A Nuland Surprise?

The Ukrainian offensive will fail, which bring us to moment of the greatest danger. Can the USA accept defeat or will it escalate?

Ukraine finally launched it’s much ballyhooed offensive. It doesn’t have the men or the firepower to succeed. Either the west badly miscalculated or it’s a desperate, last ditch, all-or-nothing attempt to reverse its fortunes. Its possible that it might achieve some limited gains. War is always a gamble, but I’m going to go ahead and call it anyway. Ukraine has lost. Its all over but the crying.

I feel like I should defend that claim with some numbers and analysis. Very briefly, Russian has more of everything than Ukraine does. Russian missiles, air defense, and electronic warfare all outclass their western counterparts. We don’t know for certain, but it looks like Russia has a 10:1 advantage in artillery and at least a 2:1 advantage in troops in the field and more in Belarus and Russia. Ukraine is attempting an assault against entrenched forces without air support or an advantage in artillery. To put it bluntly, Ukraine is out numbered, out gunned, and out classed. They may have an ace or two up their sleeve, but they can’t possibly have enough of them to pull this off. USA satellite intelligence and Pentagon planning aren’t going to help them to pull a rabbit out of their hat either. Nobody has a hat that big. Trust me on this one; it is my one area of expertise. At this point, they need alien space bats to win.

Which is terrible news for the USA. America went to a lot of trouble to push NATO to Russia’s borders, stage a coup in Kiev to create an anti-Russia in Ukraine, fund, equip, and train a bunch of neo-Nazis, sham the Minsk agreements, and finally shell the Donbass hard enough to provoke Russia into intervening. The project was at least 20 years in the making and the goal was to consolidate America’s control over more of the world by either forcing Russia into vassal status or dismembering it.

It has all backfired horribly. Russia’s economy is doing far better than Europe’s. Their army is larger and veteran. Their MIC has been dialed up a notch or three. And aside from the soon to be defeated Ukrainian army, they have the only army in the world that has experience with modern industrial warfare. The entire endeavor is accelerating the decline of the west.

So, what will the USA do? That, dear reader, is a very interesting question.

But to answer that question, we would need to peek behind the curtain. Unfortunately, I don’t have a man on the inside, Blinken hasn’t returned my calls, and my attempt to summon Donald Rumsfeld’s ghost only conjured up a foul smell and a greasy feeling of smug and condescending arrogance. So, we have to infer based on what we can see.

Here’s the way it looks to me. I see a civilization in decline, with an entrenched and senile elite who have all the money and call all the shots. They’ve been running the world for a generation, but now they are facing internal challenges and rising powers in the east. They know that they have to strike while they still have an edge, before their rivals surpass them. And they are aware of the stakes, but don’t really understand the dynamics at play or why they are falling behind.

Let me explain. And please bear with, it will make sense at the end.

Spengler and Toynbee - the shape of history

What we can see tracks pretty well with the predictions (Hat tip Avery Morrow. Do take a look, some of them are stunningly prescient.) that Oswald Spengler made in The Decline of the West. Spengler postulated that civilizations had lifespans. They are born, mature, grow old, and die. He labeled the phases after the seasons.

In the spring, the culture explores its central notions, which it can feel acutely, but can’t define. In the summer it flourishes and great advances are made in all cultural and intellectual endeavors. In the autumn it matures into its fullest and most complete form; all of the notional space of its thoughts and ideas are developed to completion. At the same time, it transforms from a culture to a civilization. Winter is the civilizational phase which manifests with great technology, engineering, industry, and other worldly and material pursuits, but the spark has gone out of it. Western civilization, which Spengler labeled Faustian, has passed its prime. Winter is here.

Spengler wrote well, but in a style that was popular a century ago in Germany. It is difficult to parse into modern English. He invented some new terminology, made a taxonomy of cultures/civilizations, and waxed poetic in a way that conveys the feel of his subject matter without much in the way of concrete details or well defined abstractions. Quite frankly, it’s infuriating because he was clearly a genius who was onto to something insightful and exceptionally useful, but he makes it maddingly difficult to nail it down. Here is a pretty good walk through (hat tip Jeff Russell) and here is a sample of Spengler on winter. The man in his own words to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:

Children become men and women, marry, and beget their own children. In them and through them, the parents seem to be reborn, surrounding their offspring with affection, knowledge and moral lessons condensed from life. But for all the parents’ efforts, children still go their own ways, absorbing, rejecting, and recreating themselves with all that their environment offers them. The child is the father and mother of the adult.

