The Crucial Next 6 Months in Ukraine — What Comes After?
Thomas H. Lipscomb, a new friend, penned the following and graciously gave me permission to publish. Mr. Lipscomb is the Chairman of the Center for the Digital Future in New York. He was a founder and CEO of two public companies in digital technology and holds five patents. He has been an executive in several media companies, including CEO of Times Books, and he has written articles for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
There is no doubt now that Russia will defeat Ukraine and impose its terms. As Putin said a few weeks ago, it was his mistake to think he could trust the West to come to a reasonable agreement and he had no real choice but military defeat of its Ukrainian puppet. His shrewd foreign minister Lavrov pointed out that there was no point in discussions with the current American government. They have no understanding of war and even less of diplomacy.
But how will the United States respond to its dawning understanding that the years of US/NATO planning the Ukrainian Proxy War Angela Merkel recently revealed have not led to the collapse of Russian power and the overthrow of Putin, but the destruction and partition of Ukraine and the exposure of the American and NATO military challenge as vastly inferior to its reputation? This was a fear Biden actually exposed in his White House meeting during the Zelensky visit before Christmas.
By its total control of media the US/NATO could keep its populations learning of this catastrophe to Western power and pretensions for a considerable time. But the international effects will take place immediately.
American military planning was once world class. But who would plan a proxy war against Russia, one of the acknowledged masters of artillery with far better air defense technology than any in the West, and then equip our puppet Ukraine with inferior weapons and only enough ammunition to last six months? And surely American planners couldn’t help knowing that there was no longer a manufacturing base for resupply, and NATO warehouses were practically empty?
Rhett Butler contemptuously reminded Southern secession hot heads “There’s not a cannon factory in the whole South.” Things are not much better in the United States today. It is a worn truism for centuries that logistics are the key to battlefield dominance. Did our current military planners somehow miss that?
America is now scouring its junk pile for obsolete weapons that can never arrive in time anyway to bulk up Pentagon Ukrainian military aid lists along with manufacturing contracts for future supplies that are irrelevant and the Ukraine is digging steam locomotives out of museums to run on what is left of its rail system.
But the United States current leadership is a bunch of total idiots, blinded by ideology, arrogance and illusions of pursuing a “rule-based” global hegemony, an opportunity long passed, as our performance in this proxy war shows. The United States may have won the Cold War but it lost the peace. Its strategic thinking and its military is obsolete and configuration of both forces and equipment is based on assumptions from the past millennium. The battle for a Great Global Reset under a unipolar American hegemony has been lost as well. The World Economic Forum is now about as relevant as the Holy Roman Empire. All they can continue to do is terrorize the increasingly authoritarian states of the West with asinine policy proposals.
The attempt to destroy Russia prodded it to a burst of brilliant diplomacy and leadership by Putin and his team that has quietly established that the rest of the world prefers sovereignty and a multi-polar world. The post Cold War “Pox Americana” as Larry Johnson has called it, is over. Historians of the future will study this period of history with fascination. Few times in history has such immense change happened so fast.
But how will the idiots in Washington react? Will they resort to some attempt to implement Petraeus’ “coalition of the willing” fabricated from some NATO troops and some of our own? Petraeus so far has had two significant ideas in his life: As a cadet he married his boss’s, the Superintendent of West Point’s, daughter, and choosing to desert his CIA men dying in Benghazi to avoid embarrassment of Obama and Hillary Clinton. Will a desperate US/NATO fabricate some cause and actually physically intervene to try to prevent the inevitable defeat of Ukraine?
There is a possible important tell and it comes from Putin’s tactics in the Donbas. Why, if a great offensive to take the Donbas and breakout is about to begin, would the Russians be intensely fortifying the line they already hold? Could it be after the absurd Parthian shot pinpricks the CIA has been inflicting within Russia itself, the Russians have decided the US/NATO are just out of control enough to try a tactical nuke as well as a NATO force attack?
The next six months are likely to be the most hair-raising we have seen yet.
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