Category: HISTORY

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY

He died on Tuesday. I haven’t bothered to read many of the obits that have been published but I will make a guess about their general flavour. The Western ones will say he ended the Cold War, removed the Soviet threat and, maybe, introduced fast food to Russia (a reverse on the supposed origin of the bistro). The Russian ones will be rather uncomplimentary and will blame him for the miseries of the 1990s when jobs disappeared, savings evaporated, deaths increased and Russia was pushed around.

I approach this with a somewhat different view that, as it happens, I share with Putin. I believe that, when Gorbachev became GenSek in 1985, the USSR system had exhausted its possibilities. I believe, but cannot find the reference, that Putin told Oliver Stone that the system was inefficient at its core, but more of his thoughts on the viability of the USSR can be found here. Not very complimentary: ideals not accomplished, too much repression ab initio, he pays credit to Stalin’s industrialisation for victory in 1945 but concludes “However, in the final count, the inability to embrace change, to embrace technical revolutions and new technology led to a collapse of that economy”. Or how about this from September 2005? “In the Soviet Union, for many decades, we lived under the motto, we need to think about the future generation. But we never thought about the existing, current, present generations.” (PS he never said “the greatest catastrophe”: that’s a mistranslation.)

In short, I believe that the USSR was heading for trouble in 1985: the 1990s were bad enough but I’m not sure they would have been much better with other players.

So Putin and I would agree that Gorbachev inherited a failing idea. He had three solutions. You can agree that they didn’t work but they were better than Andropov’s notion of tightening discipline and Chernyenko’s inertia. Glasnost was an attempt to start telling the truth, or some of it, and perestroyka attempted a side-to-side, top-to-bottom reconstruction. His third idea was a redesign of the union itself. This, by the way, gave me my first revelation that many Western “experts” formed their conclusions without data. At a Wilton Park conference, one of these “experts” built his whole presentation around the assertion that nobody had any idea what Gorbachev’s New Union would be. This after three drafts, produced after much negotiation, had been published in full in the media! I was rather amazed at this ignorance and equally so to be casually brushed off when I pointed out that the texts had been published and that I had read them.

The idea of re-creating the union was put to a referendum and, with certain revealing exceptions, passed by a solid majority. But the New Union never happened. A day or so before it was due to be implemented, the August coup attempt took place. I have written about my involvement in it here. As it turned out, that killed it. Shortly afterwards, for whatever reason, Yeltsin, Shushkevich and Kravchuk declared the USSR dead and gone and Gorbachev resigned and the flag came down. And that was that. (And, not for the last time, Kiev dismissed the wishes of the Ukrainian population: 59% of the total electorate having voted yes in the referendum.)

Could something different have happened? Had the treaty had been signed; that would have been different. Most of the USSR would have remained, with some republics at the edges gone, and a lot of the suffering of the breakup of such an absurdly centralised economy would have been prevented. The Union of Sovereign States would have remained a major player in the world system and there would have been less likelihood of outsiders meddling.

But it didn’t happen and therefore Gorbachev failed in what he was trying to do. Which was something dangerous and rarely successful.

But was it so bad for Russia? A question few ask. In 2005 Vladislav Surkov told Der Spiegal that he still remembered what he felt when the USSR went down: “an enormous sense of relief, as if a huge leech had dropped from my back”. He thereby showed himself to be one of the few people who understood that, whatever may have been true at other times, by the 1980s the RSFSR was subsidising the whole thing. Most people thought the opposite. Here’s Leonid Kuchma in 1993 “…like everyone else, I believed that Ukraine is so rich that it provided for the entire [Soviet] Union. It turned out that it is, in fact, rich. However, was it really a provider?” Thus, from Russia’s perspective, the end of the USSR was actually a good thing. Admittedly, a lot of misery had to be gone though first. But, of the former fifteen – and the 1990s were bad for all the USSR successor states, not just Russia – which is doing the best now? The Baltics with their huge population loss? Ukraine or Moldova, contenders for the poorest countries in Europe? Central Asia? The Caucasus? For those who think Russia is a decaying sinkhole I invite a perusal of these Google Street View shots of numerous cities taken ten years apart.

So, despite the strong dislike most Russians have for him, they may come to have a kinder view over time.

(PS I can’t give hyperlinks for everything. Most of this happened pre-Internet and the quotations are from the collections I made at the time.)

THE RUSSIAN WAY IN WARFARE – THE BRUSILOV OFFENSIVE

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY, WAR ON RUSSIA

First published Strategic Culture Foundation

An occasional series in which I attempt to illustrate, with historical examples, a “Russian style in warfare”. I have written about the “American style” here and here. In general, I believe that the Russian style is very effective while the US style is not.

The “Brusilov Offensive” is the name given to a series of attacks by the Russian forces between June and September 1916 against Austro-Hungarian forces in the territory of today’s Ukraine commanded and planned by Aleksey Brusilov. Very successful initially, the attacks faded out over time. The numbers of soldiers, powers of the defence, difficulty of movement and enormous stockpiles of munitions meant that offensives, on any front, petered out because of physical exhaustion, heavy casualties and outrun supply lines. In essence, the war went on until one side simply couldn’t take any more. That point was reached by Russia in 1917 and Germany at the end of 1918. The last hammer-blow broke them, not the second-last.

But Brusilov’s offensive offers some insights into the Russian way of warfare and, in particular, stands in great contrast to the British offensive on the Somme at the same time. Brusilov used tactics which weren’t used on the Western front until the Germans in the March 1918 offensive and the Canadian Corps in “Canada’s Hundred Days.” I will start with the British Somme offensive in order to show how advanced Brusilov’s tactics were.

Like many wars, August 1914 saw confidence that victory would be achieved by Christmas. But, when Christmas came, tens of thousands had been killed and wounded and the fronts were stalemated. The Schlieffen Plan had failed, Plan XVII had failed, the “Russian steamroller” had failed: it was clear that it would be a long war; a war that would need millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of weapons, millions of tons of ammunition. No one had anticipated the casualties and the ammunition expenditure. Barbed wire, trenches, magazine rifles and – above all – machine guns, had given the defence tremendous power and for the Allies, the problem was how to overcome the defence and regain the territory that the Central Powers had secured at the beginning stages of the fighting.

The British Army undertook an enormous recruiting effort which brought in about one million men by early 1915. And that was still not enough – conscription was begun a year later. Conscription raised about two and a half million men: altogether nearly 5 million British men wore uniforms: an unimaginable number in 1914. All these had to be trained and equipped. The new armies needed stunning quantities of weapons and ammunition and factories were built and hundreds of thousands moved into them to make war materiel: a gigantic war industry was erected on the very small base of 1914. This took a great deal of time and it was only by the summer of 1916 that the commanders believed that the British Army war ready for a big offensive.

On the Western Front, the retreat from the Marne had left the Germans holding ground better suited for defence than the Allies and months of preparation and experience of failed attacks in 1915 had made their positions even stronger. The British solution to the problem was artillery – the attack would be preceded by the most powerful artillery bombardment ever carried out. One million, seven hundred thousand rounds were fired on the German positions over eight days: 150 per minute. It was expected – tests had been done – that this thunderstorm of high explosives would cut the barbed wire, collapse the trenches and annihilate the defenders. The first wave of infantry would have little to do but occupy the smashed enemy trenches and were, accordingly, heavily laden with weapons, equipment and rations. But, up to a quarter of the rounds were duds (it’s difficult to make fuses when you’re just starting), the wire wasn’t sufficiently cut, there were enough defenders to man the machine guns when the cessation of the bombardment gave them the cue to move; the British Army suffered 60,000 casualties on the first day. The battle dragged on until November with minor territorial gains and over 400,000 British casualties. The characteristics of the British attack in July 1916 were a week-long artillery bombardment and massed infantry moving forward from the existing trench line. The catastrophe resulted from the failure of the bombardment to do what it was supposed to do.

