Gaza
I really thought I would get away with not covering Gaza during this episode. In my view, largely nothing has changed since the last episode. Hamas is going to feed as many Palestinian civilians, children included, into the Israeli war machine as it possibly can to more and more paint Israel as a pariah. And Netanyahu and the far right of Israeli politics are going to enthusiastically embrace that label and Hamas’ tactics. Thus, the cycle of violence goes on.
But despite these fundamental facts remaining in place, Gaza is all anyone wants to talk about so, here we are, talking about it.
The place I want to start with is embarrassment. And that is embarrassment toward the unique position the Israel-Palestine conflict holds in the global consciousness. In April 2023, a war started in Sudan which as of the time I compiled this had killed at least 10,000 people, sent 1.5 million refugees into neighboring countries and driven a further 5.6 million into internal displacement. Fighting between Mexican drug cartels has killed nearly 7,000 people, some of them in absolutely horrific ways. In Ethiopia, the country is reportedly on the verge of a mass starvation event, a legacy of fighting between the government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Fighting that only ended last year after killing approximately 100,000 people. In September, Azerbaijan launched a brief military offensive into the Nagorno-Karabakh region which was home to about 120,000 Armenians. I say was because almost all of those 120,000 people were forced to leave the area, permanently.
Nobody talks about these conflicts. There’s been negligible activism aimed at bringing global attention to the deaths and displacement in Africa, Latin America and Central Asia. And it’s not as if we don’t know about them. You can find good reporting on all of the conflicts I just mentioned from outlets like CNN and the BBC. Even though it’s buried deep, there’s nothing stopping people getting animated about the humanity of the people affected by those conflicts.
I recall shortly after October 7 happened someone saying to me that the Western media doesn’t care about Palestinians and doesn’t report on the Palestinian conflict. It struck me as untrue at the time. That comment looks thoroughly ridiculous now. You cannot open any major news outlet’s website without Gaza being the top story, or close to the top story.
So, in terms of embarrassment, yes, there’s a part of me that’s embarrassed at the special treatment the conflict in Gaza receives. To the extent they are aware, I wonder what Sudanese refugees make of it?
As I said at the start, I personally don’t feel the state of the conflict has fundamentally changed since late November. So instead I’m going to work through some of the questions and issues people have raised with me and tell you what I think. I know normally that’s not what I try to do around here but, give the people what they want and all that.
Let’s start with the information war. We talked in a prior episode about the structural imbalance that Netanyahu created in global public opinion. To recap, October 7 happened and it was thoroughly depraved, but it was quick. The violent sexual assaults, the dismemberments, the murder and torture of children, all of that happened. But by roughly sunset on October 8, it had concluded.
The Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza has been ongoing for the better part of three months. And it has vaporized entire families, caused the deaths of premature infants for lack of medical care, and the associated blockade has created deplorable conditions for millions of Gazans lacking food, water and medicine.
When a random person consumes media coverage of the conflict in Gaza, they are much more likely to be confronted with images of dead and dying Palestinians than to be reminded of the Hamas slaughter that precipitated the conflict. Someone adopting the “pro-Israel” position would point out that that is unfair. Maybe it is unfair, but it is a fact of the world and while Hamas bears totals responsibility for what took place on October 7, Netanyahu bears responsibility in my view for letting the world forget.
Israelis, of course, have not forgotten and Israel continues to press ahead with its military operation aimed at dismantling Hamas. As I have said before, I don’t think this is a realistic objective. Even if Israel were able to destroy the organization we currently recognize as Hamas, the conduct of the war to date and the broader history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will see some other fundamentalist group hellbent on destroying Israel fill the vacuum left by Hamas.
Now, one might disagree with that statement and have conviction that no, in fact Hamas can be defeated. Even if that were true, some of the tactics used by the IDF clearly violate if not the laws of war, the morals of war as understood through a liberal lens. By liberal I mean here the classical definition of that word and its associated philosophy as articulated by someone like John Rawls. We’ve talked before about morality in war and specifically the work of Michael Walzer if you want to listen to a prior episode on the topic.
