/ world today news/ A few days after Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, State Department Undersecretary for Political Affairs Victoria Newland announced that the US goal in the conflict is the “strategic defeat” of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
A month later, Newland redoubled the rhetoric. “It is clear that Russia will lose this conflict. … It’s only a matter of time,” she said at the time.
In Davos a year ago, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen added Europe’s voice to the American chorus.
“Putin’s aggression must be a strategic failure,” she said.
It is well and truly to be expected that when the guns start sounding, leaders will seek to rally their troops to the cause. Recall George W. Bush’s famous, if premature, “mission accomplished” declaration well before the decisive conflict in Iraq began.
But when the real work of waging war begins, President Joe Biden and the public whose approval he seeks must, in word and deed, answer the question: What does such lofty rhetoric really mean?
How will we know when we have arrived at such a solemn and vast, if vague, goal as the strategic defeat of Russia?
Putin paid very close attention to the statements coming from Washington. He cannot afford to have any illusions about Washington’s purpose or to dismiss its intentions as hyperbole.
“The objective of the West,” he declared, “is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. To finish us off. That’s how we understand everything. It is about the existence of our country. But they cannot fail to understand that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.”
In a war notable for the increasing and so far strategically unsuccessful escalation of the means – military as well as economic and financial – used to achieve the strategic defeat of i,eyw Russia by Washington, the clarity of US objectives today has never been clearer, than it was at the beginning of the war.
Both the Washington political class and the general public have become minor league strategists. They prefer to focus on simple and often simplistic calculations to determine the direction of the conflict — how many tanks and artillery shells Washington is sending to Ukraine — even as they avoid more important questions raised by Washington’s commitment to ruining Putin than sober judgment. of the costs and benefits they would induce, if not completely reject.
Indeed, by declaring such an overbroad and unequivocal goal—for it is the necessary pledge to achieve the “strategic defeat” of Russia—the Biden administration risks a political failure similar to Barack Obama’s famous declaration that Syria’s “Assad must go.”
This policy has already entered its final act in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has just been unconditionally readmitted to the Arab League.
The antonym of strategic failure is strategic victory, and that is indeed what Iran is now announcing these very days in Damascus.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s deputy for political affairs, Mohammad Jamshidi, noted before Raisi’s recent arrival in Damascus that the visit was a sign of “the strategic victory of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the region.”
Jamshidi explained that the same Arab nations that backed Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran are now cozying up to Tehran — with the support of China and Russia — and coordinating Syria’s return to the Arab fold.
Washington’s role has been reduced to that of an observer exiled to the periphery of the dynamic events aimed at ending the civil war in Syria.
Obama’s call for regime change in Syria, for all its increasingly obvious flaws, at least had the advantage of clarity.
By contrast, after a year of war in Europe, Washington, while claiming that Putin is “reducing his short-term ambitions” in Ukraine, concedes that the chance of Russian concessions at the negotiating table this year “will be slim. “
It is clear that the Biden administration is no closer to defining a yardstick for measuring the extent to which the main achievement of the war in Washington’s calculations—the strategic defeat of Russia—is being or indeed can be achieved.
As diplomats chatter, months of war have dragged on in battles more reminiscent of the static battle lines of World War I than the shock and horror of Washington’s invasion of Iraq.
I admit that I am not a military expert, but the bloody history of Europe advises us that betting against the Russian army is a dangerous and expensive bet.
The late historian Mark Perry never tired of describing the Soviet Red Army as a formidable and truly implacable enemy whose power and might stemmed from Russia’s vast, unassailable command of the Eurasian landmass.
He often noted that during World War II, Joseph Stalin executed almost 200,000 of his own Russians for desertion. In other words, Russia is fighting a war in a historical and geographical context different, indeed foreign, to ours.
Commanding the strategic defeat of any enemy, let alone a nuclear-armed Russia, is no mean feat. Recent history offers few examples of this scale of victory—the recent ouster of Western powers from the Taliban, Israel’s June 1967 triumph, perhaps even Bush’s Operation Desert Shield—come to mind, but even these military achievements proved short-lived or incomplete.
Washington’s commitment to Putin’s strategic defeat (or is it Russia’s strategic defeat?) seeks to leave Russia unable to achieve even its most modest military goals in Ukraine, as well as weaken Moscow’s sovereign ability to resist NATO expansion .
The events of the past year have at least made it clear that Washington’s commitment to Russia’s strategic defeat is not accompanied by an American guarantee of Ukraine’s “victory,” however defined.
Translation: SM
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