True Victory in Ukraine is the Friends We Made Along the Way

Especially when those friends are content to watch you die horribly.

[EDITOR’S NOTE and CORRECTION: I mistakenly attributed the article that was the subject of my piece to the American Spectator; it was in fact the US edition of the UK-based Spectator. The article has been updated to reflect that correction. In my defense, how many conservative Spectators does one expect America to have? The substance of my article remains unchanged and the American Spectator is only slightly more nuanced in its Ukraine takes than its European rival (apparently the two publications dislike each other). Thank you very kindly to @John Maus for catching the error.]

[NB: Please read the excellent essays by

elizabeth nickson

on why our media is terrible and

Matt Bivens, M.D.

on the background to the conflict and its fallout (both also linked below).

Simplicius The Thinker

’s insightful focused long takes on Ukraine are worth reading in their collective entirety.]

If nothing else, the media arm of our neoliberal managerial elites has produced a golden age of creative interpretations of success.

Per the running general theme of late that the legacy media is terrible and going downhill and Substack is the future, this morning I came across this super-contrarian hot take from The Spectator that argues that, if you ignore the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the fact that there is no possible way for Ukraine to achieve its stated victory objectives, you can make the case that Ukraine is actually winning the war. Pretty bold stuff, along the lines of an Asahi Shimbun article from circa November 1944 pointing out that the US Navy getting closer to Japan just means it will be that much more convenient to fly out and gloriously sink their ships. For those of you still inclined to put any faith in “conservative” media outlets on the grounds that they occasionally get things right, know that the default for them is still the consensus of the neoliberal managerial regime. It’s called the Spectator for a reason; it sits on the sidelines and cheers on the home team, which is the Washington Generals.

The dwarf with the assist is Chuck Schumer.

Rather than using its resources and ostensive oppositional position to question the regime’s fruitless and devastating military adventurism of the past 20+ years, the Spectator decided it would simply tag along with the Uniparty’s we-promise-this-time-it-will-work strategy in Ukraine from the beginning, and the magazine has followed it right into the Führerbunker. As pointed out in better articles here on Substack, the war has devastated Ukraine, resulting in the better part of its young population either fleeing or dead, the de facto permanent loss of a fifth of its territory (at the time of writing) and there was never a realistic chance it would ever have gone differently. As Barack Obama- for all his other faults- realized, Ukraine represents an existential foreign policy issue for Russia, and once the US made clear it intended to support the Zelensky government in its maximalist ambitions- retaking Crimea and the whole of the Donbass- Putin would either have to commit to full war or face the collapse of his government. Nothing about Putin’s past should have made anyone doubt he would do so and nothing about the recent military history of the US and NATO should have given anyone confidence they would (or could) follow through on their promises. And so here we are, with not only hundreds of thousands of dead European youth sacrificed on the altar of preserving the rules-based liberal world order of rainbow revolutions and economic-colonial extraction, but with Con Inc. yet again beclowning itself by yet again making The Conservative Case For (TM) why humiliating defeat is actually kind of a win-win.

The author of “Is Ukraine Really Losing” [NB: yes, yes it is] is Owen Matthews, scion of communists and Oxford-educated, as well as being a former writer for Newsweek. In other words, he is the perfect person to just sort of move into writing for an ostensibly conservative magazine- not conservative in any meaningful sense, loyal to GAE and its projects, and willing to strain not only the credulity but the very sanity of readers under 70 with takes that border on the surreal in terms of their relationship with reality. His latest does not disappoint.

Matthews is very much an optimist, a ‘the-graveyard-isn’t-half-empty-it’s-half-full’ kind of guy. He does concede that there is a “stalemate,” which is a charitable way of describing the Ukrainian army hurling itself against superior Russian defenses and taking huge losses for no meaningful gains. But he wouldn’t go so far as to say this represents any kind of success for Russia. Nor does he put much stock in the fact that the Russians are methodically advancing on all fronts as winter sets in and Ukraine is rapidly running out of whatever resources weren’t looted by oligarchs. Matthews isn’t about all that negativity and he doesn’t want those bad vibes for you either. Therefore, he’s going to make an omelet out of all those cracked eggs laying out on the steppe and show you that winning can mean a lot of things, if you think about it.