To give one example, the IDF’s aerial campaign includes the extensive use of gravity bombs also known as dumb bombs or unguided munitions. When you drop a modern variant of a weapon like that the “circle error probable” (CEP) is about 100 meters. To clarify, the CEP is the radius in which a bomb might fall. If your CEP is 100 meters it means you can miss your target by up to 100 meters in any direction. If you’ve listened to the episode I referenced earlier you will know that Walzer argues that it is wrong to use a weapon in a situation where you cannot be sure it will hit a legitimate military target. So in this situation, where Israel is fighting in a heavily urbanized environment, there’s no way for the IDF to have any idea what a gravity bomb will hit. Even if the IDF is targeting a known Hamas command point, whether it’s under a hospital or a school, there’s absolutely no way to know if a gravity bomb will actually hit the target. As we have talked about before, that’s a no no.
I have heard lots of bizarre takes about what the IDF has to do to defeat Hamas. Their basic form is “but what else can the IDF do!? How else can it fight Hamas?”. These takes are bizarre in the sense that they often assume Hamas and its tactics are completely novel in the history of human warfare. This is both not true but also adopting this view indicates a limited familiarity with the history of counter-terrorism operations and the associated literature.
Actually the more I think about it, there are other strange aspects to presenting the problem this way. Keen listeners may recall that I have been to Israel. I visited while in graduate school on a trip mostly paid for by an Israeli foundation. One of the overriding messages impressed upon us during that trip was the sense of Israel as a “can do” nation. So this idea that there’s simply no alternative set of tactics available to combat Hamas I find really jarring with that.
One last conflicting aspect. Israelis are proud of the IDF. And they absolutely deserve to be so. The Israeli military has performed some of the most incredible feats of arms in human history whether it be the audacious raid on Entebbe, Uganda to free Israeli hostages or its stunning victory over the armies of the Arab nations in the 1967 war, this is a vaunted military force. Indeed, if we look at the war in Ukraine, you will find plenty of military commentators who assessed that only two militaries were capable of performing the complicated combined arms operations required to break Russian lines: the American military and the Israeli one.
So I do find it bizarre the idea that the resourceful, well-trained, motivated IDF couldn’t possibly come up with an alternative approach to fighting Hamas. If you are still listening at this point I am sure you are asking, quite reasonably “ok smart guy, well what should they do!”. Fair question.
Let’s start with this: Hamas might be novel in its extent of exploitation of civilians for strategic purposes, but it is not categorically different from dozens of other terror groups throughout history. Hamas did not invent the idea of situating itself among civilians as a way of eliciting brutality from its enemy such that its own support is strengthened.
A parallel I think about a lot is The Troubles in Northern Ireland. There are a lot of similarities to the situation in Gaza: the violence is ethnically and religiously motivated, one side is a non-state actor that is nevertheless sophisticated in its planning and enjoys a broadly supportive general populace it can melt into, and a lot of the combat is taking place in an urban environment. There are no perfect analogues, and Hamas’ extensive tunnel network is a good example of a critical difference. Nevertheless, I think there are elements of the British approach in Northern Ireland that point to an alternative approach that does not rely as heavily on aerial bombardment.
One of the things the British Army did in Northern Ireland was it built a series of urban fortifications that are some of the strangest buildings you will ever see in your life. If you are listening to this, try to find a moment to open up the text version so you can see the photo I’ve attached.
These fortifications provided British soldiers with persistent surveillance of a higher quality than is possible from a purely technical standpoint, and they also served as staging points to enable much faster action on intelligence about the location of target individuals. That’s exactly what Israel needs as it hunts the leaders of Hamas.
There are a couple of obvious objections worth tackling here. The first here is that this kind of intensive campaign would take a long time. Agreed. But as I have said before, in the wake of October 7, time was Israel’s greatest strategic currency. The longer it waited the longer the world would have had to process what happened on October 7. A slow, methodical campaign that eschewed mass bombardment would have taken longer, but I think the tradeoffs would have been worth it.