On the Eastern Front there was a similar deadlock. The Russian offensive in 1914 had failed and, as in the west, although not as densely manned, there was a long line of dug-in soldiers facing each other. The Allies had agreed that simultaneous offensives would be carried out against the Central Powers in 1916 and the Russians were the first to go. Operationally the object was to attack Austria-Hungary, correctly seen as the weaker, knock it out of the war and bring Romania into the war on the Allied side. Secondarily it was to relieve pressure on Italy and France.

The attack began a month before the Somme attack and ended a month earlier. Russian casualties were similar to the British but Austro-Hungarian losses were at least twice German losses. Territorial gains were much greater – while the Somme battle moved the front line a tiny distance, Brusilov gained much more ground. But, in the end, it was “a piece of tactical genius that had limited strategic results“. It was another second-last hammer-blow. Ironically, Romania did enter the war on the Allied side, but performed so poorly that it took Russian resources away from the main effort. The offensive’s comparative failure after the initial spectacular success probably contributed to Russia’s dropping out of the war the next year rather as a similar disappointment did for Germany in 1918.

But, operationally and tactically it was a stunning success. There are several points of difference between this attack and the British one which deserve notice and give us a perception of “a Russian way in warfare”. The use of deception to create surprise; maximising the effect of artillery fire; the use of forward saps to reduce infantry exposure to fire; the use of specialised advance troops for reconnaissance and fire correction.

(The following quotations come from Dowling’s The Brusilov Offensive.) We will begin, because it sums it up well, this account by an Austrian soldier on the receiving end.

In the dugouts of the first trench of the 82nd [Austrian] I[nfantry] R[egiment], because one still had the echo of the drumming fire in his ear, it was already five seconds after the artillery was no longer directed at the first trench. In the sixth second perhaps a spirited defender cried: to the trenches! In the seventh second he ran into someone in the stairwell, and under a low-hanging balcony that was splintered and torn to pieces a hand grenade skidded after him. And in the eighth second a voice from above called down to the men in the cellar that they should give themselves up.

Quite different from the experience of a German soldier on the Somme who, if he had not been buried or driven mad by the week of shelling, had enough time to get up to the fire step and aim his machine-gun at the heavily-laden infantry struggling through the wire towards him.

While the British had fired a continuous bombardment, Brusilov had a series of short but intense bombardments:

The Russian guns opened up at 4:00 AM along the entire front as ordered, but the display was far from impressive. After three hours of steady, concentrated, but not overwhelming shelling, the Russian guns fell quiet again. The Habsburg forces rushed to man their forward lines, anticipating the attacks their intelligence had been predicting. The Russians, however, remained in their trenches while observers checked the damage done to the Austro-Hungarian positions. Only a few weak reconnaissance patrols emerged to challenge the Habsburg forces; after an hour or so, the shelling resumed-slow, steady, and deadly accurate.

Consequently, the Austrians never knew when the bombardment had really stopped and the infantry assault would begin. On the Somme the Germans correctly assumed that the end of the shelling meant the beginning of the attack but, as our soldier relates, the Austrians only knew it when the Russians were already in their trenches: “Confused by the pauses between barrages, the troops were increasingly hesitant to man the front lines”. Second, Brusilov had his soldiers dig trenches – saps – forward so that they would only have 50 to 100 metres to run: “Brusilov wanted the point of departure for the Russian infantry assaults to be no greater than 100 meters, and he preferred that the distance be 60 meters or less”; the British had the whole distance to cover. Third, light reconnaissance teams went into no man’s land to check the accuracy of each phase of the bombardment and direct the next.

Artillery is most effective in the first few seconds – merely lying down significantly increases the probability of survival. Brusilov also understood that the cessation of fire will be taken by the enemy as a signal that the attack is about to begin. This will be seen again in Soviet artillery use in the Second World War and is the reason for the Soviet/Russian development of MLRS which produce tremendous explosive fire in very quick times (the BM-21 Grad can fire 40 rockets in 20 seconds. To say nothing of this.)

And, fourth, Brusilov used every means of deception available to him to make the enemy think the attacks were coming somewhere else:

overwhelming the Austro-Hungarian forces with information and options… Brusilov mounted a counterintelligence campaign, sending false instructions over the radio and by messenger while specific instructions concerning the offensive were relayed verbally… false artillery batteries…

There does not seem to have been any deception attempts used on the Somme – and, indeed, the enormous piles of artillery shells were in the open for all to see.

In conclusion, the Brusilov Offensive shows

  • deception creating operational and tactical surprise;
  • maximising artillery effects;
  • reducing troop exposure;
  • specialised reconnaissance troops.

Further essays will examine these and other factors in Russian war-fighting.

COLOUR REVOLUTIONS FADE AWAY

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY, THE WORLD IS CHANGING, WAR ON RUSSIA

First published Strategic Culture Foundation, in Spanish, picked up by What Really Happened,

Probably the first US-plotted “colour revolution” was the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893. The Hawaiian Islands had been united in the early 1800s and were internationally recognised as an independent country, but the native Polynesians had been outnumbered by outsiders who had acquired a good deal of the land and devoted it to growing sugar. The USA was the principal market for the sugar but, when domestic sugar producers prevailed upon Washington to impose a tariff, the producers in Hawaii saw their wealth threatened. The coup overthrew the Queen, proclaimed a republic and a few years later Hawaii became a US territory and the sugar market was saved. None of this was overtly stated in justification, of course: the coup, like later “colour revolutions”, was carried out for more highfalutin reasons than mere greed. A threat was “discovered”, “public safety is menaced, lives and property are in peril”, a committee of safety formed, simulated mass meetings were held. Conveniently a US Navy ship was in harbour and troops came ashore “to secure the safety” etc etc. The Navy’s presence was not a coincidence because the US President and Secretary of State were in agreement with the conspiracy and the US diplomatic representative, while pretending neutrality, was an active participant. All done quickly and the coup leaders proclaimed themselves to be the new provisional government. Wholly and obviously fake – there was no disorder at all and the “committee of public safety” was made up of sugar barons and their flunkeys – but it stands as a historically significant event because it was the first crude attempt at something to be perfected in later years.

A Congressional report in 1894 decided that everything was perfectly perfect but a century later the US Congress passed the “apology resolution” for the coup. Who can say that the Rules-Based International Order is not real after that? Has Putin or Xi ever apologised for anything he didn’t apologise for earlier?

The most recent successful “colour revolution” occurred in Ukraine in 2013-2014. Enter the “Non-Government” Organisations – the non-government part is a lie but they are certainly well organised; they prepare the way. Victoria Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, admitted to spending five billion dollars to “ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine”: an enormous sum for a poor country. (One learns here what has changed since the Hawaiian “colour revolution” 120 years before: 1) the rhetoric is more syrupy 2) it costs more.) She was the John Stevens of the Ukrainian “colour revolution” – sent by the US State Department to hand out the money, make the decisions and direct the performance. And, as the phone intercept proves, to block others from involvement – “fuck the EU”.) I recommend taking the time to listen to some of Nuland’s speech here to see just how sugary the cover talk for these “colour revolutions” has become – democracy, human rights, freedom, reforms, Europe; the caravan of “Western values” is chained to the juggernaut of greed and power. None of these formerly estimable values are visible in today’s Ukraine; but the interests of Ukrainians (or Hawaiians) were never the point of “colour revolutions”: the sugar barons wanted to keep their entry into the US market, Washington wanted to make trouble for Russia and the US Navy wanted a base in Crimea.

