The US Proxy Warriors Remove Their Masks

As Ukraine's Offensive Fails, the Depravity of Our Foreign Policy Class is on Full Display

“Nor could any idea be more false than the popular opinion of wealth as the sinew of warfare…This maxim is cited every day, especially by princes…They do not consider that if money were sufficient to produce victory, then Darius would have defeated Alexander, the Greeks would have defeated the Romans…All those mentioned above were defeated by those who believe that good soldiers, not money, are the sinew of warfare.”
- Machiavelli [Discourses, II.10]

A map from The Telegraph showing the progress Ukraine has made as of 8/23/23, after two bloody months of fighting. Note the dots which represent Russian fortifications.

Ukraine’s much hyped summer offensive appears to have sputtered out without reaching Russia’s defensive lines, though they have captured the village of Robotyne some 8 km from where the offensive started over two months ago. According to the assessment of US intelligence officials who pushed them into it, they will fail to meet their core objectives. Last summer I wrote that the Western powers were preparing for catastrophic narrative collapse in the Russia-Ukraine War, and now that that moment has truly arrived. However, it seems perhaps they were not prepared for catastrophic narrative collapse, despite knowing it was coming:

The Western policy class appear to have believed, initially at least, that money and fancy equipment would be enough to win the war, as we went from one weapons mania to another. The reality turned out to be that equipment such as Leopards did, in fact, burn like all the rest, just as Putin said it would. The military planners would have been wise to read Montesquieu, who admonished those who seek to put everything into one grand offensive, saying, “The slowness of the enterprise always results in the enemy being prepared” [Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, XX.] And indeed the Russians were prepared, which should be no surprise, being as the whole world learns what equipment Ukraine will be getting often several months before it is deployed, and then they are pushed in front of the enemy while hardly trained on that equipment. It is typical of the US policy class to believe spending and technology will solve all of their problems, despite that they apply this strategy to everything and it never works. The military website 19FortyFive explains that there are many reasons why Ukraine’s offensive failed, but most of all the problem is simply there was no time to properly train new troops, having lost their pre-war army:

“Unfortunately, the Ukrainian senior leadership suffered from a combination of bad decisions, an overestimation of their own capacity, and – sadly – an overestimation of the efficacy of Western military gear…it was nearly impossible for Ukraine to transform itself in a matter of weeks or a few months of training and a hodge-podge of NATO gear. The reasons are fundamental – and are no reflection on the Ukrainian troops, as American soldiers are equally constrained by these fundamentals.”

Reportedly, the Western policy class knew Ukraine didn’t have the weapons or training necessary for success but hoped they would somehow triumph anyway. Now, with failure all but inevitable, after a year and a half of lionizing the Ukrainians, the brazen depravity of the Western scribbling class is on display for all to see: they have blamed the failure on Ukraine being too “casualty averse.” This implies, I suppose, that Ukraine should be casualty casual, and care about the lives of their troops even less than they have up to this point. Old men hiding behind walls and desks are mad that Ukrainians will not make themselves human de-miners. It was already well established that the Western proxy warrior class were monsters, but they have rarely exposed themselves as clearly as while talking about the young men they’ve just led forward to pointless deaths in Ukraine’s failed summer 2023 offensive- and they are already planning for spring offensive of 2024. I’m sure when that fails, if Ukraine lasts that long, it will be blamed on Ukraine as well. This change in discourse is shocking to the more innocent hearted among us:

Meanwhile, Americans who may be prone to manipulation but are not war pig monsters are seeing no good is coming from this, with a majority for the first time turning against providing further aid to Ukraine. From the first day of this war we have been exposed to a constant blare of propaganda dedicated to the belief that Ukraine could win and we were doing a good thing helping them. However, early on they were able to be at least somewhat realistic in their optimism and pretend that Ukraine was merely being assisted in its own defense, not manipulated into pursuing its own doom. We endlessly heard absurd Hitler comparisons based on the belief that anyone who might launch a war with a neighbor would therefore seek to expand infinitely regardless of circumstances. We’ve heard constantly, “who would negotiate with someone who attacked them?” when the reality is that historically quite a lot of people have negotiated with attackers as an alternative to national suicide. We’ve heard that Russia’s goal is the total extermination of the Ukrainian people by those who argue we shouldn’t believe any public statements of Russia’s leadership but that newscasters riling up the public on TV are what really reflects Russia’s state policy.