The second is that it would lead to the deaths of more Israeli soldiers than the current approach. True! But that is the cross that militaries attempting to follow some set of liberal morals must bear. To put this in the inverse, I think most Israelis if given the option would have preferred that Hamas targeted only military outposts on October 7 - this is the same intuition applied in the other direction.
Finally, and most critically, is the objection that nothing remotely like what I’m describing would work. The push back here is what I’m describing is basically what Israel did prior to its withdrawal from Gaza in 2006. In the below map, which is from 1991, you can identify Israeli military outposts in green sprinkled throughout the Gaza Strip.
So establishing military outposts in Gaza is something Israel has done before with success. Presumably it’s not such a great stretch to think that operating from these outposts would enable a more targeted, humane strategy of dismantling Hamas’ leadership. The fact that some other group will fill that vacuum notwithstanding.
Of course, someone taking the “pro-Israel” position might throw up their hands and say all of these expectations are too high. A frequently cited example is that of Allied area bombing of German cities during World War 2. The Allies completely leveled the cities of Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg, among others, in fighting the Nazis. Why should expectations of Israel be different?
We have talked before about two major schools of ethics: one is rules-based and the other is consequences-based. From a rules-based perspective the response to the example of the Allies is: yes agreed that that was a bad way of fighting the war and the Allies should not have fought it that way. Rules-based ethics is rarely convincing in these highly emotive situations so we resort to the matter of consequences.
And the implied consequence here is that if the Allies had not bombed German cities into oblivion, they would have lost the war. I hedge a lot, but I am not going to hedge here. I am sure this idea is wrong. In graduate school I read excerpts of a US Army report, recall that the US Air Force was not formed until 1947 so American area bombing in World War 2 was performed by the Army, and that report concluded that the Allies’ area bombing strategy did not disrupt German war production, it just made lots of Germans homeless, and made it more expensive to rebuild Germany after the war. Alas, I was unable to track that report down so I will have to quote from an academic journal. The quote reads:
Another factor in the disappointing performance of the bombers was that targets proved to be much more difficult to destroy than anyone had figured. Although factories could be hit and damaged, they could not be hit often or badly enough to be permanently knocked out of action. In addition, rapid and effective German repair, dispersion, and adaptation diminished the impact of the Allied bombing.
That quote is from The Strategic Bombing of Germany in World War II: Costs and Accomplishments written by Kenneth Werrell and it appeared in Vol. 73 of the Journal of American History in 1986 if you are interested in tracking it down.
Another sign that Allied area bombing wasn’t all that effective is that Germany didn’t surrender because its cities had been bombed. Germany surrendered because every single German population center of any note had Allied troops stationed in the center of it. Germany didn’t give in to avoid further area bombing.
We have spent a lot of time talking about Israel and its options, more than I had planned, but of course wars are fought by at least two sides. Hamas, for its part, has gone all in on sacrificing as many Palestinians as it takes to achieve its goal of obliterating the Israeli state. I recently saw a Hamas leader interviewed on Arabic television who basically said that 20,000 Palestinians killed to date were simply nourishment for their cause. Imagine that, viewing your own people as effectively fertilizer for your power. I sadly did not have time to track the video back down but this New York Times article articulates the same idea.
A frequent critique of Israel and its conduct of the war is that it is completely unclear what governance will prevail in Gaza after the shooting stops. I share much of that criticism but when you see a senior Hamas leader making very clear they’re willing not just for Israelis to die, but Palestinians if it leads them closer to eradicating Israel, you become more sympathetic to the bind Israel is in.
Egypt recently proposed a peace deal in which Hamas would relinquish control of Gaza in exchange for a permanent ceasefire. For the average Gazan, that’s a good deal. You stop getting bombed and the regime that has actively ripped up your infrastructure to build rockets doesn’t get to rule over you anymore. Naturally, Hamas rejected this proposal which would have preserved countless Palestinian lives. Because much more important to Hamas than preserving Palestinian lives is ending Israeli ones. You can understand why Israel might find negotiations difficult when it is expected to make an accommodation to leave Hamas in power.