But the day of “colour revolution” seems to be running out. The mechanics are noticed and countered. Observe, for example, the moment in this video of a protest in Sevastopol when the commenter – who had seen it before on the Maidan – points out the carefully spaced people, wearing red so they can recognise each other, directing the supposedly genuine and spontaneous protest. The organisers were trying to make the Crimean Tatar issue a fighting cause. (I wonder, by the way, how many consumers of the Western “news” media think the Tatars are autochthonous?) I well remember this documentary because it was the first time I saw the people on the receiving end of a “colour revolution” getting ahead of the organisers; up to this moment they had been reacting, always wrongly and too late. But many of the security forces in Crimea in 2014 had been on the Maidan and had ample opportunity to observe how “spontaneity” is organised.

The authorities and their security services are becoming proactive and are using social media – a good example was the recording of the organisers of the Hong Kong protests meeting with a US Embassy official. And we have the recording of one of Navalniy’s associates asking for money from a UK Embassy official; not, he assured the official, “a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake”. Sometimes it’s fortuitous and not the result of planning by the target’s security services. A civil airliner receives a (fake) bomb threat, it lands according to the rules, one of the passengers is a “colour revolution” operative, they arrest him, he sings. There is still some mystery in the Protasevich story, but the Western version is certainly not true.

And when it’s over and failed, Washington casually dismisses its tools. Where is Yushchenko today? Once the darling of the “Orange Revolution” in Kiev, today he is a non-person. Saakashvili, re-used and failed again in Ukraine, is in prison in Tbilisi today. No fuss is made about him. Áñez is in jail, Protasevich forgotten. We’ve seen many West-leaning democratic saviours come and go in Russia – Berezovskiy, Khodorkovskiy and Pussy Riot are in the past; today it’s Navalniy but he’s probably passed his best-before date. Just props in the “colour revolution” theatre.

And we come to another secret of beating the “colour revolution” – tough it out. The Emperor Alexander told the French Ambassador that Napoleon’s enemies had given up too soon, he, on the other hand, would go to Kamchatka if need be. He went to Paris instead. Maduro still sits in the presidential office in Caracas, Guaidó is reduced to begging; Brussels has stopped pretending but Washington holds fast to the delusion. Lukashenka remains. Beijing toughed it out in Hong Kong. On the contrary, in Georgia (“Rose Revolution“) Shevardnadze was unwilling to use force and in Kiev (“Orange Revolution” and Maidan) Yanukovych was unwilling to use force. Not, of course that they weren’t blamed anyway by the Western propaganda apparatus (which was unashamed to call these scenes in Kiev and Hong Kong “peaceful” and never wondered where all the orange tents came from). All designed of course, to incite a violent reaction by the authorities which would be packaged by the complaisant Western media as violence against peaceful protesters. Not at all the same thing, of course, in the Western “human rights” Rules-Based International Order construction, as anything going on in Melbourne, or Paris, or London. To a degree, “colour revolutions” are waiting games and the incumbent, if he keeps his nerve, has certain advantages.

But probably the strongest prophylactic against a “colour revolution” is to prevent it from starting. And here it is necessary to drive out the foreign “Non Government” Organisations before they get established. There will, of course, be much protest from the West but it is important for the targets to understand that their press coverage in the West is and always will be negative, no matter what they do, say or argue. It’s propaganda, it’s not supposed to be fact-based. And it’s often amusingly repetitive – the Western propagandists are too lazy and too contemptuous of their audience not to recycle yesterday’s panics. For example: remember when Russia hacked the Vermont power grid in 2016? this time it’s “an angry Chinese President Xi Jinping” shutting down Canadian power plants. Sometimes it’s sloppily idiotic: CNN tells us that Russia, China and Iran are all hacking away at the US election system; it then goes on to say that Russia likes Trump and China likes Biden; Therefore, as Sherlock Holmes would conclude, CNN must believe that that Iran decided the outcome. The target should not worry about Western coverage – if you’re today’s target, all coverage will negative. Vide contemporary excitement over “violations of Taiwan’s airspace” without mentioning this simultaneous event. Facts don’t matter: the Panama Papers were about Putin except that they didn’t mention him and therefore they must have been by Putin. The Pandora Papers give us the re-run.

Former successes – in recent times, Ukraine twice, Georgia – are becoming failures: Hong Kong, Venezuela and Belarus. The targets have learned how to counter the attacks. The essential rules for defeating “colour revolutions” are:

  1. They come from outside. So cut out the outsiders and get rid of the foreign “Non-Government” Organisations. This is probably the most important preventative: the “colour revolution” operators were quite unhindered in, for example, Ukraine.
  2. Remember Alexander’s advice: don’t give up too soon. Maduro and Lukashenka are still there. To say nothing of Russia, China and Iran.
  3. Don’t be afraid that you’ll be blamed: you will be anyway. The Western propaganda machine is not interested in facts.
  4. Be tough. There’s a rhythm to these things; if you interrupt them, its hard for them to get back on track.
  5. Be patient, as we saw in Hong Kong, the outrage is mostly artificial and will run out of steam.
  6. Learn the techniques of how they’re done, watch for them and counter them.
  7. And finally: time is on your side. The West is not getting stronger. What the neocons call “the axis of revisionists” is.

ROME FELL AND IT’S PROBABLY YOUR FAULT

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY

First published Strategic Culture Foundation

The Roman Empire fell because it did something the author doesn’t approve of. And the American Empire or Putin’s Russia or Communist China will fall because they also do what the author dislikes. It’s a fun trope and you see it all the time. It’s easy to do and lets the author pretend to be the edjamakated sort of fellow who can use Pompey, Pluto and Plato in a sentence rather than a hack re-wording the latest instructions from the Military-Industrial-Media-Complex. Now that the American Empire has been defeated by its allies over Nord Stream and by its enemies in Afghanistan, we can expect to see a lot more of it.

But exactly when did the Roman Empire end? We need a date so we can blame that end on that thing that we dislike. Edward Gibbon wrote a rather large book about its decline and fall: it begins in the 200s and ends in the 1400s. That’s 1200 years of declining and falling; hard to find a single cause in all that.

The end of the Roman Republic – that’s an easier thing to date. Most would agree on the date at which Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus became supreme after the defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra in 30BP. But even that becomes hazy when we take into account the Roman pretence that Rome never changes even while it’s changing. And the issue is further complicated by the Romans’ love of great antiquity which meant that they never stopped doing something that they had once done. So the ancient priesthood of the flamines with their curious costumes and taboos endured; the Sibylline Books, lost but then restored, were consulted even into the Christian period; they honoured geese and punished dogs; the sacred fire burned; the lowering of the flag stopped the trial. So, no matter how cataclysmic the crisis, at the end, the Republic was once again “restored” just as it was. And that is what Octavianus claimed to have done – consuls, the Senate, praetors and all the rest remained but he, now named the August One, was merely the first man in Rome. He had restored the Republic. And we will see this throughout: whatever happens, nothing has happened; the pretence is kept up.

410. That’s the date it ended. The Visigoths, under Alaric, sack Rome. But Rome isn’t the capital of the Empire nor even of the Western Empire at this time. And Alaric, who had been a Roman soldier, is seen by many as unsuccessfully seeking a formal position inside the Empire. But the date is significant because, among English-speaking historians, it is probably the origin of the notion that “the Roman Empire fell” at some definable time. Roman Britain seems to have been generally prosperous and peaceful (with some friction north of the Wall) for three centuries until the middle of the 300s when sea raiders and northerners combined to shake its security, a general then took many soldiers to the continent in an unsuccessful bid for the crown and the last soldiers left in the early 400s to defend Rome. This left the Romanised (and Christianised) British to the mercies of the raiders. Little but legends survive from this time; this is the era of Arthur: but was he in Cornwall or the Borders? did he even exist? was he Roman, Briton or Sarmatian? king or war leader? Libraries are full of books of speculation; no one knows and archaeology doesn’t help. Gradually the Britons were pushed out and Saxons settled what was now called “England”. Recorded history picks up again in the 700s when the Saxons become Christianised. So in Roman Britain, there certainly is a “fall” in the early 400s, followed by a three-century “dark” age, followed by a gradual growing of the “light” as Christian Saxons struggle against a new round of pagan raiders from the seas. Here, the Roman Empire did “end”. But not for any moralistic reason – the legions left and Britannia was a juicy target.

