Ending Conflicts

Winning the Peace Is the Hard Part

We’ve now reached a moment when the two major conflicts have reached a critical point. Each one is fundamentally different, will require a different approach, and we have no real idea if serious negotiations will even start.

So I’ll confine myself to the Ukrainian conflict in this post, talk about the Middle East in the next one. Hopefully. Events have been occurring with such speed these past weeks, that it’s not just hard to predict what will happen next, you no sooner adapt to Sunday’s new reality than Wednesday comes along and gives you a whole new one.

That being the case, speculations about success or failure are idle fancies, so this essay is entirely concerned with the difficulties of getting any serious negotiations started that could conceivably end the fighting, which in concrete terms only means a ceasefire or an armistice, which is simply a prelude to negotiations that could result in an actual resolution. But even though that’s just the first step, it’s the necessary precondition for all the succeeding ones.

Yeah, that’s totally obvious, so obvious you might wonder why I’m even bringing it up. Here’s why.

The Biggest Obstacle

Right now it’s not the combatants that are the biggest obstacle. Sure, both Kiev and Moscow are suspicious, wary, and hostile. But that’s not the problem, it’s just the way it is.

Not to beat around the brambles about it, the problem if the Europeans; specifically, the leaders of the the three not-so-great powers.

Just as Moscow started the war by confusing their sentimental memories of the powerful Red Army of 1945 with the ramshackle military of 2022, the London-Paris-Berlin axis has confused their memories of January 1914 with the reality of 2025.

So instead of tacitly agreeing with the American position that the fighting needs to stop, they immediately expressed their support for Ukraine, vowed to support Kiev in its fight, went to far as to say they would even eight hundred million euros into armaments. They might even send troops to Ukraine, would if necessary fight Moscow directly.

But here’s the reality. First, as far as military aid to Kiev goes, the Europeans have been buying energy from Russia throughout the whole conflict, and the amount Moscow has gotten from those transactions is basically the same as the aid the Europeans have been sending to Kiev. The Indian foreign minister has brought that up repeatedly.

So I think it’s fair to say that the Europeans are cheerfully willing to let Kiev fight to the last Ukrainian, just as for the last half a century, they’ve been equally willing to let Washington spend massive amounts of money to protect them against Moscow, so they didn’t have to bother. And they haven’t.

Both of these judgments s are likely to aggravate a good many people no end. So what? Just because facts are ignored doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Sure, the leadership in Moscow probably has its own delusions, but again, so what? Don’t forget what I brought up at the start of the invasion, that if Putin’s ideas about his military power were delusional, all he had to do to see them confirmed was to observe the unanimous judgment of the Western “experts” that Moscow would overrun Ukraine in a few weeks. At the time there were only a couple of people who argued the contrary, including me.

Clearly reality was otherwise, but if any of these self proclaimed authorities have admitted they were totally wrong, I’ve missed it. On the contrary, the war dragged on for months and months with the kinds of denials and rationalizations that had hitherto been believed to occur only in small children and cats.

That being the case, here’s another couple of doses of reality.

First, although the eight hundred billion sounds impressive, it’s difficult to see the Europeans coming up with anything close to that actual amount. The Netherlands has already refused, citing the constitutional provisions against deficit borrowing (the so-called ”brake”). Germany has the same provision, and overriding it would require a vote of Bundestag. Currently, as the result of the recent election, Berlin is facing yet another cobbled together coalition government, and the only German observer of the scene that I trust is highly doubtful that either the outgoing or the incoming representatives would agree.

But as he ruefully admits, the political situation in Germany is so unbelievably fouled up, anything is possible. Supposedly there’s now some sort of agreement patched together by the minority parties that supposedly will be able to form yet another coalition government to override the Brake, but whether that will actually happen is another matter.

Nor is there any reason why the small group of nations already spending a great deal of their money on defense would pitch in more to Brussels.

The Delusion About Military Power

For some time, the defense ministers of the Axis have been pointing out that their forces are in no shape to do squat. It’s not just the lack of functioning equipment (tanks, aircraft, and so forth), it’s the shortage of manpower. They simply don’t have enough trained troops to utilize what resources are left. In response there’s lots of talk about resorting to conscription.

Just to make clear the level of delusion prevailing, they don’t have the cadres to train them, the facilities for them, or the money that’s required. Here’s haw conscription works: whole categories of citizens serve a fixed term in their nation’s military. During that period they’re not only trained, but the military has developed a system to stream them back into the military when needed (mobilization). If they’d started this five or six years ago, it might work today.

Possibly. Provided is all you need is people armed with rifles. But it’s apparently escaped notice that nowadays armies require specialists who have had experience in operating and maintaining complex machines, and that experience really should be current. The fact that you can drive a car doesn’t mean you can sit down in a Leopard 2 and off you go.

So right now, for instance, the UK not only doesn’t have enough aircraft, but what’s worse is they don’t have enough pilots to fly what they actually have, and the navy is in equally bad shape.

The French Defense Minister, whose forces are in somewhat better shape, compared to those of his neighbors has actually given a euro figure of what it would take: an additional 30 billion euros a year.

I know! They can just print more money! Given the current level of economic expertise in the Axis leadership I wouldn’t be surprised.

So the idea that the Euros are in any position to send troops to Ukraine is just wishful thinking. And there too the idea is fracturing. The Italian prime minister has already declined, and it’s hard to see that the country with the largest and most effective military (Poland) would weaken its own defenses.

It’s all very well for countries like Great Britain to make grandiose pronouncements about what they’ll do. But after decades of meddling and neglect, the British military is in no condition to do much, and Berlin’s is even worse off. A decline that’s been going for decade after decade, can’t be remediated quickly, and in order to reverse this situation, the various European governments would have to scrap policies that are by now firmly embedded.

Finally, as I’ve pointed out before, almost the only country where the elected leader actually represents the majority of the electorate is Italy, an increasingly volatile situation which is hardly a recipe for stability or expressions of national will.

As far as their economies go, Great Britain has about the same GDP as one of the poorer American states, and there no evidence it’s going to get better.

All attempts to put together some kind of “peace keeping force” reveal is a startling ignorance about the relationship between the length of the front and the number of European troops available.

Basically, as I see it, the European position is what it is: a combination of what in their minds is virtue signaling and some basic anti-Americanism.

If there are any actual negotiations, it will be because both sides are ignoring them.

And on that last part of my analysis, all I can say is that anyone who thinks the elites of the three once great powers like us is sadly misinformed.

Developments

As I finished the initial draft of the above, Putin has responded to Trump’s overtures, which Kiev has already agreed to.

So it definitely seems like there will be some discussions and I think what’s really important here is that the two sides have one thing in common.

They realize the only power that counts in this is the United States, which if nothing else suggests a certain degree of realism on their part.

How this will play out is anyone’s guess, and we’ll just have to wait and see what actually happens, if anything.

But I think there’s an important factor here that’s being ignored. What’s going on is not a resolution. It’s a process, and it it has a sequence of steps. Those are important in and of themselves.

Just getting enough of an agreement started in which the two sides indicate a willingness to talk is a major development, All by itself it has an impact. And if Washington can get the two sides to get serious about what they might be willing to accept to stop the fighting, that’s an even more important step.

If there’s an agreement to even a temporary cessation of hostilities, that has an even bigger impact, even though the process is a goodly distance from any sort of resolution.

Of course the Axis is already hysterical about the idea that if Moscow in any way comes to terms with Kiev, they’ll turn around and invade western Europe. But to be blunt, those fears have just about as much basis as their delusions about their military and economic power.

But as Bismarck remarked a while back, a failed national defense policy is its own punishment.