This guy does a good job explaining the actual situation, which would be hard to gather were one to go by Google search results, which strangely seem to track closely with the messaging needs of the US Government. History Legends’ work is actually really solid and another great example of amateurs running laps around the lapdogs. Check him out.

Matthews begins the article by recounting the almost-peace that would have broken out in March of 2022.

Matt Taibbi

and the rest of the free media have long noted that these talks were purposely wrecked by Boris Johnson acting as NATO’s bagman, urging the Ukrainians to fight on with the West’s full backing. The US led alliance was confident that a combination of sanctions and the full productive might of the MIC would serve to quickly dispatch Putin’s regime. Do you remember the very real discussions of how Russia was going to be broken apart after Putin’s defeat?

NAFO Twitter was already celebrating the glorious ascension of the Pskov Republic and its first transgender prime mistress.

That didn’t happen, but rather than let his readers get the unhelpful impression that NATO ultimately proved a weak reed to lean on, Matthews lets us know that Johnson really had nothing to do with it:

Was it Johnson’s charisma and his message from the West that reversed Zelensky’s resigned acceptance of peace talks? According to close aides, no — rather it was a deep shift in Ukrainian public opinion, outraged by news of the massacres that came to light in the territory relinquished by Russia, plus a realization that Putin could not be trusted. As Arakhamia said: “There was no trust in the Russians… lasting peace could only be done with security guarantees [from the West].”

Matthews provides no data to support the contention that the Ukrainian public supported peace negotiations until they collectively realized during said negotiations that the man who invaded their country might not have their best interests at heart after all. In any case, the understanding seems to have been that NATO would have their back, so Ukraine refused the key Russian demand that they rule out joining NATO, whereupon they continued the war, and the West . . . refused to let them join NATO. Yes, Ukraine went to war on the principle that it could join a military alliance if it wanted to and that military alliance refused to have them despite urging them to fight on its behalf. Imagine an 80s movie where the evil blond jock beats up a nerd for talking to his girlfriend, and the girlfriend keeps egging on the nerd to go back for more beatings, but still categorically refuses to date him. That’s a sad movie. That’s this situation.

This is who would play Russia.

So the Spring Summer Offensive came and went and with it any hope that NATO would come through. The American manufacturing base needed to produce arms on the scale Ukraine requires still exists, but has now been relocated to China, and while this did have the happy effect of making a small group of people very rich(er), it does make producing actual weapons a touch inconvenient. Europe would have helped out a bit more had the US not actively sabotaged their energy supplies for the purpose of enriching American petroleum interests. One might get the impression that the US wasn’t actually especially serious about a Ukrainian victory, given that behind the scenes actual military leaders understood that always to have been impossible. But as long as Russians were dying and American arms companies were seeing huge profits and the public wasn’t especially engaged, what was the harm, really?

Lindsey Graham is willing (for the Ukrainians) to fight to the last person- that’s very inclusive, the women dying too and all.

Well, that’s the rub. Eventually the propaganda gets stale and people start to notice that a lot of money and credibility were spent and the results were not as they were told they would be. President Biden told us the Ruble would be rubble and Russia’s economy with it. It isn’t. He told us that Putin would be a pariah. He isn’t. And he said that victory in Ukraine was necessary for the preservation of Our Democracy. One can see where that is going. So now people are asking unpleasant questions and it’s the job of journalists like Owen Matthews to make sure they get answered in ways that don’t lead to still more unpleasant questions.

Unfortunately for him, that task is complicated by the fact that nothing any sane person would recognize as worthwhile was accomplished in Ukraine on the part of the West despite all the blood and treasure spent. So Matthews give us this:

Ukraine may not have recovered all its lost lands — but it has already won the war in many other ways.

There are lots of fun ways to win a war that don’t involve imposing your will on your enemy and achieving your political goals through military force. Wars are soooooo commercial now- where’s the love?