The history on the Continent is quite different. Barbarians, yes, but always pretending to rule by permission of the Emperor in the East and seeking a Roman-style title. Henri Pirenne’s researches make this clear. Take, for example another “end date” – 478. The last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus (a name ironically combining the founders of Republican Rome and Imperial Rome) is overthrown by the barbarian Odoacer. But Odoacer is careful to seek authority to rule from the Emperor in Constantinople and to consult the Roman Senate. So the pretence of the unchanging Roman Empire is kept up. And this kept on – a barbarian king, formerly a soldier of the Empire, would take power and the Emperor in the East would appoint him to some Roman position and he would be king of his people and an official in the Empire. Marius is Consul seven times, Sulla appoints himself Dictator, Caesar becomes Dictator for life: it’s all perfectly Roman and in accordance with the Twelve Tables. Given a little twisting of the rules. Which now become the new rules.

Of course it’s pretence and of course each iteration is a blurred copy of the last. But it’s a continuous process and one cannot find – except by making some arbitrary decision – a moment at which one thing ends and another begins. An important moment in the Western Empire comes when Charlemagne declares himself Emperor of the West. Crowned by the Bishop of Rome without reference to the Emperor in the East. That’s a split; but it’s all done in Latin, it’s all Christian and it’s still calling itself the Roman Empire headed by the Imperator Romanorum. Charlemagne even referred to himself occasionally as Augustus and claimed to have renewed the Empire. So 800 marks a moment to be sure, but there’s still something in the west calling itself the Roman Empire and it’s not entirely fanciful to do so.

The Holy Roman Empire existed until 1806. That’s another thousand years after Charlemagne created it and by 1806 there’s no doubt that Caesar Augustus would recognise nothing in it – but how much would he have recognised in Constantinople in 600? Certainly some time in those thousand years the (Western) Roman Empire ceased to have any content beyond the name. But one cannot find a “moment”: it just faded away over time until nothing was left but the name and Bonaparte – having just made himself emperor in a ceremony redolent of Rome and Charlemagne – puffed the last bit of dust away.

Meanwhile in the East the Empire continued. Its hold on the Western Empire waxed and waned but by the 800s had disappeared in form and in reality (although it kept Venice). But it certainly endured in the East; rich and powerful. What did it in was the century of destructive war with the Persian Empire beginning in the early 500s which so weakened the two that they were unable to resist the Muslims. By the mid 700s, Islam ruled over Roman Africa, Egypt, Spain, most of today’s Middle East and the Persian Empire itself. The Eastern Roman Empire was left with the Balkans and Anatolia. Over the subsequent seven centuries, Islam, which never lost its desire to rule over “The City“, ate more and more until the Empire was reduced to the bounds of the city itself and, when it fell in 1453, that was the end. And that’s the date Gibbon picked.

So, when did the Roman Empire “fall”? There isn’t any date – unless you take 1806 or 1453 – and therefore there isn’t any “cause”.

So the next time – and that time will be soon – you read someone pontificating that the Roman Empire fell because it did something he doesn’t approve of and the USA or Russia or China is doing the same – smile. It’s just gas and persiflage.

(The fall of the Republic, on the other hand, could be framed as the inability of a smallish city state to deal with an expanding empire, the strain of the need for large armies and foreign garrisons, greed and ambition fed by the tremendous inrush of loot, the impoverishment of many ordinary citizens. You don’t often see that comparison, but here’s one: Donald Trump as Tiberius Gracchus; “farcical” sneers the reviewer – well it is the NYT. All I can say is that there is a certain parallel and wait till he meets Cataline and Clodius!)

AFGHANISTAN: SAME, SAME; AGAIN, AGAIN

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY, THE WORLD IS CHANGING, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

(First published Strategic Culture Foundation)

The lesson of Afghanistan is not that the US is washed up as a great power. The lesson is that the US is such a great power, militarily and economically, that it is continually tempted to try hopeless things that nobody else on earth – including China – would ever attempt.

David Frum gives new meaning to the expression “in denial”.

Don’t believe what you’re told by the generals, or the ambassadors, or people in the administration saying we’re never going to do this again. That’s exactly what we said after Vietnam. We’re never going to do this again. Lo and behold we did Iraq. And we did Afghanistan. We will do this again.

John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)

Bill Ehrhart arrived in Vietnam in 1967 believing everything. His first indication that all was not as expected came when he wasn’t welcomed the way Allied soldiers had been in 1944. A couple of days later he was shocked to see “detainees”, bound hand and foot, casually tossed off a high vehicle by other Marines. This didn’t seem to be the way to treat people the Americans were there to help said he to his companion who told him to keep his mouth shut “until you know what’s going on around here”. And, he continues in this video, “it went downhill from there”. Every day patrols met “snipers and mines” but he saw hardly any enemy soldiers. He came to realise that the Viet Cong didn’t have to force people to fight the Americans; once a Marine patrol had destroyed its way through a village, they’d have all the recruits they needed:

the longer we stayed in Vietnam, the more Viet Cong there were, because we created them; we produced them… The Vietnamese people hated me and I gave them every reason to hate me.

The war he saw bore no resemblance to the optimistic stuff he read in Time Magazine and other mass media. So he hunkered down, stopped asking the questions of what and why – “the questions themselves were too ugly even to ask” – did what he did and waited for the date when he would go home.

This story is from Afghanistan but it fits Ehrhart’s conclusion perfectly. The first Americans into a valley in 2001 make contact with a local timber baron; he tells them his rival is a Taliban supporter; the rival is bombed; he loses his business, some of his family are killed and he does join Taliban. You can just imagine the locals, when these dumb and ignorant – but terribly destructive – aliens drop out of the sky, calculating how best to manipulate them. The Americans never think to reflect on Putin’s observation of five years ago:

The extremists in this case are more cunning, clever and stronger than you, and if you play these games with them, you will always lose.

Or try to answer his question: “who’s playing who here?“

The scene shifts to Afghanistan as we move four decades ahead from Ehrhard’s observations. For example, in this account in the Military Times:

  • Expecting to be welcomed: “I just felt we were over there fighting an enemy who attacked America and liberating the people of Afghanistan from Taliban rule”.
  • They’re all the enemy: “It was such a complex war with more than one enemy, not just the Taliban… Sometimes it seemed like it was just some young, bored kids shooting at us”.
  • The happy-happy reports are all fake: “Seeing politicians use Afghanistan and Iraq as a talking points without any action, then seeing young men and women run through deployment after deployment until they have nothing left to give, only to be discarded and left to figure out how to cope…”.

What’s the difference between these American soldiers’ experiences in Afghanistan and their predecessors’ in Vietnam?

Ehrhart doesn’t talk about personnel rotation policy in Vietnam although there is an allusion to it: he knew to the day when his time would end and, as it happened, he was literally plucked out of a firefight and sent home. The practice was that junior officers were at the front for six months and other ranks for one year. Thus an individual infantryman might go through two or three platoon commanders with fellow platoon members appearing and disappearing as their dates came up. The effects of unit cohesion were devastating – indeed there was no unit cohesion at all. This rotation policy was argued to be one of the reasons for the defeat as described in this essay. A colleague of mine was peripherally involved in this discussion as he presented the British/Commonwealth “regimental system” in which units and subunits went in together and came out together. But what do we see in Afghanistan four decades later?

Hearts and minds sounded great on paper, but it was often seen as an empty promise to the locals… We would inevitably break those promises in one of two ways. First, the command may just up and move us to a different area, leaving those who helped us high and dry. Second, frequent deployment rotations meant personal relationships would only last, at most, a few months to a year.