Every reason was made up to believe that fighting was the only option that Ukraine had and that no one ever considers surrendering; all such discourse is completely ahistorical. It’s easy to see how Americans who have never faced a real threat could fall for it; I do not know how the people wedged between Russia and Germany did not learn to be more wise from their own history. At the same time, a strong case can be made that it was worth Ukraine testing their fortune, and by demonstrating their capacity for resistance there was a chance to get a better deal than having negotiated for peace immediately. However, that time is long since past, and they have now cost Russia enough as to have made it much worse for themselves without any benefit but with many dead.

We are also watching an incredible phenomenon unfold whereby Russia is fighting a real war, but NATO thinks what Ukraine needs to win is support on the internet. Granted, global public opinion does matter a fair amount more to Ukraine. They are a ward of the “international community” which is largely made up of nominally democratic states, so the public does need to be on side. Alternately, Russia primarily relies on itself and people and states who are used to opposing what you could call the liberal internationalist mainstream, so they are much less at the mercy of public whims. The NATO side somehow convinced themselves that they could win by convincing themselves they could, as if morale is not but one of many components of victory. Nothing emphasizes this better than a July 6th video by some limey named Dominic Nicholls for The Telegraph as he explains that “countries fight wars” not militaries and then speaks to the value of their propaganda. This has aged in a quite hilarious fashion, or at least would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic:

Starting at 3:45 he speaks of “the battle in the mind” which is “after all, where wars are won or lost.” This is, of course, nonsense. It is certainly usually necessary that an army have the political support of its government to attain long term success, but wars are won or lost on the actual battlefield by soldiers with weapons. He then goes on to say the following,

“If I was a Russian conscript in a trench in Southern Ukraine waiting for the tsunami of Kiev’s counteroffensive to break over me General Budanov’s silent self-confidence and almost imperceptible smirk at the end of his Tweet would terrify me.”

The comment section is full of people who seem to think this is good commentary, which could only possibly be the result of Youtube or The Telegraph removing the haters, because you have to be delusional to think this is a real military strategy. His argument is that Budanov’s weaponized assault smirk will win the war, but it’s just a guy looking forward pretending to be tough. I’m also relatively confident that Russian soldiers don’t have phones with them in the trenches for Operational Security [OPSEC] reasons, and surely laugh at these clowns if they do see videos like this.

He seriously wants you to believe that a guy sitting safely in a room somewhere who will likely face no personal consequences if his side loses would terrify Russian soldiers who are fighting a real war because Budanov appears unafraid. For contrast, here are the Russian soldiers in the trenches, which they’ve had to make special roofs for due to Ukraine’s use of US-supplied cluster munitions:

I’m sure they are scared, like any sane man in this situation would be, but what they are scared of is not Budanov smirking on an internet video, they are scared of the actual bombs falling on them. I’m sure this British video explaining the psychological warfare would raise their morale were they to see it, being as they would see that their enemy’s masters are profoundly unserious people. As an added level of absurdity, the clip from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence says “Plans love Silence.” Certainly true of effective military operations, except that due to Ukraine needing support from a huge number of countries, what they are doing is all over the press all the time. Compare this to everyone talking about Russia’s supposed coming winter offensive last year, which was pure speculation and then didn’t happen at all. Russia is able to have actual OPSEC because they don’t have to go all over the world trying to sell plans to sponsors.

Nicholls then goes on to talk about how these psychological operations have a global component. He proceeds to say that when we see people like Ukraine’s Defence Minister people go around begging for money and shaking hands and giving “bear hugs” around “international democratic circuit” it says “We are in the club. We’re friends. We have the same vision for a value-based future. We are you, you are us.” Of course, presumably the value they are referring to is sodomy, since it seems to be the only thing these people care about. I’ve been complaining about how much Zelensky’s ridiculous pajama suit annoys me for a year and a half because it’s insulting that they think anyone should take this schtick seriously, but apparently their best military minds actually think that this imagery will terrify Russian conscripts. The level of derangement is strong. I wrote last summer about how Russia used century old tactics to defeat NATO’s untested ideas, but it appears their war effort runs even more on wishful thinking that I imagined:

While Ukraine’s offensive last summer and fall made more progress than I would have thought, this is largely because Russia has avoided losing good men over land that will always be there and tends to fall back then bomb the new positions Ukraine occupies, a solid strategy if your goal is to destroy your enemy’s army. Russia is what US foreign policy mavens would call “casualty averse.” I have been left wondering the whole time to what extent the West was simply using Ukraine as a sacrifice and to what extent they thought this would all work, and these things do not seem to be mutually exclusive, they appear to have believed that mass sacrificing Ukrainians was the path to victory. It turns out they are just performing Brannigan-esque feats of leadership, like the captain from the show Futurama who is proudly brash in wasting the lives of his troops. With everyone knowing about the offensive months in advance, it seems they’ve only had one form of the element of surprise:

If you think I am exaggerating just how little these Western proxy warriors care about Ukrainian lives, look at this incredible line from the ghoul David Ignatius in The Washington Post:

“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values.”

