Washington’s Carthaginian Peace Collides With Reality
The Biden administration refuses to tell the American people the truth: Ukraine is not winning and will not win this war.
The American Conservative
November 29, 2022
By Douglas Macgregor
The national political and military leaders who committed America to wars of choice in Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, did so as a rule because they were convinced the fighting would be short and decisive. American presidents, presidential advisors, and senior military leaders never stopped to consider that national strategy, if it exists at all, consists of avoiding conflict unless the nation is attacked and compelled to fight.
The latest victim of this mentality is Ukraine. In the absence of a critical root-and-branch analysis of Russia’s national power and strategic interests, American senior military leaders and their political bosses viewed Russia through a narrowly focused lens that magnified U.S. and Ukrainian strengths but ignored Russia’s strategic advantages—geographic depth, almost limitless natural resources, high social cohesion, and the military-industrial capacity to rapidly scale up its military power.
Ukraine is now a war zone subject to the same treatment the U.S. armed forces inflicted on Germany and Japan during the Second World War, on Vietnam in the 1960s, and on Iraq over decades. Power grids, transportation networks, communications infrastructure, fuel production, and ammunition storage sites are being systematically destroyed. Millions of Ukrainians continue to flee the war zone in pursuit of safety, with ominous consequences for Europe’s societies and economies.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration repeatedly commits the unpardonable sin in a democratic society of refusing to tell the American people the truth: contrary to the Western media’s popular “Ukrainian victory” narrative, which blocks any information that contradicts it, Ukraine is not winning and will not win this war. Months of heavy Ukrainian casualties, resulting from an endless series of pointless attacks against Russian defenses in Southern Ukraine, have dangerously weakened Ukrainian forces.