And this of course leaves aside the fact that Hamas could end the violence by releasing the hostages it continues to hold and surrender the perpetrators of the October 7 terror attack. You will find people who will tell you that Israel would continue to bomb Gaza anyway because Israeli hatred of Palestinians knows no limit, etc., etc. That’s an argument born of prejudice. The people who say things like that simultaneously argue that Hamas and its ilk cannot be held responsible for their violence because of the political and economic oppression they face. But if they had a thriving, independent state all would be well. In other words, only Palestinians are redeemable. Personally, I simply don’t think that’s true.
Anyway, suffice to say that if you believe Israel has the power to end this war, then you ought to believe Hamas does too.
Governance isn’t the only area where I sympathize with the Israelis as being genuinely challenging to figure out. Another is how to police the day-to-day administration of the Gaza Strip. I can’t possibly cover everything I mean here but let me give you just a few examples.
This is a link to a video from a news segment that Al Jazeera produced in 2008. It shows the production of children’s television programming by Hamas which is aimed at radicalizing children against Israel. There is so much that is extradordinary about this. First is it reinforces the Israeli concern about a post-war role for Hamas - how do you tolerate hateful indoctrination of toddlers? Second, it is kind of incredible to me that this was reporting done by Al Jazeera? Al Jazeera is the media outlet of the Qatari state which is a significant financial contributor to Hamas. Third, and this is a sidequest but important, you will often hear the October 7 attacks justified on the basis of Israel’s ongoing military and economic oppression of Palestinians. At least regarding the economic point, would Gaza perhaps be in better economic shape if Hamas had done more programming on Arabic language and numeracy than anti-Zionism? Probably yes?
Another example is the role of UNWRA, or however you pronounce it. This is the UN agency responsible for services in the refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank. We have talked about this organization in prior episodes. The intense scrutiny on Gaza as a result of the war has highlighted the increasingly problematic role of UNWRA. First, many people imagine a multi-ethnic organization administering aid and services to Palestinians. UNWRA’s staff is primarily Palestinian. As a result, when the Biden Administration restarted US funding to UNWRA its stipulations included that UNWRA facilities not be used by terrorist organizations and that antisemitic content be removed from UNWRA’s educational curriculum.
You do not stipulate things like this unless you think you have to and you have evidence that they have taken place in the past. Of course, Hamas and UNWRA have done plenty to furnish such evidence. In 2009, UNWRA planned to include references to the Holocaust in its educational curriculum. A development Hamas found so troubling for its potential to humanize Jews that it wrote a letter of protest to UNWRA.
So these are the challenges Israel faces in terms of figuring out an internal configuration of governance in the Gaza Strip that doesn’t leave in place either explicitly or latently antisemitic institutions that actively cultivate animosity towards Israel.
Because of these issues, an argument Netanyahu and his far right allies make is that peace with the Palestinians based on a two state solution comprised of Gaza and the West Bank would just create territory from which groups like Hamas can launch attacks against Jews and foment hatred.
The problem I see with that argument is that it denies that Israel’s situation could be made better. Do I think if a peace treaty were signed tomorrow that created a Palestinian state that there would still occasionally be rocket attacks against Israel? Yes, I do. But do I think it would be harder for Hamas to find people motivated to the degree required to commit the depraved violence of October 7? Also yes. Surely that is an improvement of Israel’s situation? Not to mention, if you accept as I do that all people are redeemable over time, those rocket attacks ought to eventually fade as fewer and fewer Palestinians have direct experience with violence from the Israeli military.
So, notwithstanding the very real problem that Netanyahu doesn’t seem interested in peace, even if he were replaced by a “reasonable” prime minister, that person would face all these same strategic dilemmas when it comes to negotiating an end to the current war and figuring out a path to a lasting peace.
