The Z of History: 13 Months of Commentary

This about Geopolitics, tagged , , , , was written by for on March 10, 2023

 

I would like to take the opportunity to highlight my discussion with Noah Carl the prospects of each side in the Ukraine war.

My basic thesis is summarized in this thread:

Most everything I said there still applies as of March 20, with the exception that I’m now somewhat more bearish about the prospects of Ukrainian offensive success, which just goes to further confirm the “long stalemate” thesis that can only be broken by an OOM-scale increase in NATO supplies or the implementation of a war economy to and by Ukraine and Russia, respectively.

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Military-Technical Decommunization

This about *default, Geopolitics, tagged , was written by for on February 24, 2022

Vladimir Putin: “We Are Ready to Show What Real Decommunization Would Mean for Ukraine”

Since my article last week predicting the imminent “Regathering of the Russian Lands”, the prospect of a large-scale Russian invasion has gone from ambiguous to extremely likely (90% on Metaculus). Personally, I think it’s a foregone conclusion, with operations beginning either tonight or tomorrow night, with the most interesting and important questions now being the speed of the Ukrainian collapse, the future borders and internal organization of Russian Empire 2.0, and the ramifications of the return of history on the international order.

February 22, 2022 will indeed enter history as the day when Vladimir Putin decided to become a Great Man of history. In an hour long speech, he basically recounted his magisterial July 2021 article on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, officially endorsing the nationalist position that Russia is the “world’s largest divided big nation”. He stated that the modern Ukrainian state can be rightfully called “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine”, asserted that its statehood was developed by the Bolsheviks, and noted the irony in Ukrainian nationalists toppling statues to their father. “You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine.”

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Regathering of the Russian Lands

This , about Geopolitics, tagged , , was written by for on February 16, 2022

Already in 1990 I wrote that Russia could desire the union of only the three Slavic republics [Russia, Ukraine, Belarus] and Kazakhstan, while all the other republics should be let go. It would be desirable if [a resulting Russian Union] could be formed into a unitary state, not into a fragile, artificial confederation with a huge supra-national bureaucracy. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The Empire, Long Divided, Must Unite

There is a good chance that the coming week will either see the culmination of the biggest and most expensive military bluff in world history, or a speed run towards Russian Empire 2.0, with Putin launching a multi-pronged assault invasion of Ukraine to take back Kiev (“the mother of Russian cities”) and the historical provinces of Novorossiya.

There is debate over which of these two scenarios will pan out. The Metaculus predictions market has given the war scenario a 50/50 probability since around mid-January, spiking to 60-70% in the past few days. This happens to coincide with the public assessments of several military analysts: Michael Kofman and Rob Lee were notably early on the ball, as were some of this blog’s commenters, e.g. Annatar. The chorus of skeptics is diverse, but includes Western journalists and Russian liberals who tend to believe Putin’s Russia is too much of a cynical kleptocracy to dare go against the West so brazenly (e.g. Oliver Carroll, Leonid Volkov); Western Russophiles who are all too aware of and disillusioned with hysterical media fabrications about Russia, and are applying faulty pattern matching (e.g. Michael Tracey); and Ukrainian activists who have spent the last eight years hyperventilating about “Russian aggression” and have been reduced to shock and disbelief now that the real thing is staring in their face.

For the record, my own position is that the war scenario was ~50% probable since early January, might be as high as 85% now, and it will likely happen soon (detailed Predictions at the end).

My reasons for these bold calls can be sorted into four major bins:

  1. Troops Tell the Story: What we have observed over the past few months are all completely consistent with invasion planning.

  2. Game Theory: Russia’s impossible ultimatums to NATO have pre-committed it to military operations in Ukraine.

  3. Window of Opportunity: The economic, political, and world strategic conjuncture for permanently solving the Ukraine Question has never been as favorable since at least 2014, and may never materialize again.

  4. The Nationalist Turn: “Gathering the Russian Lands’ is consistent with opinions and values that Putin has voiced since at least the late 2000s, with the philosophers, writers, and statesmen whom he has cited most often and enthusiastically (e.g. Ilyin, Solzhenitsyn, Denikin), and more broadly, with the “Nationalist Turn” that I have identified the Russian state as having taken from the late 2010s.

I will discuss each of these separately.

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