And so the child grows old, following the unalterable decay endemic to all creatures born and moving through time. Early creativity stiffens into pattern and habit. The fire in the blood cools, leaving noble the lukewarm pleasures of the philosophic mind, or a death-driven flight into a second religiousness.

But even in the winter years, there are tasks to perform. Twilight and winter leave bare the shape of things: the darkening mountain, the leafless tree, the multicolored past stripped to its essential components and toned down by the blank certitude of impending death. Still the world-fear and world-longing are at work, even in the deficient veins of the old; and if accident and senility can be avoided, the prime feelings of meaning in the world may yet produce final, austere monuments as departing symbols of a mature mind drawing to a close.

And then, the only end of age.

It’s tempting to dismiss Decline of the West as nothing more than a fanciful fever dream writ with flowery prose like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, but he predicted in the 1930s that Hitler’s 1,000 year Reich would end no later than 1946, that communism was a Faustian notion that didn’t really sit well with the Russian soul and they would shake it off by 1990, and this:

I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of countryside, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of today’s and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness.

James Blish put it like this:

But autumn ends, and a civilization becomes a culture gone frozen in its brains and heart, and its finale is anything but grand.

..

In such a period, politics becomes an arena of competing generals and plutocrats, under a dummy ruler chosen for low intelligence and complete moral plasticity, who amuses himself and keeps the masses distracted from their troubles with bread, circuses, and brushfire-wars. (This is the time of all times when a culture should unite — and the time when such a thing has become impossible.) Technology flourishes (the late Romans were first-class engineers) but science disintegrates into a welter of competing, grandiosely trivial hypotheses which supersede each other almost weekly and veer more and more markedly toward the occult.

The Faustian soul has at its heart the notion of infinite space, the ever receding horizon. This manifests as a desire to take everything as far as possible, to transcend all limits. In winter, that thinking becomes fossilized. Remember this point when we get to the neocons.

Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History also tracks well. His 12 volume opus took a different approach. The relevant bit is that civilizations are shaped by challenges. When a group rises to the challenge, they take charge and become the creative minority, and deservedly so. When they fail to adapt or to relinquish control, they are simply the dominant minority.

Our elites have largely failed to deal with the problems of the day. I’m going to refer to them as the senile elite because their world view has fossilized and can no longer adapt. They continue to believe that they deserve to be in charge, but they try to solve every problem with the same thinking that created it. This is the standard when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail mentality.

Between the two of them, we see a civilization in decline with a senile elite that is disconnected from the real world, and they consistently apply approaches that have ceased to work in practice.

There’s also elite overproduction, huge crops of bright, young, university graduates vying for a much smaller number of important positions in a fairly corrupt and ossified structure. Those that make it in do so by shamelessly aping all the norms and mores of the ruling crop of elites, less a meritocracy than a yes-man mill. Those that don’t are skilled, disillusioned with the status quo, and free to stir up trouble, but that’s going to be more of a problem down the road. And money, tons and tons of money chasing power, buying up politicians, and pursuing money as an end unto itself at the expense of everything else.

The distribution of wealth and the senile elite

Most of the corruption in the USA isn’t illegal. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot of stunningly illegal corruption, but the legal stuff is both damaging and ubiquitous. Corporations spend ungodly sums on campaign contributions and lobbyists every year. Most of the regulatory agencies have been captured and the revolving door between government and industry makes for a lots of rich bureaucrats and little oversight. This makes for stunningly expensive boondoggles like the F-35 Penguin (because it flies like one), the trillion spent bailing out the banks in 2008 after they crashed the financial system shortly after they finally managed to repeal Glass-Steagall in 1999, and the billions spent on mandatory mRNA vaccines that turned out to be neither safe nor effective.

It also supports the façade of a two party system that covers the uniparty reality. The republicans and Democrats fight over some domestic issues, primarily social issues that are easily polarized and don’t have much impact on the elite, but line up remarkably well on foreign policy. The uniparty maintains the USA’s empire.

