The West is all tactics. The East is mostly strategy. You need both because even the most brilliant short-term moves do not add up to a strategy. Just look at the history of US military intervention since World War II. Each of them had their short-term rationale, even Iraq. But has it made the US safer? Has it made the world safer? Has it brought democracy? Has anyone become more civilized as a result?

Israel’s strike against Iran is a classic case of a trade-off where a short-term tactical maneuver is bought at the expense of a weaker strategic position in the long run. I am not the first commentator to observe that Israel’s attack against Iran will succeed tactically, possibly with sensational success, but it will not stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Any future Iranian strategic planner will logically conclude from the last series of attacks that Iran absolutely needs the bomb. Other countries in the region might too. Ukraine’s biggest regret is having agreed to give up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. Had the country kept them, Putin would never have attacked.

Lack of strategic thinking plays an important part in the decline of the West. The biggest strategic own-goal of all has been to drive China and Russia closer together — and Iran closer to both. These countries do not form an alliance in the Western sense. What they have in common is an overriding strategic goal: to become independent of Western coercion.

Our sanctions, our bans, our wars and proxy-wars have had the opposite effect of what we intended. Some, like the sanctions, failed tactically. Russia has outgrown the West and has shifted to a war economy that the Europeans struggle to keep up with. But the most consequential failure of the policy was strategic. The financial sanctions persuaded China and Russia to develop a joint payment system.

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Until a few years ago, the world of finance depended on the US dollar and Western-controlled global payments infrastructure. Part of that infrastructure was Swift, a Brussels-based quango that provides the main networks through which international banks communicate. When Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the first actions taken by Western governments was to cut off some Russian banks from Swift, so they could no longer transact. The West also froze Russian financial assets, a large chunk of which is held in vaults in Belgium. Russia was essentially cancelled by the global financial markets.

The result is that Russia, China and other countries have been developing their own parallel financial infrastructure. The first part is called Brics Pay. Brics stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The name “Brics” came up 25 years ago as a short-form to denote the five newly-developing economies most likely to succeed. The group has since grown to ten countries, and now includes Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. They are not like Nato or the European Union. India is a bit of an odd-one out here. What they have in common is a desire to be independent of Western infrastructure monopolies.

Payment systems are to financial capitalism what plumbing is to the water supply — not something we talk about until we have a problem with it. The Western payment monopoly makes it possible for the US and Europe to impose financial sanctions in the first place. But financial sanctions are like the cake you can either have or eat. When you start abusing your monopoly powers and impose sanctions on too many countries, you give an incentive to break out of the system.

Brics Pay was developed by scientists from Saint Petersburg State University. It works differently from Western payment systems. Brics Pay is decentralized. It has no hub, no owner. It is based on the same underlying technology as crypto currencies — the blockchain. Brics Pay is sanctions-proof. No member can sanction any other member. If you want to make yourself independent from the US, starting with the payment system is the smartest thing to do.

I lost respect for virtually every single Russia or China expert in prominent think-tanks because they kept on misjudging this key element of China’s and Russia’s strategy. They still tell us that China and Russia will never align, or that China would step in and stop Putin from using a nuclear bomb. The misjudgments continue on all levels. The previous US administration misjudged the dynamics of the semiconductor ban, through which they hoped to keep China in the digital dark ages for a little while longer. They expressed surprise when Huawei succeeded in integrating a state-of-the-art chip into one of its latest models. The semiconductor ban is a classic case of the unintended consequences of sanctions. China learned how to make semiconductors, and the Russians learned how to build a payment system.

Officials in the US State Department think of the dollar as a political weapon through which they can force their will on others. They got bad advice from macroeconomists who told them that no other currency in the world could ever challenge the dollar. They are not telling the whole story. What is true is that no other official currency will challenge the dollar. The euro started as the world’s second-largest currency for foreign exchange reserves and has now been pushed into third place by gold. Where the observation goes wrong is that it fails to see the true threat. It comes from alternative payment systems, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies that allow other countries to diversify away from the US without having to create new currencies of their own. Macroeconomists still live in the world of fiat money and central banks — all creations of modern industrial society. But China and Russia are changing the game. It’s not cricket anymore.

The trouble with our misjudgments is they have no corrective mechanism. If you are a financial trader, your misjudgments cost you money. You cannot keep getting everything wrong and expect to stay solvent. That is not the case in foreign policy, because the people who keep on making those serial misjudgments are not the same people who are paying the price. It is also why dysfunctional economic theories persist even if there is no empirical evidence that supports them. Economists, State Department officials and journalists live in a space of mutually reinforced misjudgments. They celebrate each tactical victory — and never win wars.

