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by Aurelien
Perhaps the greatest of all traditional political skills is timing.
Not just deciding when to launch an initiative or make a speech, but also knowing when an issue is ripe, when to join a bandwagon and most importantly when to get off, because you recognize that something is just too difficult, or even that a cause is now lost and there's nothing you can do about it.
The great British Labour politician Denis Healey famously said,
...by which he meant that,
Although today's western political class has forgotten even the basic skills of everyday politics, you might nonetheless reasonably expect that fear alone would make them think seriously about their Ukraine policy, and how they would survive a defeat politically.
After all, the Curse of Zelensky has struck down nearly all of the major western political leaders since 2022:
Traditionally, changes of leader, and especially changes of government, are an opportunity to rethink policies and, in Denis Healey's words,
Yet with Ukraine this has not happened, and as western leaders replace others, they take their place one by one in the herd of lemmings headed for the cliff.
Only in the United States does a new government
appear to offer the possibility of change, although I cannot pretend
to know what Mr.
Trump's confused thought
processes will eventually produce, if anything.
I've written before about the,
But even the most fanatical liberal-libertarian, gently simmered for years in the Brussels court-bouillon, should at least be capable of recognizing reality...!
After all, few if any politicians these days are inclined to sacrifice their career for their ideals:
So,
The purpose of this essay is to try to answer that question, at least for European nations, and to do so by looking at the mechanics of how politics typically operates, and how politicians typically think.
I'm not going to reveal any grand plans or intricate conspiracies (you can find plenty of those elsewhere) and in the end you may be disappointed by the prosaic, unreflective and self-serving nature of the motives I'll be discussing: but that's our contemporary political class for you.
And although I have never hidden my views on this class or its behaviour, I'm not here concerned with polemic, or with the rights and wrongs of various interpretations.
The Internet is knee-deep in all that, and since the beginning of these essays I have tried to do something different:
I'm not a great fan of Spinoza (I will finish the Ethics one day), but I've always been impressed by his remarks in the Tractatus theologico-politicus that he had attempted,
That's the spirit of this site (as you will
recall from the name) and of this essay as well.
I'll offer two relatively mundane reasons for the current state of affairs, and a third which is more speculative, but I think well founded.
The first thing to say, is that as things stand, there is no political or electoral advantage for any political figure in opposing western policy towards Ukraine.
Thus, even at the most basic level, there is no popular cause to embrace, no current of opinion to support.
Moreover, the average western politician never comes across dissident or skeptical voices on the question, and anyway lacks the basic understanding to disentangle useful knowledge and insights from the mass of propaganda flying around in all directions.
Defense and security are complex and not especially popular subjects, and few western politicians have even a vague grasp of them.
Even if they were to accidentally happen across
some well-informed and objective analysis, they probably wouldn't
recognize it, nor be able to understand it.
Here's a YouTube site that says,
But here's another YouTube site that says,
And within these broad categories there is also furious disagreement on certain issues.
There are sites that try to be objective as possible about the fighting and try to avoid taking political sides, but often these are technical and require some familiarity with military concepts and vocabulary if you are to understand them.
In any case, it's obvious that you can't draw a
line down the middle labeled "truth," and that it's possible to
argue endlessly about the rights and wrongs, and the interpretation
of specific issues. (Indeed, if that were not so, it would be the
first crisis in recorded history without such controversies.)
A sensible and rational western politician with their country's best interests at heart, if we could find one, is not going to say,
That politician would say something like,
The problem, of course, is that the argument is effectively circular:
All of this - second point - is massively magnified when you consider the wider context.
Our politician is surrounded by people they know, organizations they respect, experts they assume to be well informed, telling them that Russia is near defeat and it's just a question of waiting.
Every newspaper, all the main TV channels, all the prestigious Internet sites, are giving variations of the same message.
But imagine for a moment that you are in government:
It takes you a while just to master your basic brief on Ukraine (you will have many others of course) and inevitably, since your country can't influence events much on its own, your working day will be consumed with second-order questions.
...it goes on and on, and by the time you've
dealt with the rest of the day's business and the various crises and
scandals, attended various meetings and engagements and spent an
hour or two signing (and maybe even reading) letters that your
officials have drafted for you, well, you don't have the time or the
energy to ask awkward questions.