Yes, it’s an empire. When a small percentage of the global population, with hundreds of military bases all over the world, enjoys a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth, resources, and manufactured goods it is an empire. Nobody went to jail after Colin Powell’s little vial of white powder launched an illegal war on Iraq. All of the journalists, politicians, and intelligence professionals that sold that war coughed, said “oops, my bad,” and got promoted. Most of them went on to champion the SNAFUs in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, and the looming one in Taiwan. They were doing the empire’s bidding and were duly rewarded. Political scientists David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski have mapped out how the empire works in this flow chart:

But, you wouldn’t know this from reading the news or following campaigns. Obama’s hope and change turned into a pretty good impression of Bush’s 3rd and 4th terms with more regime change and droning wedding parties.

Speaking of the news, there has been an incredible consolidation of western media since WWII. The USA had hundreds of independent radio stations and thousands of independent news papers and now they are owned by a half dozen giant media conglomerates. And not just the news; music, magazines, movie studios, and publishing houses have all been subsumed into giant media empires. They cut the staff, particularly investigative journalists, and now they mostly broadcast press releases with some editorials mixed in as if they were news. Couple that with the censorship from the central government (see the twitter files, hat tip to all you guys) and the oddly homogenous narratives that emerge fully formed with identical talking points and in unison on hosts of different issues from Trump/Russiagate, the BLM riots/mostly peaceful protests, the health authorities completely reversing all pandemic guidelines when Covid hit to Nord Stream and the CIA’s Maidan Coup of Dignity.

And not just the USA, media consolidation has happened in most of the west. And not just the media, most industries have consolidated into a handful of giant players. And the board members and CEOs have an enormous overlap, with a couple dozen people serving on multiple boards of the largest corporations.

At this point, we need to take a step back. This consolidation seems sinister, but it’s a fairly normal process. Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto famously observed in 1906 that 20% of the population owned 80% of the wealth. Less well known, a handful of academics using Pareto’s math noticed that cities, towns, and villages had similar distributions, with a small number of huge cities like Paris and London, a handful of big cities, a bunch of towns, and thousands of tiny villages. Plotted on a log-log scale, it forms a straight line from one axis to the other. The relationship holds for a number of things, like the number of oil fields vs the size of the reserve.

One of those things is the distribution of wealth, and the reason is pretty straightforward. People with money can make investments and people without money basically can’t. Some of those investments make more money and some lose money. Maybe the winners are smarter or better connected or just plain luckier, it doesn’t matter which. If you generalize it to winning and losing based on the flip of a coin and then iterate hundreds of times, you get a Pareto distribution with a tiny number of fantastically wealthy people who had the good fortune to come heads on almost every flip, a handful of wealthy people who came up heads more often than not, and huge number of poor people.

This turns out to hold for businesses as well. When a new industry is born, like automobiles or computers, a bunch of companies start up with innovative ideas. A few decades later, most of them have merged, failed, or been bought out and only a handful of giant companies are left.

It ends up looking like an elite class who own everything and pull all of the strings. And while that is true, it is not the whole truth. They do live in a separate world of private estates, personal secretaries, wealth, connections, and privilege that has completely divorced them from the reality that the rest of us live in. They are entitled, believing that they deserve their positions and status. If they retain feedback loops that promote competence and weed out failures then they remain the creative minority. If they eliminate those selective pressures then they become the dominant minority. When that happens they have the ability to milk the world for a larger and larger share of the wealth while they run the whole system into the ground. The elites do share some common features, but they are not entirely homogeneous.

There are different groupings. Fracking did save American oil production, but it suffers from double digit depletion rates. It takes a lot of expensive wells that deplete very quickly to produce that oil, so they borrowed money from the financial sector to drill the wells. It was never cost effective so the majority of the fracking companies went bust, were bought out by the rest of the industry, and the financial sector had to eat a huge loss. Covid was great for the pharmaceutical industry, billions in profits for new drugs and vaccines, but shutting down the country for two years killed oil prices. In April of 2020 they actually went negative and producers were paying $20 a barrel for anyone to take their oil. (Oil futures had to close on a specific day with someone taking physical delivery and there was more oil than storage space that day in Cushing, OK where the contracts close so negative $20 per barrel) The IT giants get into legal disputes with the legacy media over revenue from news aggregators and social media.

