Russia and Ukraine a year from now. Part 2: a longer view

part 1 is below this

In modern history, there have been constant errors of expectation of quick end to war. We need to begin sober thinking about the Russia-Ukraine war a year from now. We are still in an early stage of a modern re-run of World War 1, begun in 2001. We need to consider history, in wider perspective.

In part 1 I discussed events of the past week or so. Now to look at several decades of famous wars and the expectations at their beginning.

The Iran-Iraq war: when Iraq with US support attacked Iran in 1980, from official documents and conversations to which I was privy, at the outset only some Japanese foreign ministry officials imagined the war might last a year. When I came back from talks in Tokyo, an ambassador from the subcontinent was aghast. This war lasted eight years. Nobody won. It had been an American effort to wedge Iraq away from the Soviet Union; it was also to open an angry front against a new revolutionary government Iran where staff were hostage in the US embassy in Tehran. It was also the worst legacy of the last year of the Carter Administration. Read, recall, weep. This Iran-Iraq war, the deadliest war between conventional forces of developing countries in history (though less than the wholesale killings in the Congo Wars), saw a great rise of the ethos of young Moslem men being convinced they were doing a holy thing, going straight to die, and to heaven, a phenomenon of which we have seen more. 

When Israeli invaded Lebanon in 1982, the confident expectation of informed officials in Canberra was that Israel would achieve its objectives and withdraw in weeks. Israel withdrew finally in May 2000, leaving behind weapons which fell into the hands of Hezbollah, grown strong in the interim. A major failure of Israel had been to reject negotiation with Arafat in the beginning of the 1980s, when Israel was strong, Arafat was weak. Negotiation from strength is an essential key in strategy (core teaching by Coral Bell when I was her student at Sydney University in 1962), but there is tendency, not least in democracies, to think that strength is an alternative, indeed a block, to any need to negotiate. 

Israel, as is the way of modern war, imported into Israel many of the troubles it went abroad to defeat. 

The Gulf War of 1990-91 was over quickly but failed to achieve a key objective specified by Clausewitz: defeat of the will of the enemy. 

We still have Australian forces in the Middle East entangled with the long trail of destruction and violence consequent of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, launched in March, declared over in May. but scarcely then begun. There was no real thinking about how a conquered Iraq should be governed. 

Very little was effectively done about governance in Afghanistan (war 2000-2021). The US is out of Afghanistan, failures under the rug. Our minds are out of Afghanistan ignoring the fact that now the Biden Administration plans to legislate to confiscate assets of the Afghan Central Bank parked in the US, and blocks World Bank funding for humanitarian relief. Afghanistan now in an outer dark corner of our minds, starved, even less governable, threatening stability in a fragile region from India to China to Russia to Iran and the countries in between. Turkish broadcaster TRT a week ago presented this sensible discussion of sanctions, interviewing an Undersecretary of the UN and a former policy advisor at the US treasury.

We and our children will be paying for this for a long time. At the beginning of the modern era of Middle East terrorism in end of the 1960s with international aircraft hijacked and blown up in the desert, Basil Liddell Hart, greatest British strategic thinker of the twentieth century, was of the view that the inspiration for it was in the work of Lawrence of Arabia, violent British hero of World War 1. Liddell Hart was also of the view that the viciousness of the Spanish Civil War 1936-39 reflected the viciousness of the Peninsula War when Napoleon invaded Spain… during which the term guerrilla war was coined. 

The land space between Germany and Moscow is flat, ask Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Czars, Putin and Zelenskyy. Ukraine, currently frozen is in size half way between Victoria and NSW. Twice the size of Germany, half the size of Iran. Ukraine has not mounted territorial defence but is defending cities. This is difficult for invaders with long logistic trails behind them, deprived of a border war.  However the now-encircled Ukrainian cities are modern, cut off from supplies of food and medicine. With spring there will, on the one hand, be problems planting crops, on the other the military efforts will be muddled as snow melts, fields become boggy, and heavy vehicles crack roads. Russia will control ports for export. 

It is possible that some negotiation of a ceasefire will succeed given the starvation of cities. But there will be no easy end to what has begun, and should government capitulate guerrilla war including urban guerrilla war will continue. The history of violence in Ukraine since World War 1 is savage. 

Much industrial capacity was handed to oligarchs thirty years ago, many chopping up factories to sell as scrap metal to Turkey. 

The gas pipeline issues are more complex than as portrayed in much current discussion. A lot of Ukraine’s foreign earnings are payments for gas transit from Russia to the west. Hostility in the US to Nordstream 2 has been to protect Ukraine’s pipe-transit income as well as promote prospect for gas sales from the US.

Wider political consequences will ripple. Morrison and Johnson have been handed tin helmets, the prospects for opposition parties damaged. In the US, despite these heroic efforts for Ukraine, Democrats may lose their majorities in the House and Senate in November 2022, leaving Biden as a lame duck for another two years. Whatever Biden has sought and may achieve domestically, the foreign policy and strategy team (Biden, Blinken, Austin, Sullivan, and Nuland) are all out of the stable of the Obama Administration, perfectly acceptable to the Republicans, architects of the 2014 coup and aftermath in the Ukraine, all but Biden employed by Blinken in the interim. This is an old school team, wanting by any means to build upon the bound-to-fail imagining of an eternal unipolar world after 1989. Biden has chosen the view of that team, which includes Nuland, architect of the American coup in Ukraine in 2014, not the more sensible cautious views of William Burns, Biden’s appointee to the CIA. The Blinken team, enthusiastically supported by military minds at NATO, pushed Russia, pushed Putin, without counting costs, without negotiating from strength. That strength has evaporated and attitudes are hardening. But in the US their spines are reinforced by this bill that has been read a second time in the US Senate and is a schedule for sanctions that would probably end global progress as we have witnessed it, with the President reporting to Congress on progress down the slope. 

We are still in developing stages of a new kind of World War I as I put to Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in 2003: 

I am also still of the view that since September 2001 we have been watching events and strategic responses unfolding as at the outbreak of war in 1914:

• Delusions of moral rectitude.

• Defence of imperial status quo.

• Nothing but narrow military options.

• Resort to alliances, hostility to thought.

• Vilification of the enemy, climate of fear and promotion of paranoia.

• Simplistic notions of victory, expectations of speedy end.

• Failure to address real wider issues.

• Enveloping sea of violence.