And, of course, that great favourite of the American Way of War – bombing. Lots of bombing. In the Vietnam War the US is said to have dropped seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. I haven’t found tonnage numbers for Afghanistan, but there are numbers on “weapons releases”. This presumably includes bombs (but was each “dumb” bomb really counted?) and missiles but not artillery or – vide the destruction of the MSF hospital in Kunduz – Hercules gunships. The numbers I can find say that there were, between 2013 and 2019, about 26,500 “releases” plus about another 21,000 going back to 2006. Another estimate puts it at at least 81,000 in total. It is generally accepted that 160,000 tons were dropped on Japan proper – a country with numerous shipyards, naval bases, aircraft and munition factories; few of which existed in Vietnam and none at all in Afghanistan. What were they bombing?

The next similarity is that reports in both wars were, to put it gently, doctored to make things look better than they were. The Pentagon Papers have their direct match in the Afghanistan Papers. From each it is clear that the authorities knew, from the first few years, that it was a failure; but they hid, lied and obfuscated. Each commander kicked the failure down the road for his successor to deal with. Official accounts of each war show plenty of “light at the end of the tunnel”, “turning the corner” year after year until the last corner was turned and the lights went out.

In Vietnam the enemy was moving under forest cover, so the US forces dropped immense quantities – tens of thousands of cubic metres – of defoliants to clear away the leaves they were hiding under. Few trees in Afghanistan so instead there was geological bombing “blasting away mountain passes and potential cover to limit where and how militants can operate”. An insane use of technology and destructive power substituting for tactical competence. And little to no effect on the outcome.

Accounts of soldiers’ experiences in Vietnam speak of patrols that, when they run into snipers or mines, call in artillery or airstrikes at vague targets – effectively saturation bombing – and helicopter out. We hear the same thing in Afghanistan. The only difference being that patrols in the former were on foot and in the latter in vehicles. It sees that the patrols had little purpose other than to show a presence: they’re not armies moving closer to Berlin or some other objective, they are just moving around. Something to do with “hearts and minds”, I suppose. But targets for the enemy and the opportunity for immense random destruction in retaliation.

Fake metrics are another similarity. Robert McNamara was US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1966 – the very height of the Vietnam War. He had been a “whiz kid” at Ford and had had the knack of impressing his superiors with flow charts and numbers. His behaviour in Vietnam has led to an entire fallacy being named in his honour. The “McNamara Fallacy” is described by Daniel Yankelovich as the following four steps

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes.

The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.

The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness.

The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

In the Vietnam case the “easily measured” was the famous body count – number of enemy soldiers killed: the higher the number, the closer to “the light at the end of the tunnel”. According to this source, a rough calculation suggests that in 1965 there were more than five million males aged 15-39 in Vietnam and another seven million younger. That’s lot of bodies between the USA and victory. Secondly, if that’s what the boss wants to hear, that’s what we’ll tell him and the metric rapidly became GIGO. In Afghanistan, according to this account, it was dollars spent:

Perversely, because it was the easiest thing to monitor, the amount of money spent by a program often became the most important measure of success. A USAID official told SIGAR, “The Hill was always asking, ‘Did you spend the money?’…I didn’t hear many questions about what the effects were.”

Schools, hospitals, roads: hard to find, hard to measure (especially with widespread corruption) – bundles of hundred-dollar bills out the door easy to measure and so that became Afghanistan’s version of McNamara’s Fallacy. The make-believe precision measurement of nothing.

In a word, everything I’ve written about the American Way of War has been illustrated in the Afghanistan failure. The initial success feeding the appetite for further engagement and ever-larger aims. The assumption of free air movement and reliable communications. The obsession with technology. The self-replicating intelligence feedback cycle in which you only hear what you want to hear culminating in the final error of how much time was left to get out. The reinforcement of failure – bombing hasn’t worked, do more of it; can’t find the enemy, change the terrain. Worthless metrics. Inability to see things from the enemy’s perspective.

The only difference between the American performances in Vietnam and Afghanistan is that in the first, the vehicles were painted green and in the second, sand. They should sit out the next one.

AB INITIO: AFGHANISTAN

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY, RUSSIA'S NEIGHBOURS, THE WORLD IS CHANGING, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

17 November 2015. I wrote this under a pseudonym when I was writing for Russia Insider (A site which has betrayed its intention and which I — AGAIN — refuse the right to reprint my stuff: something I deny to no one else). I am inspired to do this by this piece Fuller just wrote. Go and read it and then come back. We now see the utter collapse of the whole project. Forty years and thousands — hundreds of thousands — of destroyed lives later.

Bigger Than Big, Maybe Even Huger Than Huge

Almost like Brzezinski saying he got it wrong

When I heard of the Paris atrocities I thought: Oh no, here we go again. Fake sincerity, prayers “going out”, “attack on values”, “stand together”, flag overlays on Facebook, mounds of flowers, op-ed writers flogging their dead horses, solemn parade with linked arms (but will they invite Poroshenko this time?), T shirt slogans and all the rest of the sentimental bogosity. What there would not be is any consideration or discussion of Wahhabism, the US causative element, NATO and its activity in the home countries of refugees, “moderate rebels” or anything actually challenging. Just another wallow in false emotion and cheap threats. And, oh yes, some bombing. Always some bombing.

Never would there be any actual thought about causes and effects, how these things came to be and certainly not even the tiniest admission that we – we the exceptionals – just might have a responsibility. Nor would we hear about all the other atrocities in places that don’t get the full soppy treatment. Especially not Syria which has had four years in which every day is a Paris. And certainly not any thought that the explosives and weapons used in Paris might just have been supplied… by Paris.

Well, perhaps I’m wrong. And very glad to be too.

Read this:

I reach this view with much mixed feeling. Over the years I have grown increasingly convinced that western military interventions and wars to “fix” the Middle East have not only failed, but have vastly exacerbated nearly all regional situations. Washington has at the end of the day, in effect, “lost” every one of its recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere. The West has been as much the problem as the solution.

And now read this:

The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against [the Russians]. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.

Different guys, right? Nope. Same guy, different times.

The author is Graham Fuller. Here’s his bio on his website, and here’s what Wikipedia says. Details are sparse – of course – but he is widely regarded as one of the key people in the US support of the mujaheddin in the Afghanistan-Soviet war.

In other words, Fuller was one of the architects of the US policy to use jihadists in one part of the world expecting to put them back in the box afterwards. (The arrogance of the hyperpower: we’re the actors, you’re the puppets). Now he realizes they’re not puppets and they didn’t quietly go back in the box when the hyperpower was finished using them. Now he says:

The elimination of ISIS requires every significant stake-holder to be present: UN, US, EU, Canada, Russia, Iran, Kurds, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Qatar, Egypt and others. China, aspiring to a major world role, cannot sit this one out either. This convocation requires real heft and clout to impose some rough plan of action. Above all, the UN must head up future operations involving the indispensable future ground operations. If ever an neutral face was essential, this is it.

Which is exactly what Putin is calling for.

Speaking of Putin, I guess Fuller now agrees that

It is equally irresponsible to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve your political goals, hoping that later you’ll find a way to get rid of them or somehow eliminate them.” And “So, it’s a big question: who’s playing who here?

So, maybe the Paris atrocity will lead to some clear thinking. And, as there can’t be any real action without clear thinking…

But Fuller’s only one man, plenty more have to now come to the same understanding.

CAN THEY LEARN? ANOTHER US WARGAME DEFEAT

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY, THE WORLD IS CHANGING, WAR ON RUSSIA, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

First published Strategic Culture Foundation. picked up by ZeroHedge, Verity Weekly, scottadamsshow, usanewsguru, invest.smola.com, alltopcash.com, patriotnews, financial world, in Spanish,

(Note: by tradition, going back to the first Prussian Kriegsspiel, your side is “Blue”, the other side is “Red”. Soviets did it the other way round.)