The weapon industry makes billions selling pork projects like the F-35 and the Patriot to politicians, but those same politicians also need those weapons on occasion when they try to put the smack down on uppity nations that fail to recognize their place in the rules based order. There are plenty of other conflicts. That is why TPTB (The Powers That Be) is plural. (I know that the phrase actually comes from the scriptures, but that’s not how it has been used in the last 50 years)

We are social mammals, all jockeying for position in the hierarchy. There are elite groups jockeying for position. This is normal. And in normal history, the elite groups that can deliver real or perceived gains for the masses advance (This is Toynbee’s creative majority) and those that can’t lose stature. A useful metaphor is appropriate here. Imagine a bunch of marionettes pulling each other’s strings. There are some large ones with commensurately larger pull on others, and a bunch of small ones which can aggregate up to a large pull if they are aligned. Populate this model with trade unions, old money, various titans of industry, financial institutions, religious institutions, political parties, government bureaucracies, and millions of citizens going about their days and you have a pretty good representation of democracy. Or, in an earlier day, royalty, nobles, high priests, military men, merchants, guild masters, other hangers on of the court, and a bunch of farmers. I like this metaphor because it is a good representation of actual democracy in practice, the courts of monarchs, and aristocracies. It also encompasses all the corruption that pervades them.

(Side note: I’m pointing this out at greater length than is really required because it is embarrassingly common for people to flip like a switch from one pole to another, from believing the official narrative to believing in outlandish conspiracy theories. If the news is lying to us, it must be because the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Rothschilds, the English Royal Family, the Vatican, the Jews, the mafia, the CIA, Klaus Schwab, George Soros, aliens, the lizard people, or an unholy alliance between cyborg Elvis and zombie JFK is pulling the strings. No, first if there was a single monolithic man behind the curtain we’d be living in 1984, not this clown show of widespread incompetence. If there really was an all powerful shadow group, then the Nord Stream bombing would have a much better cover story than ‘Some Ukrainians rented a boat.’ If TPTB were actually a single all powerful monolithic cabal then the official single shooter narrative would have been broadly accepted.

But it wasn’t, which is why the term “conspiracy theory” was put into widespread use, to try to force any notion of powerful people doing sinister things into the ridiculous mold of an all powerful secret society. Second, history is replete with normal conspiracies, from con men and simple backstabbing to the coordinated elimination of a religious order. You can read up on the royal intriques of any monarchy, the origins of Friday the 13th, or the First Triumvirate, and in modern times the Iran-Contra affair, the Carwash Scandal, or the not at all suspicious suicide of Jeffrey Epstein.)

In a healthy society it mostly works out, but there are periods when the civilization’s structure becomes stagnant and the same groups of elites remain in power long after their pull by date. They’ve happened across a bag of tricks that remove all of the feedback mechanisms and elite selection pressures that keep the system healthy. Be it bread and circuses, divide and conquer, or social media and censorship, it keeps them in power at the expense of pretty much everything else. Given enough time to demonstrate their incompetence, something usually comes up to put a stop to their shenanigans, a charismatic and populist champion of the people seizes power or the torches and pitchforks come out to reboot the system. We’re not there yet, but it is heading that way. There have been plenty of recent events that demonstrate this point. Here are two memorable examples.

Brexit, the British referendum on leaving the EU, had to happen because the complaints of the working class couldn’t be brushed aside any longer without jeopardizing the perceived legitimacy of the government. It was supposed to fail by a few points and every major institution in the western world went on at great length what a terrible idea it was. It passed by a few points instead because the current crop of ruling elites failed to realize how badly they were failing to deliver to the people that kept them in power. Some of the voters might have voted to leave purely because the establishment told them that the sky would fall if they did. Trump was the same. The Democrats went out of their way to promote Trump in the primaries thinking that he would be the easiest for Hillary to beat. He was supposed to lose by a few points, but the disconnected elites failed to realize just how much the voters despised them and he won by a few points instead on the premise that anything is better than the status quo.

The whole system immediately went into anaphylactic shock because he was outside of the normal scope of elite conflict. Which is a little weird because Trump is a member of the elite, born to a fantastically rich family, silver spoon, military education, and he evaded the draft. The whole nine yards of privileged elite upbringing. It happened because he crossed them on a number of issues that were popular with the masses but off limits in elite circles. He found and exploited the fault lines in American society.

It should have been a wake up call to the senile elites. But in the typical fashion of senile elites, they responded by doubling down, doing exactly what they had been doing, just much harder.

The Thucydides’s trap

Graham Allison, a protege of Henry Kissinger, coined the phrase. Incidentally, Kissinger wrote his undergraduate thesis, one of the longest ever undergraduate theses, on Spengler’s decline of the west. The Thucydides's Trap refers to an ancient Greek historian’s comments on a looming conflict between a declining power and a rising power. Basically, the current alpha male tries to lay the smack down on every up and coming challenger before they become a threat. Graham put it this way:

Thucydides's Trap refers to the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power...[and] when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception.