In addition to these problems being genuinely difficult to unpick, Israel has to contend with increasingly unhinged rhetoric and depictions of its situation, especially in the West. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the repeated characterization of Israel’s actions since it gained its independence in 1948 as a “genocide” against Palestinians.
I genuinely wonder what Jews think when they hear Israel described as a genocidal state. When I was taught in history class what a genocide was, the Holocaust was the first example used. Looking back I understand why, it is a pretty simple story at least for the purposes of understanding the very specific context of the word genocide.
Hitler and the Nazis hated the Jews so they set out in a very deliberate way to kill them all. Not most of them. All of them. For millions of Jews that meant being gassed in a concentration camp. For millions more it meant being shot in the back of the head by the Einsatzgruppen and buried in mass graves. There are still fewer Jews in Europe today than there were prior to the Second World War.
Subsequent history classes added to the list. In the Rwandan genocide, the Hutus set out to kill as many Tutsis as they could and ultimately fell just shy of a million. During Bangladesh’s war of independence in the 1970s, the Pakistani Army killed at least 300,000 Bangladeshi Hindus. The Ottoman Turks killed about 1.2 million Armenians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Other massacres and brutal periods of mass killing have taken place throughout history. Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union killed tens of millions. Mao’s purges during the Cultural Revolution probably killed about a million people. But these examples lack that quality of a very deliberate attempt to kill every member of a particular ethnic or religious group.
Of course, another obvious and basic quality of genocides is that the population of the target people falls it doesn’t rise. Today there are about five times as many Palestinians living in the occupied territories than at the time of Israel’s independence. Couple this with the fact that “pro-Palestinian” activists in the West are quick to point out how much more powerful Israel and the IDF is than Palestinians and the genocide characterization is truly bizarre.
If nuclear-armed Israel with its mighty military were bent on genocide against Palestinians, why hasn’t its genocide succeeded? The answer is, of course, because that’s not Israel’s policy.
None of that excuses Israel’s brutal occupation of the West Bank which kills Palestinians on an almost daily basis, or its indiscriminate use of heavy ordinance in Gaza which as we’ve discussed has killed over 20,000 people and wiped out entire families. But it is unclear to me why that behavior can’t be condemned on its own terms and instead wild hyperbole is required?
If I had to guess, the way to interpret it is that the Holocaust is a real problem for “pro-Palestinian” activists in the West. Most Westerners are aware of it and thus have a dim awareness of the historical peril faced by Jews. And, critically, they understand the Holocaust as the canonical example of a genocide. So for the average person who is not closely engaged in world events, politics and history, they at least know that the Jews were the victims of a famous genocide and that probably creates some base level of sympathy for pro-Jewish causes or positions.
Therefore, painting Israelis and Jews as today’s perpetrators of genocide cancels out that historic experience and the associated sympathy. At least, that’s my theory for the internal logic behind painting Israel as a genocidal state.
Phew, ok I think I have hit my limit on this topic and yet there is still so much more I have to say. Ok let’s try to bring this home. My view is that there is no act of terror that Hamas could commit which would lead me to view the Palestinian people, especially its children, as less than human. In my bones I hope that there is a future for the Palestinian people that involves political and spiritual freedom, material comfort and lives free of hate both directed towards Palestinians themselves, but also directed by some Palestinians towards others.
Similarly, there is nothing the Netanyahu government could do to shake my view that Jews are equally deserving of a bright future with physical safety, prosperity and one tiny slice of this vast planet that they can ensure stays free of antisemitism.
So much of the conversation about Gaza in the West involves people sharing the absolute worst behavior of one side or another to anyone willing to consume it followed by something to the effect of “see!? Look at these people!”. And you have to ask yourself when you receive that kind of material, what is the point here? To dehumanize one side or the other?
When Hamas uses anti-depressant medication to facilitate its torture of Israeli hostages, does that mean premature Palestinian children deserve to be abandonded? Surely not. Similarly, could Israel’s behavior in the West Bank really have justified decapitating someone with a garden hoe? Again, no in my view.