According to David Halberstam, when Washington was considering escalating its presence in Vietnam, a wargame was held to test options. More bombing aircraft were put into airfields in Vietnam; Red attacked the airfields. Blue brought in more troops to guard the airfields; Red started attacking the supply lines for those troops. More troops to guard the supply lines; more attacks on their support systems. And so on: everything the American side thought up was quickly and easily countered by the Vietnam team. The results were ignored: only a game, not really real.

Forward to 2002 and a very large and complicated exercise simulating a US attack on – not named, but obviously – Iran. The retired USMC general playing Red – a no-nonsense experienced soldier who didn’t believe technology was the answer to everything (especially the projected wonders that the wargame granted to the American side), scorned business-school buzzwords like “network-centric” – thought outside the box and used low-tech weaponry. When the US high-tech took out his communications, as he knew they would, he went silent – his communications were by motorcycle dispatch riders, coded messages in Friday prayers and similar old-school techniques. He fired more missiles that the Blue side could handle and sank most of the invasion force and finished off the rest with swarms of small boats. “The whole thing was over in five, maybe ten minutes“. The invasion force was brought back to life, the rules were modified to reduce the defenders’ abilities – the Red force commander was on the point of destroying the reconstituted landing forces – and the US side “won”. He walked out when he decided that the game was too rigged for him to bother doing anything; as he said in a report: “this whole thing was prostituted; it was a sham intended to prove what they wanted to prove“.

Each of these wargames was supposed to be a learning and testing experience. The first was testing what to do and how to do it in Vietnam, the second, more ambitious, was supposed to test the whole package of the new US military in every aspect – it is said to have cost a quarter of a billion dollars and involved 13,000 participants. What was learned from the two? Certainly nothing was learned from the Vietnam wargame – Washington went ahead and put troops in – just a few at first but rising to an incredible 500,000 at the height and dropped a fantastic number of bombs; corners were turned, light was seen at the end of the tunnel but everyone knew it was a lost cause and no one wanted to say so. The enemy countered and endured everything and, at the end, the US went home defeated. The war game turned out to be a rather accurate predictor of the future. And it doesn’t appear that the US military have learned anything from the 2002 experience either. Certainly nothing in Washington’s behaviour towards Iran gives the impression that the US leadership imagines it could be defeated if it attacks Iran.

Nor, come to think of it, is there evidence that it learned anything much from the Vietnam reality either. Afghanistan was, in many respects, a replay of Vietnam: a determined low-tech force countered everything the US military could think up. In 2018, Les Gelb, the compiler of the Pentagon Papers said:

You know, we get involved in these wars and we don’t know a damn thing about those countries, the culture, the history, the politics, people on top and even down below. And, my heavens, these are not wars like World War II and World War I, where you have battalions fighting battalions. These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, with the culture is like. And we jumped into them without knowing. That’s the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers.

And now we move forward two decades. Last October another wargame simulated a US defence of Taiwan against a Chinese attack. Another test of some high-falutin war-fighting concept. (One might parenthetically ask how many of these concepts are actually business-school ideas given the predilection of US generals for MBAs. Probably the worst imaginable preparation for what our USMC “Iranian” commander called a “terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business“.) General John Hyten, Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman, and MBA, reported on the wargame:

Without overstating the issue, [Blue force] failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it.

The first thing that went wrong for the Blue force was that it suddenly lost all its communications – as I have been saying (and the Chinese and Russians surely know) one of the fundamental assumptions of the US style in war-fighting is constant, reliable, assured communications. All its “smart” weapons need to be “talking” to their controllers all the time: stop the “talking” and they become immediately “stupid”. Then the US force was hit with wave after wave of missiles. And the rear areas were hit with waves of missiles. And that was that. And, in another wargame in 2020, Poland was annihilated by the Russians: Warsaw was surrounded in five days.

What stood out for me in Hyten’s refreshingly honest presentation was this: “studying the United States for the last 20 years”. Washington officials are not noted for their ability to see things from the other side’s point of view, but he certainly got that one right. China (and Russia and Iran) know that they are on Washington’s hitlist. They have been watching Washington fight wars for two or three decades (winning none of them, despite the hype); they know how Washington fights; they know its strengths and weaknesses. They have put a lot of thought into it. One might also observe that, while Washington fights its wars safely overseas, China, Russia and Iran have very strong memories of wars fought on their own territory. This gives them, as Andrei Martyanov is always pointing out, a rather different view of war – it’s not some affair of choice far away over there, it’s a horrible, deadly, bloody, immensely destructive process in your own home.

The United States has zero historic experience with defending the US proper against powerful and brutal enemies. It is a cultural difference, a profound one and it manifests itself across the whole spectrum of activities, not just the respective military-industrial complexes. In other words, Russians MUST build top of the line weaponry, because the safety of Russia depends on it.

Losing for them is not the American way of losing – no walking away, explaining away and forgetting away: it’s life or death. They take war seriously and they put the effort into thinking about how to defend themselves against an American attack. They know that air superiority and assured communications are the necessities of the American way of war; they know the US military expects to accumulate huge forces undisturbed. They haven’t used these years idly; they won’t wait for the Americans to leisurely assemble the force to bomb them. That’s why they have concentrated on EW and lots of missiles. The US won’t have secure communications, free air power or safe bases: Beijing. Moscow and Tehran, if they have to fight, will fight to win. And do whatever it takes; no umpire will appear to “call foul” and re-float the fleet.

In the real world, Ukraine’s “de-occupation” boasting was silenced in two weeks by a huge Russian mobilisation. Surely somebody in the Pentagon noticed that. HMS Defender’s adventure off Crimea (incidently the only one of the six ships of its class actually fit for sea – not, in itself, a very impressive performance) may also have taught some lessons about the consequences of silly gestures.

Nothing was learned from the Vietnam or Iran wargames, what about this one? General Hyten said:

the U.S. has reevaluated the joint warfighting concept. He said the new strategy being developed is “not quite a clean-sheet approach, because you can never take a clean sheet of paper if you want to get between now and 2030, you have to start with what you have.”

That sounds good – “clean-sheet” – but you know that nothing will really change. Vietnam was supposed to teach a lesson (and the US Army certainly did improve) but, essentially, it did the same things all over again in Afghanistan. For twice as long. I doubt that this exercise will cause the full-scale change that he’s talking about. Complacency will probably return.

Even so, one would like to be a fly on the wall when US senior military brief the President: “failed miserably”, Afghanistan defeat (coming soon to Iraq and Syria), Russian and Chinese military power, hypersonic manoeuvring missiles, EW, layered air defence. The briefings can’t be too upbeat, can they? Could this be why the big exercise in the Black Sea ended so quietly? Could this be in the background of the decision to stop trying to block Nord Stream? Could this be a reason why Biden asked to meet with Putin? The couch-warriors will never understand this of course, but perhaps one can hope that the generals will – Hyten seems to have but, just as American wars are a sequence of one-year wars because each commander kicks the failure down the road for his successor to worry about, his replacement may return to the complacency of being at the top of “the greatest military in the history of the world“.

But, one can hope they’ll learn a little humility.

WHY MOSCOW DOESN’T JUST KNOCK HIM OVER

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

First published Strategic Culture Foundation

Every time – and we’ve just had an illustration – someone in Kiev makes trouble for Russia, the Internet is full of people crying on Putin to just go in and knock them over. A sub-variant of this is that Moscow should have invaded after the Maidan coup, arrested all the nazis and put Yanukovych back to serve out the rest of his term under the now-forgotten agreement hammered out by the EU.

But there’s actually a good reason why Moscow, in Ukraine or earlier in Georgia, did not invade and knock Zelensky or Saakashvili over and why it doesn’t forcefully deal with other irritations. And that reason is a very simple one: it’s not that it couldn’t have done it – there was nothing between Russian power and Tbilisi in 2008 or between it and Kiev in 2021 – but, simply, experience. Both Moscow’s experience and its observation of others’ experiences.