Graham’s critics have challenged some of his historical cases, pointing out that the rising power sometimes starts the fight, but for our purposes that is a secondary consideration. The central point is a special case of an age old problem of state security. The biggest threat to most states is from other states. Historically, one of the best solutions is to attack them first. Great powers don’t have this problem with smaller and weaker states, but they do have it with other great powers.

Graham’s book was focused on USA-China dynamics, and the USA is still expecting a conflict with China in the 2025 to 2030 range. But the USA decided to weaken and possibly balkanize Russia first. I don’t know what the deciding factors were in that calculus, but taking down Russia allows the USA to surround China. It also eliminates a key supplier to China of raw materials and hydrocarbons. Not to mention a bread basket, a strong ally, a giant nuclear power, and a world class weapons industry.

The imperial wealth pump

In addition to security, one of the big reasons that great powers decide to become empires is the wealth. All empires, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union, drain wealth from their subjects and send it to the capital. The wealth pump can work in a couple of different ways like official taxes, tribute, or spoils from conquest. The USA manages the world’s reserve currency and the petro dollar.

In modern state financial systems the central bank borrows/lends money into existence. It’s a neat trick, and it’s easy to take it too far and print so much money that the currency devalues. The USA has found a clever solution. By making the US Dollar the reserve currency, denominating oil trade in dollars, lending from the World Bank and IMF in dollars, and a whole host of other transactions the USA has a guaranteed external demand for dollars. So, if the USA decides to print up more money than is prudent it doesn’t suffer the devaluation and hyper inflation that other countries would.

This has a couple of perks, but the big one is that the USA can simultaneously run large fiscal deficits and a trade deficits essentially forever. This allows the USA to import more than it exports, spend more than it earns, borrow the difference, and still maintain a strong currency that gives it more buying power than it should have.

The downside is diminishing returns and increasing costs. The tribute dwindles, the territories become poorer and the tax revenue dwindles. When England first took India it was the pearl of the British Empire. When India left the empire it was because India could no longer pay its own way. The British had subdued a rich territory and over a couple of centuries they stripped it to the bare walls. The Romans took spoils every time they conquered someone new. This ‘foreign policy’ was so successful that for a while there were no domestic taxes, conquest paid for everything. But as the empire grew the good territories had all been harvested and the pickings grew slimmer and the domestic taxes grew more and more onerous.

And easy money causes its own problems. The principal problem with having a bunch of unearned money is that it weakens the empire’s industries. There are a couple of mechanisms for this process. It can make foreign goods cheaper and more competitive, undercutting the empire’s domestic production. Expensive luxury goods can funnel that wealth right back out; a bunch of Roman gold and silver went east in exchange for silk and spices. It can lead to government bloat with legions of well paid sinecures that don’t have any real skills. Or the same problem with legions of less well paid citizens on the dole. In an empire’s early days it typically has a small and inexpensive military, but as the demands of empire grow with each conquest so does the cost of enforcing it. Regardless of the mechanism, the end result is the hollowing out of the empire’s productive capacity and the continuous creep of expenses.

Realists and neocons

John Mearsheimer is the preeminent realist of our time. Here is a link to him explaining the USA’s conflict with Russia:

I’m sorry, I don’t have a transcript, only the video. He explains how we got to where we are now. He walks us through the expansion of NATO, the politicians and statesmen that warned against it, Russia’s security concerns, and what they were prepared to do about them. He follows up with a question and answer session. At every step the USA did what he recommended against. I’m going to assume that you’re mostly familiar with his arguments. If you’re not, then watch the talk. It is a lucid and rational explanation that is a breath of fresh air in these crazy times. (For example, the first question is by Ray McGovern at the 50 minute mark. He asks Mearsheimer if the CIA, State Department, or Pentagon are asking him for input or consultation. Mearsheimer replies that no one in government has ever asked for his opinion on anything ever. Ray’s second question is that he keeps hearing that Russia didn’t have to invade, so what options did they have? Mearsheimer responds that they didn’t have any other option.)

