Is The Hammer About To Fall?

Ukraine: Is the Hammer About to Fall?

Mike Whitney

"Here’s something you must understand. We were not given any opportunity to act differently.” — Vladimir Putin

The plan to engage Russia militarily is a tacit admission that the United States can no longer maintain its global dominance through economic or political means alone. After exhaustive analysis and debate, western elites have settled on a course of action aimed at dividing the world into warring blocs in order to prosecute a war on Russia and China. The ultimate strategic objective of the current policy, is to tighten the grip of western elites on the levers of global power and to prevent the dissolution of the “rules-based international order.” But after 11 months of nonstop warfare in Ukraine, the US-backed western coalition finds itself in a worse position than when it began.

Aside from the fact that the economic sanctions have severely impacted Washington’s closest European allies, the West’s control of Ukraine has plunged the economy into a protracted slump, destroyed much of the country’s critical infrastructure and annihilated a sizable portion of the Ukrainian Army. More importantly, Ukrainian forces are now suffering unsustainable casualties on the battlefield which is laying the groundwork for the inevitable splintering of the state. Whatever the outcome of the conflict may be, one thing is certain: Ukraine will no longer exist as a viable, independent, contiguous state.

One of the biggest surprises of the current war, is simply the lack of preparedness on part of the US. One would assume that if the foreign policy mandarins decided to “lock horns” with the world’s biggest nuclear superpower, they would have done the necessary planning and preparation to ensure success. Clearly, that hasn’t happened. US policymakers seem surprised by the fact that the economic sanctions backfired and actually strengthened Russia’s economic situation. They also failed to anticipate that the vast majority of countries would not only ignore the sanctions but proactively explore options for “ditching the dollar” in their business transactions and in the sale of critical resources.

We see the same incompetence in the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine. How do we explain the fact that the NATO nations have been frantically scraping the bottom of the barrel to find weapons for Ukraine? Did our leaders really start a war with Russia not knowing whether they had sufficient supplies of weapons and ammo to fight the enemy? That appears to be the case.

And were our leaders so sure that the conflict would be a low-intensity insurgency that they never planned for a full-blown, combined-arms, ground war? Once again, this appears to be true.

These aren’t trivial mistakes. The level of incompetence in the planning of this war is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. It appears that all the preparation was focused on provoking a Russian invasion, not on the developments that would happen soon afterwards. What’s clear, is that the Pentagon never “gamed out” the actual war itself or the conflict as it is presently unfolding. Otherwise, how does one explain these glaring errors in judgement:

1. They never thought the sanctions would backfire
2. They never thought they’d run out of weapons and ammo
3. They never thought Russia’s oil receipts would skyrocket
4. They never thought that the majority of countries would maintain normal relations with Russia
5. They never figured they’d actually need a coherent military strategy for fighting a ground war in eastern Europe.

Is there anything they got right?

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