Everyone who briefs you, everyone who attends the meetings you attend, everybody who briefs them, everybody you meet at receptions and in the margins of meetings, has basically the same opinions...
Your colleagues in other governments, the Opposition spokesman on your subject, the Parliamentary Committee, the Secretary-General of NATO, the journalists who interview you, the EU Commission, think-tanks and influential retired politicians, will all be saying much the same thing...
What we have here is quite close to a collective fantasy, a collective hallucination, or a process by which people collectively hypnotize each other.
It's groupthink on an epic scale...!
Now because this is politics, there will of course be disagreements.
But everybody you meet will basically have the same broad picture of events.
In a twenty-minute bilateral meeting at NATO or the EU, you won't get much further than exchanging banalities like,
...and so on.
In fact, most of your interlocutors will
themselves be uncomfortable about getting into details.
But in the absence of a properly articulated counter-discourse, it's hard for skeptics to know where to begin.
Actual informed, non-polemical analysis of the type that governments might find persuasive is desperately rare on the Internet (I have tried to produce a little myself, and so have others, but governments don't read Substack...)
And this is really the problem, or at least the origin of it (it gets much worse, as I will describe in a moment.)
For the moment, at least, people are clinging to
the discourse they have because, for all their potential private
nervousness, there isn't another, and nobody wants to be the first
to express doubts.
The biggest problem its the one Denis Healey identified:
Imagine you, as Foreign Minister of a medium-sized country were to explain the potentially-disastrous effects for your country of continuing on the current course of action.
Even if others were convinced, the obvious question would be,
Now obviously there are hand-waving replies like "stop support for Ukraine," but nothing in this area is simple, and everything has consequences and consequences of consequences, for your government, for your country, for your allies, for third countries, for your position in international organizations and so on.
It's taken you three years, at least, to get wrapped around the axle of this problem in an ever-more complicated and inextricable fashion, and a point arises in politics when the hole you have dug is so deep you can't see the top any more, or even remember where it is.
So the majority view will be,
Anyway, it will be added,
What I have discussed so far could be described as Permanently Operating Factors of Politics, which apply in most situations.
Here, though, I think there are other, more speculative, but also more dangerous factors operating.
Let's begin by postulating a final state for the current conflict in Ukraine, one which western politicians would hate, but which at least they would understand, since the elements of it are well known and have been widely discussed.
Now this, I stress, is a reasonable, middle-of-the range politico-military outcome of the current fighting.
It could be better, but it could be significantly worse.
Nonetheless, it would represent the most catastrophic defeat the wider West has ever suffered, and a political and military humiliation as complete as the surrender of Germany in 1918, except on a massively larger scale.
Think of it, if you like as Suez, Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan, all happening at the same time, with the volume turned up to eleven. And of course it's not Over There, it's just down the road...
Any political system would struggle to survive such a crisis, and the current western system, full of mediocre greasy-pole climbers and empty of any real ideology, would find it harder than most.
It's not just the mechanics of it:
But every foundation of western security policy, and much of its economic policy as well, will start to crumble under the feet of the hapless western governments.
A political void will open up, the like of which
hasn't been seen in politics for a very long time, if ever.
Suddenly, it will be receiving demands rather than making them, and having to take very seriously the reaction of other states to its actions.
Playtime's over, boys and girls:
And this, I think, is the basis of the apparently irrational obsession with continuing a war that cannot be won...!
The alternative is to recognize and accept a situation which will be much worse, which is almost literally unthinkable.
But then it is surely enough to ask precisely, how the type of events sketched out above can be falsified.
You can draw your own conclusions, I think...
The future reality is too terrible to contemplate, and, no matter how bad the current situation is now, how much it is deteriorating, and indeed how much you are making it worse, it is better than the alternative.
In a nutshell,
If there is a single overriding explanation for why governments have historically done stupid things, it is precisely that:
From a well-stocked cupboard of examples, let's pluck out a few.
And so on...
We say lazily that certain things are "unthinkable" when we mean just that they are unacceptable to us.
Beyond the militaristic and ultranationalist mindset of the regime, and beyond the cultural specificities, was the simple fact that Japan had been victorious in war throughout its history, especially recent history, and the only attempted land invasion - that of the Mongols - had been defeated by the Kyushu samurai.