So I leave you with this parting thought. There is nothing contradictory about condemning the behavior of members of one group while recognizing the humanity and legitimate aspirations of the group as a whole. So, if you think that peace would be a good thing, don’t be afraid to say that when confronted with this issue. You don’t have to have all the answers. There will always be label seekers who see that as indecision or worse. Ignore them, they’re faux-activists just in this for the likes on Instagram. Going tribal and picking a side, that’s easy. Taking a deep breath and seeing both sides as human? That’s the harder path. And, in my view, the righteous one.
Ukraine
Let’s start by briefly recapping Ukraine’s situation. American military aid is drying up. House Republicans rejected a $60 billion aid package because they demanded that further aid to Ukraine be tied to harsh measures to curb migration at the southern border which they knew that Democrats could never accept. Current American funding for Ukraine is expected to run out by the end of 2023.
In Europe, the story is similar. European aid has been stalled by Hungary. Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orban is blocking flows from the EU to Ukraine as blackmail for frozen cash transfer to Hungry related to Orban’s own erosion of the rule of law.
Furthermore, the majority of credible commentators agree that Ukraine’s much hyped summer offensive was a failure or, at the very least, failed to achieve its objectives. You may recall that Ukraine had trained a number of new armored units with modern Western equipment and the hope was that these units would achieve a breakthrough in Russian lines and lead to the recapture of significant territory. Suffice to say none of that happened and Ukraine made only incremental gains.
On the surface, the situation looks bleak for Ukraine. Its external support appears to be wasting away and, at the strategic level, it has suffered a year of mostly military defeats. I think there’s some value in going back and considering an alternative view of how Ukraine might have used 2022. Some of this will sound like criticism, but it isn’t meant to be. It’s just that elements of a hypothetical path highlight some valuable strategic and operational concepts that I think you will all find interesting.
So if we rewind to late 2022, the situation was pretty bleak for the Russians. The invasion had been halted, with the attempted dash to Kyiv in the early days of the war being a particular embarrassment. President Vladimir Putin had been forced, in September of 2022, to institute a partial mobilization of Russian men to reconstitute units decimated by the fighting. Russians were fleeing across the border as a result to escape mobilization. And the West was much more united, although the Republican Party had retaken the US House, which was always going to be problematic for continuing aid to Ukraine. But otherwise, the picture looked bright for Ukraine.
At this point, Ukraine kind of paused offensive operations so that it could create the units armed with Western equipment that I mentioned earlier. I am glossing over the details here but for the point I want to make, this is accurate enough.
So, rather than maintaining pressure on the Russians and focusing on continuing to degrade and attrit their forces, the Ukrainian pause instead gave the Russians time to not just reconstitute their forces, but to build and lay down extensive fortifications which the Ukrainians were ultimately unable to pierce when their counter offensive started in earnest.
Given what we know now, I think that decision, to launch a maneuver-warfare based counter offensive with the aim of delivering a decisive blow, is one that Ukraine wishes it could do over. And, it should be pointed out, that choice was not entirely Ukraine’s. US military advisors along with the Europeans pushed that as the preferred way forward and it is easy to imagine that the Ukrainians felt somewhat hemmed in: it is hard to tell your most important allies they are wrong.
So what might Ukraine have done instead? For one, it might have maintained a higher tempo of operations in the winter of 2022-2023. Instead of giving Russian forces breathing room, it would have maintained the pressure during the winter months and aimed at maximum disruption of Russian efforts to reconstitute front line units. To the extent possible, Ukraine would also have tried to prevent Russian entrenchment and fortification construction efforts.
If it sounds like I am kind of hand waving the details away there, you would be correct. Both because I don’t know exactly what Ukraine would have done differently but also because that’s not necessary to know for the broader point I’m trying to make which is that in hindsight, it looks like Ukraine’s attempt to wind up for a hammer blow led to the hammer slipping through Ukraine’s fingers. Instead, Ukraine would have been better served keep the pressure on Russia and Russian forces and trying to build more domestic opposition to the war inside Russia.