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The West did have a strategy once, which is what put us into the position of superiority in the first place. It originated in science and was leveraged by smart political decisions. But it all happened a long time ago. The Second World War was the beginning of a breathtaking series of innovations that started with the Manhattan Project and that were co-sponsored by the US Army: the transistor, the semiconductor, the integrated circuit, the personal computer, the internet, and now AI. It was technology that gave the West a strategic advantage. European integration was in that category of big strategic moves until it turned into a sprawling mess with EU enlargement.

China made two big strategic moves in succession. The first was the policies of economic modernization by Deng Xiaoping, who came to power in 1978. As Frank Dikötter, the Dutch historian, explained in his masterpiece China After Mao, the West misjudged Deng’s reforms as a transition from communism to capitalism. The real goal was to make communism work better. Deng’s reforms were a long-term project. His reforms started in the 1980s and were continued by his successors. When he died in 1997, China was still at an early stage of industrialization. Today, it is one of the world’s most advanced industrial nations.

China’s second important strategic move was Xi Jinping’s decision to leverage critical raw materials, like rare earth magnets, to turn China into the world’s indispensable producer. The US still enjoys the fruits from the digital revolution. But it is no longer alone. And China is about to take a lead in this area too.

A report by Stanford University tells us China publishes more AI research papers than anyone in the world. The big prize in AI will go to those who can leverage it to create AI-based manufacturing: plants that are operated by intelligent robots and are linked to large data centers that optimize the production flow. What is known as Industry 4.0 still requires raw materials as inputs, but China is better placed in this area too. I call that a strategy.

You can think of a tactic as a shiny gift, and of strategy as a gift that keeps on giving. We Westerners are, by our inclination, more tactical than strategic. We like to close in. That is not necessarily a bad thing, for as long as you have an underlying strategy in place.

Chess players know that. One of the greatest chess grandmasters of all time, the American Bobby Fischer, said: “Tactics flow from a superior position.” The West has lost that superior position. So has Israel. We are the aging grandmasters of geopolitics, eager to play one more game.

The delusional part stemmed from the mistaken belief that the US could persuade the Tehran regime to abandon its “death to America” hostility. Perhaps because he relied on his law-school buddy Robert Malley (whose extreme hostility to Israel did not make him an Iran expert), Obama failed to see that, by the time he set out to win it over, the regime’s blend of oppression and institutional corruption had lost it the support of most Iranians. Unmoored from popular opinion, it had instead become entirely dependent on the professional extremists of the Revolutionary Guards, the much larger Basij militia, and the most politicised clerics.

This is why all attempts at mutual reconciliation under Obama were doomed to fail, in spite of two successive nuclear accords and the wholesale lifting of sanctions. Even if Iran’s leaders had wanted to reciprocate they could not abandon their performative hostility to the US, because Iranians at large are so hostile to the theocratic regime that many even tell pollsters that they have renounced Shi’a Islam altogether: visitors report empty mosques in all but the poorest neighbourhoods.

Partly because Obama compelled Biden to take on Malley as his own Iran coordinator (until he lost his security clearance), the Biden Administration moved very fast to repudiate Trump’s hostility to the Ayatollah’s regime, going overboard in its own attempt at reconciliation. One example is sufficient: the Houthi militia that is Iran’s proxy in Yemen, which the US Navy is now battling in the Red Sea, was unilaterally removed from the terrorist list in exchange for nothing at all, merely to signal to Tehran that the Obama courtship of the regime was being renewed after the Trump interval.

The reasonable, even wise, part of Obama’s policy was to disabuse Washington of the illusion that Iran could be knocked off the board as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been, with a quick march to Tehran by a couple of US divisions. Of course it is a much bigger country (almost four times as large, with twice the population), but the real difference lies in the fact that Iran’s statecraft is derived from the country’s pre-Islamic and imperial past, not from its extremist religion. Those principles are so deeply ingrained in the country’s political culture that even the ruling religious fanatics are high-functioning imperial operatives when it comes to diplomacy and war.

They know how to manipulate foreign perceptions of Iran to suit their aims; for example, they successfully simulated a very warm conviviality with the US negotiators they privately resented, while in confrontations they know how to go right to the edge, without falling into the abyss. Consider how Iran Air still operates out of London several times a week, despite the route being used by Tehran’s goons to fly in, attack dissidents, and return home with a quick taxi-ride to Heathrow. Knowing that the UK Foreign Office is desperate to keep its embassy and its diplomats in Tehran (to have something the US lacks), the regime perpetrates all manner of abuses secure in the knowledge there will be no retaliation.

