victories meant escape from Napoleon's exactions, an end to an era of constant war, and the restoration of European trade and prosperity."
Lieven, Russia against Napoleon, p. 528.
Is it too much to imagine, in a not-too-distant year, there is a Treaty of Kiev or Vienna that brings the long unfounded enmity between the Anglo-American world and Russia to an end, closes the Cold War, and restores peace and security to Europe without the fear and arms traders of America?
Mary Sarotte has published a book, Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (2021) that explores the decade of the 1990s and the squandered opportunity to end the Cold War without humiliating Russia. Its title comes from a fateful conversation between American Secretary of State, James Baker, and leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. Baker proposed that the USSR could withdraw from Germany if America and NATO will "not shift one inch eastward from its present position".
Gorbachev agreed and took the words on trust. Fatefully, the American Empire proved not trustworthy or agreement capable. President George HW Bush told Baker that alas he did want to push ahead, and America's geo-strategic aggression continued. They welched on the deal, and never put a too-clever negotiator's words into a legal treaty. No gracious victor there. Sarotte gives a balanced account, using archival documents, but ultimately takes the side of the American imperial republican idealists of the 1990s, from which milieu she came.
The consequence, in my view from the outer provinces of the crumbling American Empire, was the great geo-political tragedy that Putin has spent twenty years responding to, and the unresolved Cold War we have today. We cannot have Cold War II with China because we have not yet concluded Cold War with a treaty and a peace with honour.
Not much poetry, and much history and geopolitics this week. In reading the Cambridge History of Russia: Volume 3 The Twentieth Century I came across an illuminating discussion of the debate on totalitarianism. There Barrington Moore Jr is quoted on his assessment of the Utopian goals and totalitarian methods of the Soviet state. He said:
"the means have swallowed up and distorted the original ends.”
Coming up on the Burning Archive
Next week, I will be bringing you some reflections on a remarkable conversation I had today with Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson, historian of Australia-China history. That interview will appear on my YouTube channel on Friday, and on my podcast the following Monday.
Thanks for reading, and please share the Burning Archive with some other readers.
Great piece, Jeff, although I must admit you had me hooked with the combination of ‘diplomacy and history’ in your title. If the West had studied more Russian history they may have been less keen to try to push into Ukraine. Perhaps they were blinded of the possibility of stealing Russian land and resources