I bring this up because it is important to draw a distinction between neocons and realists. Realists like Mearsheimer operate on the premise that states should do everything that they can realistically get away with to maximize their own advantages, and no more. The key limitation here is that they shouldn’t try to do things that are unrealistic. Neocons are realists that don’t accept that limitation. The name comes from shortening neoconservative, and not because there is anything conservative about them but because calling themselves unrealists would make them sound silly. They believe that since the USSR lost the cold war the entire world belongs to the USA.

Apparently, being suicidally insane and failing at everything is no real impediment to holding high office or dictating foreign policy. They’re behind the wars in the middle east, NATO expansion, and the proxy war with Russia. The war in Afghanistan cost the USA about 2 trillion dollars and resulted in Taliban rule. The Iraq war cost about the same and the clear winner was Iran (hat tip to the War Nerd). Syria and Libya were stable, secular states and they are now playgrounds for radical Islamic extremists. This broad and unquestioning acceptance of achieving unlimited goals should remind you of something.

Pulling it all together

There are times when concepts, demographics, and technology push the world with irresistible force. When the Europeans stumbled across the new world, their guns, germs, and steel guaranteed colonization regardless of the choices of individual monarchs in Europe. The results were essentially inevitable. And some moments in history are highly contingent on specific individuals. Had the winds across the English Channel been typical in 1066 then Harold Godwinson would have easily defeated William the Conqueror. Who knows what would have happened if Caesar had steered clear of Brutus on Rome’s equivalent of the grassy knoll or if Hitler had perished in WWI. If Napoleon had just listened to his Little Red Man of Destiny (Never heard of him? He doesn’t accord well with the western worldview so we don’t talk about him. Probably best to just ignore it.) and not invaded Russia, then all of Europe might have been consolidated under French rule.

We are at one of those rare moments at the threshold halfway between the contingent and the inevitable. Inevitable because western civilization is a spent force and contingent because the conflicts with Russia and China are dependent on the whims of a small handful of people in Washington.

Toynbee’s dominant minority has become senile and undeserving, but they still hold the reins. Their mindset is shaped in the Faustian mold with a compulsion to push every boundary and they have not the wit to question it. Spengler again:

Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.

And they have achieved a remarkable degree of control over the political machinery, business, finance, and the media. But their empire has been hollowed out. The USA’s finances are in terrible shape. The most expensive army in the world has fancy new planes that aren’t ready, a flagship air defense system that can’t hit anything, and billion dollar aircraft carriers that are a few cruise missiles away from the bottom of the sea. The dollar is losing its status. Saudi Arabia and Iran have kissed and made up. Syria is back in the Arab League. OPEC cut production jointly with Russia and then snubbed western media outlets. The USA offshored its industrial base decades ago. The USA’s sanctions backfired on Europe. Early signs of European defections are appearing. The BRICS are gaining members. China is gearing up to outperform the USA at just about everything. And on and on and on.

The entire point of picking a fight with Russia was to smack down a rival and maybe plunder her resources if it went well. But the entire endeavor has hastened the day of reckoning for the USA’s empire rather than forestalled it. The USA needs a win to stay on top. If it loses then others will rebel, accelerating its decline even further. This is the big game for all of the marbles.

At this specific moment, the USA’s proxy force in Ukraine is spending its reserve force in vain and it will soon be clear to all that a Russian victory is inevitable. Russia has already destroyed two Ukrainian armies. Ukraine’s first army was the army it had at the beginning of the conflict, continental Europe’s largest army. Its second army was comprised of eastern Europe’s Soviet equipment and fresh Ukrainian conscripts. After this third army of NATO equipment is gone, there isn’t much left in the way of surplus kit left in the west.

The USA has two options. It can accept defeat or it can escalate with western troops.

So, a declining power in a declining civilization with a senile elite has done some underhanded things to provoke a proxy war with a lesser competitor before it squares off with the rising power. The war isn’t going well and has brought the declining power closer to the precipice. Both the USA and Russia perceive this war as an existential conflict. The loser will be ruined.

Under these circumstances, I don’t think that the USA can admit defeat. I mean that literally. I don’t think that the neocons are predisposed to countenancing the notion even if it is rudely shoved in their faces. I don’t think that they are constitutionally capable of admitting that they have failed. So that means war. Specifically, a war between the two largest nuclear powers. A war that both of them assiduously avoided during the cold war.