We will start with others’ experience. The Royal Navy began to switch to oil fuel just before the First World War and that made assured oil sources vitally important to it and, by extension, to Britain and other naval powers. Iran (Persia) was a major source and Britain made a rather one-sided agreement after the war giving a British company excessive rights to oil sources in Iran. Iran was heavily influenced by Britain from that point on, to the growing resentment of the Iranians who saw themselves getting little out of the arrangement. In 1951 Mohammed Mosaddegh became Prime Minister and nationalised the oil company. A pause should be made here – later experience has shown that such nationalisations are very far from catastrophic: the oil has to be sold to somebody, the price isn’t set by the selling country and, in the end, it’s actually a business matter that can be settled by business methods. The Suez Canal functions and so does the Panama Canal despite local control; state-owned companies sell their oil and life goes on. But such was not considered acceptable – fear of communism or the Soviet Union gaining control or just amour-propre – and, in the end, it was decided to solve the problem by getting rid of him. Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup organised by London and Washington but mostly carried out by the CIA. And so the problem was solved. Officially denied by London and Washington for years, the CIA’s involvement was confirmed in 2000 and more documents were released in 2017. But the Iranians always knew who did it and the coup greatly contributed to their dislike of the USA and was a strong motivation in the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Today Iran is perceived in Washington as a “daily threat” and its extensive armoury of missiles “a significant threat“. Several decades of neocon/PNAC/exceptionalist harebrained machinations against the “Iranian threat” has made it more powerful, more influential and more determined than before. It is now a very significant obstacle to American ambitions to control the MENA. So, in retrospect, the overthrow of Mosaddegh was not so successful after all and sixty years later the problem is very far from “solved”. Doing business with Mosaddegh, in the long run, would have been the better response and Iran might even be well-disposed towards the USA and its allies or at least indifferent today. Knocking Mosaddegh over worked at first, but the effect didn’t last.

This was then-new CIA’s first known venture into “knocking him over” although Washington was well-practised in the custom – perhaps the first was the coup that overthrew Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii in 1893 – but there were to be many more. Diem in Vietnam; but that didn’t work either and the Vietnam War just got worse until the USA retired in defeat. For years Washington has proceeded under the delusion that it’s just one person that stands in its way and with him removed the road will be smooth. It never is, but Washington never stops trying. Washington has overthrown many governments in Latin America without, it appears, bringing stability or friendship any more genuine than the passing dependency of the current beneficiary. Even Newsweek ran a piece concluding: “As it stands, however, the only evidence we have of anyone interfering with any election or government implicates the U.S. — not Russia. But don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.” Seventy-two attempts during the Cold War calculated the Washington Post. Knocking him over is very much the American style of diplomacy.

The resentment of the outsider’s interference never goes away. And, as the case of the Shah illustrates, any excesses the puppet commits are attributed to the puppet-master. Americans are very offended with the “Great Satan” chants and flag-burnings but – typically – they cannot understand the why of it: Iranians blame Washington for everything bad between the overthrow of Mosaddegh and the departure of the Shah and continual hostility thereafter. And, from the arming of Saddam Hussein, the naval battle and the civilian plane in 1988 to the killing of Solomeini last year, they can enumerate examples. Far better from Washington’s perspective if Mosaddegh had been left in power.

Another disastrous CIA enterprise was the subversion of Soviet-supported governments in Afghanistan especially the post-Soviet one of Najibullah. In doing so, Washington built up the very elements that would, after an involvement that more than doubled the Soviet stay, send it and its allies home in defeat. There is no doubt that Washington would be happier with a Najibullah in Kabul than with what will be there in a year.

Speaking of Afghanistan, we now turn to Moscow’s direct experience of failure. In 1978 the local communist party pulled off a coup in Kabul no doubt with some involvement from Moscow. But the Afghan communist party was deeply split and the government was too hasty in communisation; dissatisfaction grew and the communist government trembled. This could not be tolerated under the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine and Moscow decided to end the problem by knocking him over; it invaded, the present leader was killed and replaced by Babrak Karmal from the rival faction. Karmal eased off on the communisation but it was too late; the revolt expanded, the Soviets got bogged down and finally left the, in Gorbachev’s words, “bleeding sore” in 1989.

In Hungary in 1956, Imre Nagy, a long-time communist, spoke in favour of a “new course” reform after Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin’s “cult of personality”. This led to revolution and a Soviet invasion which deposed Nagy and later tried and executed him. A similar attempt in Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubček of “Socialism with a human face” in 1968 was similarly crushed by an invasion and deposition of Dubček. He at least was spared to live to see the end of the Soviet Union.

So Moscow can remember three cases in which, under previous management, it just “knocked the guy over”: Nagy, Dubček and Hafizullah Amin. In no case was there any profit except in the short run. Hungary and Czechoslovakia dropped the Warsaw Pact, the USSR and communism as soon as they possibly could and the resentment carried them into NATO. The Afghanistan War limped on until Moscow admitted defeat and handed it, as you might say, off to Washington so it could be defeated there in its turn. (Speaking of cunning schemes that have disastrous results for the schemer, the case can be made that it all began with Brzezinski.)

Had Washington and London left Mosaddegh alone they would both be happier today and, in all likelihood the price of oil would be the same and the supply just as assured. Admittedly it’s hindsight but hindsight is supposed to produce foresight. Washington’s endless interventions in Latin America have brought only short-term benefits and have left a legacy of hatred that will, one day, boil up. Washington would have been wiser to have left Afghanistan as it was just as Moscow would have been. Overthrowing Nagy and Dubček brought short-term gain and laid the ground for longer term problems – especially as Prague has become a Tabaqui thinking itself safe between Shere Khan’s paws.

In short, the lesson of history is that, in almost every case, “knocking him over” gives a geopolitical quick sugar hit that will be paid for later. Moscow knows this because it is smart enough to learn from its own and Washington’s failures. I can never stress too often that Moscow was once an exceptionalist power: for seven decades it was the capital of the leading and guiding light of history as the “world’s first socialist state”, the standard-bearer for the “bright future of mankind”, producer of a new type of human being and that exceptionalism brought it neither friends nor prosperity. Putin himself called it “a road to a blind alley“. But Washington is still in its exceptionalist phase and thinks that doing the same thing again this time will succeed.

And sometimes there isn’t even the quick sugar hit: for each in Afghanistan the hangover began within a few weeks. If Moscow had driven into Tbilisi and sent Saakashvili running – Shere Khan would not have come to Tabaqui’s defence then or in Ukraine – Moscow would then have to do something to create a Georgia more to its liking. Conceivably Russian intervention could have kept Yanukovych surviving under the EU-brokered agreement but it is highly probable that the next election would have brought the Maidan people to power and the situation would be much as it is today as far as Moscow is concerned. As for a swift drive on Kiev last month, there is no doubt Moscow had the military might to do it, but then what? As Bismarck observed, one can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

And Moscow has enough experience in the USSR days of trying to sit on bayonets and can watch Washington’s failures.

In short, Moscow knows what Washington has not yet learnt: it’s not just one guy, it’s a whole country and sugar hits don’t last.