Oh, a relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians.) Ukrainian lives are literally parenthetical in his reckoning. And by the way by “Germany weaned itself off Russian energy” he mean its economy- the motor of Europe- has been grievously damaged. Further, The New York Times claims that this war has left around 500,000 humans dead or maimed, though they do admit they are making up those numbers and put the majority on the Russian side. They note however, that even by their numbers which are clearly suppressing Ukrainian deaths Ukraine has already lost more men than the United States lost during the entire Vietnam War, and the US population in 1975 was many times larger than Ukraine’s pre-war population. In fact, Michael Vlahos recently estimated that in 500 days of war Ukraine has lost nearly the same percent of its population that Germany lost in 1500 days of WWI. Devoid of empathy for human suffering, our ghoulish foreign policy class has decided it is time to blame the cowardice of the Ukrainians- and say what you will about the Ukrainian people, they have thus far showed a tremendous willingness to die for their country.

The incomparable Caitlin Johnstone did an excellent job explaining the sickness of these proxy warriors:

Big Brave Western Proxy Warriors Keep Whining That Ukrainian Troops Are Cowards

As she points out, it is anonymous officials releasing these statements implying Ukrainians aren’t brave enough. How would they feel walking through a minefield? In fact, as we learned at the beginning of the war, even American combat veterans who had spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan were terrified to fight in Ukraine and half of them went running back to Poland after a single bombing. Before some volunteered in Ukraine, not even America’s most experienced combat troops had ever faced the kind of artillery bombardment one gets from the Russians, and had never been asked to perform these type of missions without thorough air cover. There is every reason to believe that the best US troops would refuse to do assaults under these conditions and few commanders would sacrifice Americans troops in this fashion. Something I have observed from reading ancient histories is that a lot of plans involve using a general’s best troops, but when a plan specifically involves using a general’s worst troops you are about to read something really messed up. The US would primarily be employing “worst troop” strategies in Ukraine, except that Ukraine hardly has a distinction at this point. They perhaps have a few elite units mostly intact, but they have primarily just thrown men together and pushed them forward. The lives of Ukrainians are cheap to the imperialist class:

The senseless sacrifice of Ukrainians is justified on the grounds that if they did not fight then Putin would exterminate them all, but that is as made up as the idea that the war is somehow “genocidal.” Brutal and having a horrible human toll, certainly, but there is absolutely no evidence of systematic extermination of the civilian population, and in fact Russians consistently argue that Ukrainians are the same people as them. It is Ukrainians and their supporters who say weird things about Russians being Asiatic hordes and try to play up a genetic difference. It is certainly understandable why Ukrainians would resist Russian domination- having had such precious little independence in their history- but there is no reason to believe Russia would have killed any of them if they had not resisted, so this is not a situation where winning is their only chance to stay alive [and in all of history that being the case extremely uncommon, though there is a great nobility to choosing death over slavery.] It is simply the case that, as we’ve all been saying and as Kyle Anzalone recently thoroughly explained, the Biden Administration has as its policy to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. It’s been cheap- for us, at least.

Henry Kissinger once said “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” Ukrainians have learned that the hard way. In fact, Ukraine, a country of wide open spaces, apparently doesn’t have room for cemeteries, and is disturbing the dead from prior wars that they can put new men in the graves. Ukraine will continue searching for a new wonder weapon, but few believe at this point it is possible to change things. We’ve seen one new weapons mania after another, and none of them change anything; they are finally providing F-16s but its said Ukraine would be able to use them “at scale” until 2027. I don’t even know what they think will be going on in 2027.

If you have ever played a real time strategy game, the situation Ukraine faces is akin to the point at which you have already lost but even so keep training what troops you can and sending them one by one to their death against a full army for no reason but that you are not ready to admit defeat. I feel guilty doing this to fake men on a computer game: our empire managers don’t feel bad doing it to real humans with parents, spouses, and children. For those of us who have opposed US involvement in the war all along, the pivot to saying the Ukrainians are not will to sacrifice enough after telling us the whole time that it is their decision to keep fighting is a grim and unsatisfying “told you so.” I feel quite ashamed to be ruled by such men, but I have done all I can to convince anyone who would listen to not let Ukraine and Ukrainians be used in this way. With the failure apparent, the entire swamp foreign policy class is Zapp Brannigan now, except that in real life it isn’t funny:

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