Ostensibly, the congress has the power to declare war, but in reality the executive has made the decision far more often. Which means this guy is calling the shots:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1664458588197212161

And since he appears to be literally senile and only retains the ability to read a teleprompter and sign things that means his inner circle of neocons is functionally in charge. They will escalate, the question is with what? The only thing that they have left to send is western armies. Sending in more proxies like Poland, Romania, and the UK, maybe to fight, maybe to ‘secure’ the rump state for round two. Sending in NATO air power, again to either defend the rear areas or to attack Russian positions in Ukraine. Lastly, NATO could go all in with everything that they’ve got.

The rear guard options won’t accomplish much, but might manage to move in some gear for future use that the Russians refrain from destroying for now. The other options amount to a serious escalation. NATO would need a very good justification to take that sort of action. Something that mobilized their citizens to demand action. Something like Russia using a tactical nuclear weapon.

My guess is that the neocons will try to build this up incrementally with Polish troops in Galicia followed by UK air patrols or something like that. But this isn’t an analysis of military factors, this is about a handful of delusional actors doing something reckless, so let’s go big. What would a false flag to bring in NATO look like?

The Nuland Surprise

Neocon Vitoria Nuland first came to the public’s attention when a recording of her plotting the Maidan coup was leaked a few weeks before the government fell. She later apologized for saying something disparaging about the EU and thus confirmed the leak’s bonafides. The news mostly ignored the implications and focused on the embarrassing slander of an ally. After toppling a duly elected government in 2014 she was promoted to Under Secretary of State for European Affairs in 2020. The Nuland Surprise is named after her in part because of the significant role that she played and in part because I just really dislike her.

Here is my speculation about what it could look like. I don’t expect it to follow this plan to the letter. I expect it to have a similar flavor, much like John Michael Greer’s book Twilight’s Last Gleaming (hat tip John Michael Greer) about a fight with the Chinese. So, without further ado.

Starting sometime this week or the next the MSM announces a Ukrainian breakthrough to operational depth with thousands of Ukrainian troops flowing through the breach. The coverage is positively glowing although a few sources mention that Russia disputes the claim, insisting that their defensive lines have held. Then disaster strikes.

A nuclear explosion. The MSM reports that the Ukrainian army has been destroyed by a Russian nuke. RT News claims that their defensive lines have been destroyed by a western nuke. A frantic day of news coverage, emergency meetings, and wild speculation is all anyone can talk about. Several social media sites go down as everyone swamps them looking for updates.

The next day, NATO declares that it must act to put a stop to Russian aggression. The USA and the UK make a joint statement proclaiming that any further use of nuclear weapons will result in a proportionate nuclear response. France’s nuclear arsenal is not included, but few people notice. A mad scramble to move NATO forces to western Ukraine ensues while tensions escalate and conventional missiles fly across international borders. The fog of war gets much thicker overnight and claims of destroyed Russian air defenses and Russian submarines contend with rumors of sunken US aircraft carriers and crashed American F-35s. It is all denied, assessed, and refuted constantly while tech companies fall over themselves to block anything that might be Russian mal/mis/disinformation.

Now, I know what you are thinking. This is way over the top. Yes, as I said above, I expect that the USA will escalate more gradually before doing something like this. And chemical weapons or a melt down at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant are less likely to accidently start a nuclear war, but chemical weapons don’t eliminate the evidence on the battle field and I don’t think that Ukraine will ever manage to take the Zaporizhzhia NPP. This isn’t about a reasonable plan from a rational actor. For a good assessment of what the situation looks like after the offensive fails from a rational standpoint see Round Two? There Is No Round Two (Hat tip Aurelien).

Even rational actors do reckless things when their back is to the wall. Mearsheimer is fond of pointing out that the Japanese knew they had almost no chance of winning against the USA, but they went ahead and did it anyway because they didn’t have any other choice. The situation for the USA is similar, except that in addition to not having a choice the neocons are also crazy. They believe that they can, should, and will succeed. After their stunning failures in the Middle East, they decided to aim higher and take out Russia. This doomed offensive is just the most recent example of their hubris. They poured billions into this offensive and then sent it off to die when it should have been obvious that it was going to fail. The west was never going to win this fight, but they went ahead and did it anyway. There aren’t a lot of ways to square that circle. Being literally delusional is the way that tracks best in my view. And, unfortunately, that means a false flag to justify sending in NATO.

I don’t know exactly what the USA will do when it becomes inescapable that the offensive is going to fail, but I’m guessing it will be reckless, ill-conceived, and have little chance of winning the war, but the neocons will do it anyway.