The way some military strategists might describe this concept of maintaining pressure on Russia is that Ukraine would have tried to get further inside Russia’s “OODA loop”. OODA refers to a framework developed by the US Air Force and it stands for observe, orient, decide act. The OODA loop is a continuous, repeating process and whichever side can cycle through OODA loops fastest, gains a strategic advantage.
In the case of Russia and Ukraine, at the end of 2022, Ukraine was well and truly completing its OODA loops faster than Russia as we have discussed. By pausing its most intense offensive operations, Ukraine gave Russia the chance to gain control of the OODA cycle and to leverage its strategic advantages such as the limited attention span of the Western public and its superior material resources.
As an aside, the OODA loop is a fancy way of saying something that the US military has known since at least the Second World War. General George Patton, a US general in that conflict, is supposed to have said “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week”.
So, what does Ukraine have to look forward to in 2024? I do not think significant further US military aid will be forthcoming for a start. In a presidential election year, with the Republican party mostly in lockstep behind Donald Trump who, as we have discussed before, has an axe to grind against Ukraine, there won’t be any support in the House to approve further Ukraine funding.
That will undoubtedly embolden Putin and the Russian regime. I don’t spend a ton of time watching Russia state propaganda, but the small amount I do consume is pretty revolting in terms of the level of glee and gloating. Presumably that will be much worse.
For that reason, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, much as he won’t like it, should focus on shoring up Ukraine’s defenses. Ukraine’s greatest military successes in this war have come while it was defending, or after attacking Russian soldiers themselves exhausted from attacking. The failure of the 2023 counter offensive and the nature of the modern battlefield in terms of pervasive surveillance from drones and lethal precision strike suggests that uness some technological or doctrinal solution is found to break the stalemate, the frontline is likely frozen for the foreseeable future.
It is not clear to me how tolerable a situation that is for the Ukrainian people. It may be the case that they recognize the limitations of their national power and will follow whatever Zelenskyy determines to be the best course of action. But I can also imagine a world where opposition politicans start challenging Zelenskyy on this front, claiming that an aggressive approach is needed, someone has to bring the fight to the Russians, etc.
I just don’t know enough about Ukrainian politics to have a view on the answer here, but it seems like a risk factor. On the other side, however, continued Ukrainian resistance is definitely not a tolerable situation for the Russian regime. Recall that Putin’s goal at the outset of the invasion was regime change and so the continued hold out of Ukraine’s democratically elected government and the resistance of Ukrainian armed forces will undermine Putin’s prestige along as both persist.
Which leads to what I think might be the single potential bright spot for Ukraine in 2024 which is that all the ingredients are there for Russia to dramatically overreach. The failure of Ukraine’s counter offensive, the drying up of American military aid… You can see how this could combine to make Putin overconfident and determined to force a Russian counteroffensive.
We have talked multiple times about the degree to which Russian offensive potential is spent and I don’t think that has changed, but Putin may not know that. Imagine if Russia had invaded Ukraine and Ukraine had had time to prepare sophisticated defenses, the way the Russians did in advance of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Imagine how much worse things would have gone for Russia.
To me, that’s what you’re hoping for right now if you’re Zelenskyy. That you can align the country behind entrenchment, digging in and protecting at all costs the territory you currently hold, and hoping Putin forces the Russian military into some kind of catastrophic military blunder even worse than the original decision to invade.
At a minimum, even if that doesn’t take place, Ukraine’s continue defiance is, in and of itself, a challenge to Putin’s rule and continues to put pressure on Putin domestically given all of this promises about a quick and easy victory.
We started this conversation by talking about how Ukraine stopped making decisions faster than the Russians. Ironically the way out for Ukraine might be to stop making decisions at all for a while and see if the Russians can find a way to make a mistake.
Guyana [bonus]
Apologies but I simply did not have time to script out this section. You will have to survive on the audio-content only!
CWI #36 - Gaza, Ukraine, Guyana (bonus)