Putin occupies 18 percent of Ukrainian territory, but strategically the war has been disastrous. NATO has expanded to cover more than 600 miles of Russia’s border with Finland; Europe has dramatically increased defense spending; Gazprom’s economic dominance of the continent has disappeared.

So apart from the fact that Putin has successfully and permanently conquered a fifth of Ukraine (and isn’t stopping) the war has been a disaster for Russia. NATO now includes Finland! Ukrainians should be proud that their sacrifices have increased the size of a military alliance that would not admit them; this is what Ukrainian victory looks like to Matthews. And Europe is spending way more money on defense while Gazprom no longer provides Europe with cheap energy; I wonder if perhaps those two things are connected.

Ukraine’s military has become the most powerful in Europe;

This is the military that would collapse in a month were it not continually funded and supplied with money borrowed from China by the US.

[t]he EU is about to announce that Ukraine is an official candidate for membership; and even if sanctions have not succeeded in destroying Russia’s economy, Moscow is nonetheless economically and politically isolated.

Well that’s big news- the EU is about to decide to proclaim that Ukraine will be a candidate for membership. That will be a great help after the war when multinationals descend on whatever rump state is left calling itself Ukraine to loot its corpse, all that standardization. And yes, other than its close relationships with China, India, Brazil, Iran, most of sub-Saharan Africa, a good chunk of Latin America and the Middle East, and sundry other places, Russia is wholly alone.

And then there’s this:

Putin cannot be trusted — nor can he be defeated without NATO’s direct involvement up to and including nuclear war. He can, however, be effectively contained, stopped in his tracks by comprehensive NATO military solidarity. In a decade’s time Ukraine has every chance of being a prosperous and free EU member, with its security guaranteed by the world’s most powerful military bloc, either as a close ally or as a full NATO member. Russia, meanwhile, is likely to continue to languish in international isolation under Putin’s gerontocratic death cult. Then it will be clear enough who has truly won this war.

So Putin can’t be defeated without a nuclear war, but he can be contained (except that he isn’t being contained) by “comprehensive NATO military solidarity” that includes a bunch of NATO countries that don’t really want to fight Putin anymore and one country that does that NATO won’t let in. In ten years Ukraine will be a “prosperous and free EU member;” this assumes Ukraine can sow dragon’s teeth and harvest a crop of young people to fill in the demographic megacrater the war has left in its future. “Putin’s gerontocratic death cult?!” Putin is younger than both of the front runners for US president in the next election and considerably more compos mentis than the current resident of the White House.

Now if we can afford to spend this on trains, surely we can lay out a measly $10,000 million ferfillion kabillion for Ukraine. It’s a small price to pay for Our Democracy.

“Then it will be clear enough who has truly won this war.” This last line is what really gets me; these people truly don’t see it. People think they’re just lying shills paid by defense contractors and diletante donors, and that’s not untrue, but I actually think the media wing of our neoliberal managerial class has so ruthlessly purged out meaningful dissent from their orbit that they can’t accept the truth even when it is manifest. They actually believe in a postmodern way that reality is simply a narrative construction, and that if they can get all the outlets they control to all at once say that Ukraine is actually winning, then it is so. They need only condescend to facts inasmuch as they need support from the public, which is why Our Democracy is so committed to removing the annoying speedbump of actual democracy from interfering in its machinations.

The best outcome now available to the world is that NATO and the neoliberal managerial regime that sustains it is forever discredited and broken, that a multipolar geopolitical order arises where powers act as a check on the ambitions of others. Klemens von Metternich was able to construct an enduring peace based on the principles of balance or power abroad and suppression of liberalism domestically, and this set the stage for a period of enormous cultural revival for the peoples of Europe. Let us hope that a new age of wise statesmen arises, men committed to their countries as their personal patrimony, willing to rid them of the scourges of financialization, mass immigration, consumerism, and all the other toxic byproducts of a system that regards men as exploitable resources. Neoliberalism fought to the last Ukrainian and lost. We will have won when we fight to the last neoliberal.