THE GREAT AMERICAN DELUSION – JUST THAT ONE GUY

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, HISTORY, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, WAR ON RUSSIA, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

First published Strategic Culture Foundation

In my career I used to participate in regular meetings with an American intelligence agency. I – we – were always fascinated by their obsession with individuals. One time they proudly presented each of our group with a chart showing the Boss’ associates distributed into three groups. I’m sure creating this had cost a lot of time and money, but what use was it? Did it allow us to predict better, understand better? Of course it didn’t. Quite apart from the absurdity of thinking that an individual was 100% in one group and 0% in the other two – least one fitted two groups equally well – the truth was that they were a team which made decisions and outsiders had no idea what went on inside the process. The three-group division just led to more ungrounded speculation – if some decision were imagined to be to the benefit of one group, then a flurry of speculation about who was up and who was down would erupt. Theorising in the absence of data: a labour of crackpots. Lots of money, time and promotions but very little understanding. On another occasion their predictions at a leadership change were entirely personal – if X, then this, if Y, then that. (And the person who actually did succeed wasn’t on their list.) My group’s approach was to try and describe what constraints the as-yet-unknown successor would have to deal with. We were trying to work out the context; they were talking personalities. But there is an objective reality: and the most powerful and strong-willed individual can only shape the future within the existing possibilities. The American assumption seemed to be that the boss had unconstrained choices. Now it’s true that they thought of the country as a “dictatorship” but never even in the greatest tyranny has the ruler been able to do anything he wanted to. No wonder they have, over the ensuing twenty years, been invariably wrong. The simple-minded and ignorant obsession with personalities leads nowhere.

Did it begin with the Calvinists of Plymouth Rock and their division of humanity into the saved and the damned? Was it reinforced a century and a half later by the conviction that King George single-handedly caused “repeated Injuries and Usurpations” and urged on “the merciless Indian Savages”? Or is it of more recent origin? Hollywood’s rugged individuals saving the day at the end of the movie? Who can say, but it seems to be hard-wired into the American view of the world – or at least their view of the rest of the world. And the news media play along every time: the problem is Leader X, if we replace him, all will be better.

I have just finished a book about the CIA which mentions the Kennedy Administration’s obsession about Fidel Castro. “‘We were hysterical about Castro,’ Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged”; there were innumerable assassination plots. The missile crisis seems to have brought Kennedy to his senses and, a couple of months before his assassination, the CIA principal had to tell the mobster he had picked to organise it that the plot to kill Castro had been terminated. None of it amounted to anything and, in the words of one player “so much of the goddamn stuff was really juvenile.” Sixty years later, Fidel Castro is gone but Cuba remains – still defiant.

Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran was a problem; after he was overthrown Iran was not a problem for a while but today it’s an even bigger problem; and they still resent his overthrow. Ngô Đình Diệm in Vietnam was a problem; but his death just led to more war. Mohamed Farrah Aidid of Somalia was another who had to go, but after the Battle Of Mogadishu it was the Americans and NATO who went; Somalia, much now as it was then, has faded from the news. Slobodan Milošević was the Butcher of the Balkans until a court found that he wasn’t so guilty after all. Saddam Hussein was a pretty comprehensive problem, the NYT informed us; now he’s gone and Iraq is still a problem – can’t win it, can’t leave it. Kims in North Korea come and go; it remains the same. And so on and on – Assad, Maduro, Qaddafi, Arafat, Daniel Ortega and Yanukovych; all individuals who were imagined to be the single roadblock in the path of… The Better, Progress, Democracy and all other Good Things.

But the two biggest are Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinpeng. I have written enough about the crazy American obsession with Putin: five years ago I wrote A Brief Compendium of Nonsense About Putin. Since then he has grown in monstrosity: election rigger, computer hacker, serial poisoner, “Russia under Putin poses an existential threat to the United States and other countries of the West, Russia’s neighbors, and his own people” is a typical effusion. Note the personalism: the “existential threat” is “Russia under Putin”, not “Russia”. If only Putin could be got rid of…

The author of this piece goes on: “China will be at the top of the to-do list”. And the Atlantic Council has emitted The Longer Telegram: Toward A New American China Strategy written by Anonymous. Clearly it is supposed to echo Mr X’s (George Kennan’s) Long Telegram. But some differences: this is longer – much longer, grinding on for seven times the length of Kennan’s essay. Secondly, Kennan himself didn’t think that his recommendations had been well followed and was utterly opposed to NATO expansion and Western triumphantasies. I will certainly not waste my time reading this midden of prolixity (one wishes an ex-PFC Wintergreen had binned it), the summary is more than enough – and it’s longer than Kennan’s essay. The very first sentence puts us on familiar ground

The single most important challenge facing the United States in the twenty-first century is the rise of an increasingly authoritarian China under President and General Secretary Xi Jinping.

“China under President and General Secretary Xi Jinping”, “Russia under Putin”. Back to personalities.

…Xi has returned China… quasi-Maoist personality cult… systematic elimination of his political opponents…. Xi has used ethnonationalism… Xi’s China… Xi has demonstrated… China under… Xi is no longer just a problem for US primacy. He now presents a serious problem for the whole of the democratic world…

He is the problem and “All US political and policy responses to China therefore should be focused through the principal lens of Xi himself.” No Xi, no problem; no Putin, no problem; no Saddam, no problem; no Qaddafi, no problem. Away we go again.

Better informed people point out that Xi Jinpeng’s policies have a context: we start with Deng Xiaoping’s strategic guideline “hide capabilities and bide time”. Once capabilities could no longer be hidden, they moved to Hu Jintao’s “Actively Accomplish Something”. That something – or rather, those many somethings – are being actively accomplished by Xi Jinpeng. Far from a polity captured by a personality, China has a collective leadership focussed on a long-term strategy.

But that is only one voice in the background and the personality-obsessed (Very Much) Longer Telegram comes from the Atlantic Council which has a far greater influence on US and NATO activities. As it is engummed in personalism, so are they.

What do the personality-obsessed suggest be done to get rid of Xi? Well, this is a little more difficult than other cases: bombing got rid of Saddam and Qaddafi but China is too strong. Economic measures, as even someone as dim as Anonymous realises, might hurt the USA more than China. Stripped of nostalgianism (the US must “retain collective economic and technological superiority”), delusion (“Dividing Russia from China in the future is equally [critical]”) and degraded touchstones (“current rules-based liberal international order and, critically, its ideological underpinnings, including core democratic values”), the strategy offered is pitiful.

We are invited to be “laser focused” on the assumption that Xi’s so-called one man rule is resented by many in China; if a wedge can be driven into the leadership, Beijing will return to the happy pre-Xi state when

China, under all five of its post-Mao leaders prior to Xi, was able to work with the United States. Under them, China aimed to join the existing international order, not to remake it in China’s own image. Now, however, the mission for US China strategy should be to see China return to its pre-2013 path—i.e., the pre-Xi strategic status quo.

One is reminded of Napoleon’s delusion that Russia’s nobles could be wedged away from Alexander and the undying conviction that one more targetted sanction will make Putin’s henchmen kick him out. But, enough of Anonymous’ fancies – they have no base in reality: the USA out-sourced its manufacturing to China long ago and won’t be getting it back, wokeism is killing its education system, its politics are broken, its military is losing everywhere and doesn’t realise it, a tsunami of debt has built up. Most absurd of all, after years of needless hostility to Russia, Washington has no hope of separating Moscow from Beijing. And Xi Jinpeng is not some rogue who seized control – he is the top of a robust pyramid.

The only significance of this paltry effort is that it gives us another – and depressingly influential – example of the curious American obsession with personalities – everything in Chinese-US relations was going along swimmingly until Xi. But actually, as anyone capable of seeing reality knows, China is much, much more than one man.

China/Russia/Iran/Iraq/insert-name-of-country was happy to accept its place in the Rules-Based International Order until that nasty Xi/Putin/Ayatollah/Saddam/insert-name changed everything; get rid of him and it will all fix itself.

When are they going to understand that it’s a whole country, not just one guy?

COMMENTS FROM THE LOCKED WARD

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, HISTORY, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, WAR ON RUSSIA

(Miscellaneous comments from pieces dealing with Russia I’ve collected. Most of them anonymous or with pseudonyms, they illustrate either rabid hostility to everything Russian or stone-dead ignorance of reality. I post from time to time when I see them, spelling mistakes and all.)

Libyans ousted a dictator, but an ensuing civil war has
drawn in Russia, Turkey and others with a thirst for control

Washington Post