But that’s when the plan ran straight off the rails. The first difficulty was that most of the world’s nations didn’t cooperate with the sanctions. Some, such as Iran and China, that are hostile to the US saw the situation as an opportunity to extend a middle finger to their enemies. Others, such as India and Brazil that are non-aligned powers, saw the situation as a chance to demonstrate their independence. Still other nations wanted Russian oil and grain and weren’t willing to forgo them, so they acted in accordance with their interests rather than ours.
Yet there was another difficulty with the sanctions’ efficacy. Do you remember all those big corporations that loudly announced that they were leaving the Russian market? They couldn’t take their outlets and infrastructure with them, and so the Russians simply rebranded those and kept going. A soft-drink bottling company partially owned by Coca-Cola, for example, now produces something called Dobry-Cola in Russia. It tastes very similar to Coca-Cola, and it’s in a very slightly different red can. The crucial point is that the profits from sales of Dobry-Cola and similar products and services aren’t flowing out to stockholders in the US, they’re staying in Russia, where they’ve given a timely boost to the Russian economy. This presumably wasn’t what US and Nato elites had in mind.
But the worst news for Nato came from the battlefields. What happened there has an odd personal dimension for me. Some years ago I wrote an essay, “Asymmetric tactical shock: a first reconnaissance”, about what happens when an army becomes too dependent on complex technologies and its enemies figure out how to monkey-wrench those. The example I used came from the end of the Bronze Age, but the lesson applies more broadly: the monkey-wrenched army faces total disaster unless it does something most people these days can’t even conceive of doing. My essay circulated quietly among people interested in such things, and I have no reason to think that anybody in the Russian General Staff pays the least attention to obscure American fringe intellectuals like me. Yet the fact remains that when the Ukrainians monkey-wrenched the Russian version of Blitzkrieg, the Russians did exactly what I suggested an army in that situation should do: they fell back on an older form of warfare that wasn’t vulnerable to the monkey-wrenching tactics.
This is why the Russians abandoned their deep thrusts into Ukrainian territory, retreated from vulnerable areas around Kharkiv and Kherson, launched a mass-mobilisation of troops and a major expansion of their already large munitions industry, and got to work building entrenched defensive lines to guard the territory they had seized. Meanwhile, the Russian government strengthened ties with Iran and North Korea — two nations that have large munitions industries autonomous from Western technology and capital.
That is to say, since the new Ukrainian tactics made it impossible for the Russians to refight the Second World War, the Russians switched to First World War tactics. The defensive lines and urban strongholds on which the Ukrainians relied to defeat Russian tank columns didn’t provide anything like the same defence against massed Russian artillery bombardment. While the Russian Army was retooling for the new (or rather old) mode of war, mercenary units — Wagner PMC most famously, but there were others — took over the brunt of the fighting, tested out First World War tactics against entrenched Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, and won.
This put Ukraine and its Nato backers into a very difficult position. In First World War-style combat, the winner is the side with the largest munitions industry and the biggest pool of recruits to draw on. Russia has a huge advantage on both counts. First, Nato countries no longer have a political consensus supporting mass military conscription, while Russia does. Second, while the US and its allies dismantled most of their munitions factories at the end of the Cold War, Russia did not, and it also has those good friends in Tehran and Pyongyang. All these give the Russians an edge the Nato nations can’t match in the near term.
This wasn’t a message that Nato was willing to hear. To a very real extent, it was a message they weren’t capable of hearing. It’s been 70 years — since the end of the Korean War — since the United States and its allies last fought a land war against a major power. The entire Nato officer corps got its training and experience in an era when they had overwhelming superiority over their enemies, and they have no idea how to fight without it. (Even then — Afghanistan comes to mind — they aren’t too good at winning.) That’s when Stormtrooper Syndrome really came into play, because it never occurred to Nato that Ukraine could lose — defined as they were as the war’s Good People.
And so the elites in Washington, Brussels, and Kyiv convinced themselves that the Russians couldn’t possibly ramp up their munitions industry to a pitch that would permit them to carry on trench warfare for years at a time. (Remember all those confident reports that insisted the Russians were about to run out of shells and rockets?) They told themselves that the Russians were using mercenaries because their army was too demoralised and brittle to stand up to the rigours of combat. They drew up plans for a grand Ukrainian offensive to turn the tide of the war, and funnelled more arms to Ukraine..
The counteroffensive began on 4 June. Two months on, it is clear that it has failed. A successful assault against fortified positions in modern war requires a three-to-one advantage in soldiers on that region of the battlefield, a large advantage in artillery, and air superiority. Ukraine has none of these things, and somehow or other no eucatastrophe showed up to save the day.
The Russo-Ukraine war isn’t over yet, and the fortunes of war may yet favour the Ukrainian side — though this looks very improbable just now. Meanwhile, history is not waiting around for the details to be settled. Towards the end of last month, the heads of state of 40 African nations gathered in St. Petersburg to sign agreements giving Russia a leading position in the economic and military affairs of the world’s second largest continent, while Russia’s defence minister was in North Korea negotiating further arms deals. It seems the Russians know better than to wait for miracles to save them from the consequences of their own actions.
None of this is to say that the mess in Ukraine is the only way that Stormtrooper Syndrome has shaped recent history; it’s just the most obvious example right now. It was because of Stormtrooper Syndrome, for instance, that so many people suffered nervous breakdowns when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, their reaction amounting to: “He’s a Bad Person, he’s not supposed to win!”. Afterwards, the same factor also kept them from wondering why so many disillusioned voters were willing to settle for Trump, of all people, as an alternative. Nor, to be fair, is Stormtrooper Syndrome in short supply on the Right, where shrill moral dualism is far more common than thoughtful discussion about how to deal constructively with the cascading crises overwhelming America today.
Really, it’s hard to name anything in contemporary Western life that hasn’t been twisted bizarrely out of shape by the efforts of our privileged classes to pretend to be the heroes of their own Star Wars sequels. Yet the lesson being whispered by the winds from Ukraine is that nobody and nothing else is required to play along. That lesson may end up costing a great many people bitterly in the not too distant future.
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