According to Hofstadter’s Law, obviously a descendent of Murphy’s Law, ‘everything takes longer than you think’. Last year the first to get acquainted with it in a big way was the Russian warlord, Putin, who of course could have spared himself the shock by following the lead of Trotsky and Mao Zedong and spending some time reading Clausewitz. His Special Military Operation having failed to capture Kiev – planned to be finished in a matter of one or two weeks, putting an end once and for all to Ukraine’s endogenous fascism and exogenous Westernism – Putin had to face the unpleasant prospect of a full-scale war of indefinite duration, not just with Ukraine but also, in one form or other, with the United States.
Less than a year later, a similar insight hit his American counterpart, Biden. A Ukrainian victory nowhere on the horizon, a full barrage of economic sanctions against Russia and Putin’s oligarchic friends had done astonishingly little damage to the Russian capacity to hold on to the Donbass and Crimean Peninsula. The midterm elections of November 2022, in which the Democrats lost their majority in the House, unmistakably served notice that the willingness of the American electorate to fund the Biden-Blinken-Sullivan-Nuland adventure was far from boundless. Indeed, the war of attrition with no end in sight that was taking shape now was increasingly seen as a potential liability in the 2024 Presidential election.
Another Afghanistan-style pullout being out of the question, that of 2021 not yet forgotten even by the notoriously forgetful American public, and Putin having no choice but to hang on or be damned, it is now for the Biden administration to decide how the war will develop. By early March 2023, it seemed that the United States had to choose between two broad alternatives, and fast. Call the first the Chinese Escape. Since Scholz’s one-day visit to Beijing on 4 November, China, and Xi personally, have repeatedly urged that the use of nuclear arms, including tactical ones on the battlefield, must be ruled out under all circumstances. For obvious reasons this concerned Russia more than the US or Ukraine, given the now widely visible deficiencies of Russia’s conventional forces. With a military budget hardly higher than Germany’s – the latter found dismally inadequate from the perspective of Zeitenwende – Russia unlike Germany has to maintain a nuclear capacity, including a strategic intercontinental one, equal to that of the United States. This leaves precious little for its conventional forces. The consequences became evident when the Russian army proved unable to take Kiev, only about 300 kilometers from the Russian-Ukrainian border.
