Military historian Phillips Payson O’Brien provides a good summary here of where things are at, strategically, with the Russia-Ukraine war.
“So in a nutshell, Russian strategy is take whatever you can now, no matter how small an area and no matter how much it costs, on the assumption Trump wins, and you get to keep it. You then have four years to basically recover and come again when you are ready. The strategy is based around the longer term degradation of Ukraine as a power, the friendship of Trump, and the weakness of Europe.”
Meanwhile, “Ukrainian strategy at present has settled into a pattern of trying to maximize Russian losses, to lead to a steady degradation of Russian fighting capabilities for 2025.”
Longer term, so much depends on whether the Trump-Orban-Putin (and techbro?) axis wins the U.S. election. O’Brien’s quote of a long rambling passage from Trump’s acceptance speech provides the justification for how and why that intersection of interests (of at least the first three) can rightfully be called an axis – a case also made by Byline Supplement, co-authored by the team at the investigative media site Byline Times. Anne Applebaum correctly notes that “axis” is too strong a word; she prefers “network of convenience.” I agree with her caution and will share my own thoughts on her new book soon.
I would go further than O’Brien does in his piece, however, and would say that every significant national election today, especially in a country like the U.S., is an international election involving external players – in this case Russia, China, and other countries and transnational groups (corporate-industrial lobbies, among others) exercising influence via media and other channels (just as U.S. interests play a role in foreign elections when those interests are at stake). When Americans vote for authoritarians like Trump, they are also voting for authoritarians like Putin — and for a carve-up of international power among neo-empires still largely driven by old-energy plus new-tech interests. The opening up of the Arctic, for instance, is also opening up geopolitical competition over the Arctic and its resources, which are particularly attractive to old-energy (fossil fuel) interests, as they may keep them afloat for a significant time longer.
And voting is just the tip of the iceberg of political action – still an essential step, in countries like the U.S., but also just a cog in a much larger set of wheels. That said, the very likely emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential nominee has certainly invigorated U.S. politics, with the differences between the two candidates — in style now (as she differs little from Biden in policy) — being exactly the kind of thing the Democrats needed to whip up some enthusiasm. We’ll soon see how ugly things get as the racism of Trump’s far-right supporters (and their international backers — tech, fossil fuel, and media moguls — and autocrat/info-war facilitators) goes into high gear.
Further reading:
Phillips Payson O’Brien, “Strategic Update for Ukraine and Russia,” Phillips’s Newsletter, July 21, 2024, https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-90-strategic-update O’Brien’s Substack newsletter is worth subscribing to.
Byline Supplement, “Fascism Redux: A New Axis Takes Shape,” July 20, 2024, https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/fascism-redux-a-new-axis-takes-shape
Tonya Mosley, “Expert on dictators warns — Don’t lose hope, that’s what they want” (interview with Anne Applebaum), Fresh Air, July 23, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/07/23/nx-s1-5049021/expert-on-dictators-warns-dont-lose-hope-thats-what-they-want I;’ll have more to say about Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc., soon.
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