Most significantly, Iran’s leaders were given the time and the oil revenues to recruit the Shi’a militias from Lebanon to Yemen now holding the Middle East to ransom. Ever since the fall of the Shah in 1979 — for which Khomeini successfully obtained support in the West by pretending that he was a persecuted humanist— Iran’s campaign to dominate the region has been vigorously pursued. To succeed, the regime had to somehow overcome the deepest schism in the Islamic world by persuading Sunni Arabs that the Sunni-Shia divide was less important than their collective hatred for the Jews, and that the ancestral hostility between Arabs and Persians was less important than their shared hostility to Israel. In the meantime, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards revealed true imperial skills in turning Arabic-speaking recruits in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen into obedient soldiers ready to fight for Iran’s aggrandisement — much as the British Army did in India with native troops. In fact, the power of the Revolutionary Guards within the regime steadily increased because of the military strength it generated with its abundant, cheap and, above all, expendable molokh khor “lizard-eater” Arab manpower (Ever since the huge losses of the Iraq war, Iran has been very casualty-sensitive).

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But the Revolutionary Guards finally failed strategically because their Arab recruitment policy was so successful that it overshot the culminating point of success: seeing the historic Sunni capital of Damascus under Shia domination, and Baghdad the very seat of the Sunni Arab Caliphate ruled by Iran’s agents, Sunni Arab states from Morocco to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which had repeatedly fought Israel from 1948, moved to abandon their hostility, openly or discreetly. And while the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7 gained no goodwill for Israel or the Jews, Israel’s overall response proved that it has the strength to resist Iran’s imperial ambitions. When an Israeli air strike decapitated the Revolutionary Guard expeditionary high command gathered in  Damascus on April 1, by killing its chief and his entire staff, not a word of criticism was heard in the Sunni Arab world.

Iran’s response was an all-out air offensive with hundreds of ballistic missiles, drones, and cruise missiles. But this very expensive attack failed most miserably, wounding just one Israeli, a seven-year-old Bedouin, and inflicting only trivial damage to the non-functional edge of a runway.

Israel’s response was on the smallest possible scale but calculated to terrify the regime: an aircraft penetrated all the way to Isfahan, much further from Israel than Tehran, to drop a token UAV next to the Uranium Hexafluoride plant — the country’s major nuclear installation, most incautiously placed in the centre of the city whose population would suffer huge casualties from the highly corrosive poisonous gas if the plant were bombed.

With the exception of Algeria that is absorbed in its own traumas and Libya that has never recovered from its civil war, every Arab Sunni state in the Middle East welcomed the outcome of the aerial war — in which the Jordanian air force actually took part shooting down Iran’s drones — because all of them can and do coexist with Israel, while they abhor the threat of Shia and Persian domination.

As for Iran’s military chiefs, their standard of success is so low that, in the immediate aftermath of the failed aerial offensive, Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, declared that Iran “has achieved all of its goals”. He then unwisely added a vainglorious threat: “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate reckless behaviour, they will receive a decisive and much stronger response.” It was the sort of comment that gives effrontery a bad name. Iran’s strategists know perfectly well that if they ever come close to assembling a nuclear weapon, Israel will not hesitate to strike first with its manned and unmanned airpower. That too is a reason for the Sunni alliance, perhaps best symbolised by the uninterrupted flights of Air Dubai and Ittihad to Tel Aviv that persisted even as both US and European airlines repeatedly cancelled their own.

Six months on from October 7, it’s hard to see how Israel can achieve its stated goals of dismantling Hamas and rescuing its remaining hostages. The IDF has only rescued three hostages during its ground operations in Gaza, which is a good indicator of how unrealistic the latter always was. But Hamas is also far from defeated: the terror group’s top three commanders remain at large, and its fighters are already re-emerging in areas of Gaza City that were supposedly cleared. Israel claims to have killed approximately half of its 40,000 fighters, but given the amorphous nature of the terror campaign, and the radicalising effects of Israel’s operations on the Gazan population, the notion of totally eliminating Hamas remains fanciful.

According to the February 2024 US Annual Threat Assessment report compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Hamas will be able to continue as “lingering armed resistance… for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralise Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allow insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces”. And all of this for near-universal global outrage and condemnation.

Israel had not just a right but a duty to respond to the October 7 atrocities. No state could stand by and do nothing. No nation could suffer such a loss and not respond. But the events set in motion by October 7 were always going to be about more than just Israel and Gaza. A localised war has now become perhaps the primary front in a much broader conflict between the American-led order on the one hand and, on the other, a loose axis of states with little in common except a common desire to oppose that order. In the Middle East, the primary player is Iran — and it is exploiting events with sadistic ruthlessness and efficacy.