It's not fanciful, I think, to see the western ruling class with much the same mental deficiency:
For the western ruling class, then, defeat is literally unthinkable:
And anyway, defeat would lead to a type of existential terror that it is incapable of dealing with.
Better to pursue the current policy, even if there is almost no chance it will work, rather than admit defeat.
And the longer it continues, the worse will be the final consequences, and the harder it will be to explain.
One of the things you have to do in government on occasions, is to provide the political leadership with plausible sounding excuses for a change in policy.
There's a whole series of clichés about circumstances changing, adapting to new realities, need for fresh thinking and anyway it's not our fault it's somebody else's.
As late as the Istanbul talks in 2022, this would have been feasible, if only just.
In the meantime, as we have been emphasizing since 2014, the West must look to its collective defense to deter an increasing powerful and aggressive Russia.
If I were the person charged with writing some anodyne self-exculpatory words for a head of state or government in, say, 2026, I have no idea where I would even start.
And let's not even get into what NATO could possibly agree to say collectively:
This is actually part of the problem.
The "escalation" some have detected in western policy over the last couple of years is essentially rhetorical, mixed with a few trivial gestures of defiance.
Very soon, the West will no longer be able to
afford even such gestures.
The conceptual gap between the two sides, which was growing worryingly large even before 2022, is now unbridgeable.
Western governments will find it impossible to explain what they are doing and why to their own populations, let alone to the Russians. One of the least-remarked but most powerful forces in international relations is mutual incomprehension.
This goes beyond ethnocentrism - though that's part of it - and often amounts to a failure to accept that anyone can see the world differently from the way we do.
This mutual incomprehension, dangerous enough in peacetime, can become lethal in crisis and conflict, where the historical tendency is for positions to harden and become more radical anyway.
This is why I don't expect any substantive
talks between Russia and the West, and why the best we can hope
for is a ratcheting down of tension and a mutual snarling match.
The Russians, for example,
Normally, the West would be dong the same, but we are involved instead in an unseemly and unprecedented rush to extremes where western leaders seem determined to out-radicalize each other.
This is understandable, of course, if you accept
the analysis above, because it is a way of keeping hope alive, no
matter how small the spark may be.
There are precedents for this, of course.
This isn't really very surprising when we reflect on our personal experience.
Whatever your views of the Ukraine conflict,
I've tried this kind of experiment over the years in various settings, without much success.
Even highly intelligent people often struggle to articulate fairly views that they don't support, and after a couple of mumbled sentences will say something like "but of course that's not true," as though thereby wanting to ritually avoid contamination.
At oral examinations, I've asked students with strong views on subjects to outline what they think are the major objections to them, or a plausible counter-argument, and the result is an embarrassed silence.
Ironically, it wasn't always thus, even in times that we like to think were less tolerant.
(Most of what we know about Gnosticism, for example, comes from polemical writings against it, such as those of Irenaeus, who nonetheless quoted extensively from its arguments...)
These days, even admitting that your opponent can make a logical argument for their case is regarded as a kind of weakness, and makes you suspect.
I don't think the West has the intellectual capacity to deal with defeat and failure, and I'm not sure the Russians have the capability to understand and predict how the West will react.
This, unfortunately, is quite common in history, but here it could be extremely dangerous.
Countries that suffer unexpected and inexplicable defeats often relapse into self-pitying victim mode, complete with complicated conspiracy theories.
There are plenty of models of conspiracy theory available in the world today, and I think we can easily assemble something that would both justify western conduct and provide a comforting myth of betrayal and victimization.
Putting together various things I have read and heard in the last few years, it might look something like the following. (And remember: this is not me speaking!)
Something like that is the only way I can imagine that the West will be able to construct an even vaguely coherent theory of its own defeat that it finds just about acceptable.
And it contains enough of The Truth as seen from Brussels and Washington that western elites would probably sign up to it. (Needless to say, the Russians will find it utterly incomprehensible, and probably suspect trickery.)
Of course, presenting yourselves as naive and
gullible for trusting a foreign leader doesn't make you look very
good. But the alternative, if there is one, is certainly worse.
Unfortunately, there is not the least sign of that happening.
The hole grows deeper by the day,
because the only alternatives anyone can see to keeping digging are
all worse...
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