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As ever, its strategy is somewhat ad hoc — especially given its own internal unrest and dying Supreme Leader — and based around opportunism as much as forethought. As ever, it also combines political and military objectives. Beyond Iran’s longstanding armed support for both Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, its major concern — and indeed that of Hamas and all states opposed to Israel — was the apparent integration of Israel into the Arab world following the 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw normalisation (as opposed to peace) treaties between Jerusalem and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Next up on the diplomatic slate was an even greater prize: normalisation with the Sunni Lion and home of Islam’s two holiest sites, Saudi Arabia. The thought was simply too nauseating for Hamas or Tehran to bear, and it was their desperate desire to sabotage further Israeli-Arab rapprochement that, in part, triggered October 7.

And it worked. For the moment, the Abraham Accords are holding. But a daily stream of the most visceral suffering from Gaza is enraging Arab populaces across the Middle East. For now, there is no talk of further normalisation. The February US threat report also assessed that “Iran will seek to use the conflict in Gaza to denounce Israel, decry its role in the region, and try to dissuade other Middle Eastern states from warming ties with Israel.” It was spot on. Tehran, which had arguably been more isolated in the region than Israel, has used the war to expand its regional diplomatic relations. In November of last year, el-Sisi of Egypt and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had a meeting on the side of the Arab Summit in Riyadh to discuss a possible expansion of bilateral relations. Then, this February, the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, went on a tour of Lebanon, Syria and Qatar. Tehran is on the diplomatic offensive.

Beyond other Arab states, Iran is bringing its influence to bear on what is a key constituency for all those who oppose the US order: the imperfectly termed Global South. It has found an appreciative audience there. It was not just South Africa but also Mexico and Chile who referred “the situation of the State of Palestine” to the ICC. Taken together, states totalling 60% of the Global South’s population have either directly or indirectly supported legal action on this issue. If those who oppose the status quo are to battle it efficiently, the states once known as “non-aligned” — now, instructively, a majority of the world — will be critical in the fight ahead.

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Then, of course, there is Iran’s violent military strategy. If Hamas was disappointed that the Quds Force didn’t come charging to their aid to fight the Israelis head-on (always a foolish notion), the war has highlighted the depth and scope of Iran’s capacity to mobilise its proxies. Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (ISI) have all combined to strike the US and its allies across the Gulf and Middle East, significantly disrupting their international commerce flows. If nothing else, Gaza has allowed Iran to show the world the potency of its “forward defence” strategy. Even though Hezbollah has not opened an all-out second front on Israel’s northern border, it continues to divert thousands of IDF soldiers, and prevents the return home of 95,000 internally displaced persons in Israel. Meanwhile, there are many in the region who see the attacks committed by ISI and others on American forces as being the catalyst for the beginning of Washington’s talks with Iraq on the withdrawal of its final 2,500 troops there — something Iran has wanted for years. Once the US pulls out fully, there is only one power who will fill that void. The result is yet another expansion of Iranian power.

Israel is fighting back. A series of strikes against Iranian targets reached a climax (for now) on Monday, when Israel droned General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and various assorted underlings. Little-known in the West, Zahedi was an important figure to Iranian regional ambitions, until recently commanding the Quds Force unit responsible for operations in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Palestinian territories. Inevitably, the Iranians are vowing revenge. Khamenei promised that “the evil regime will be punished by the hands of our brave men. We will make them regret this crime and others like it.” Iranian state television also reported that, because part of the Iranian embassy was struck, the attack constitutes an attack on Iran.

Iran is matching this rhetoric with moves on the ground. On Monday, Hussein Moanes, a spokesman for the Iranian-aligned militia group, Kata’ib Hezbollah, announced that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq is preparing to “equip” 12,000 “Islamic Resistance in Jordan” fighters with a significant supply of weapons so that Iraq and Jordan can jointly attack Israel to defend the Palestinian cause. It is instructive that the Iranians feel that they can openly announce the presence of a proxy in a Sunni Arab state. The Sunni Arabs have far more ideological and historical enmity with Iran than Israel does (under the Shah of Iran, Tehran and Jerusalem were allies). But these are not normal times, and Iran is exploiting this fact relentlessly. Jordan, which is in essence a Palestinian state, has witnessed tremendous unrest over the war. Since 24 March there have been near-constant protests outside the Israeli embassy in Amann. Protestors routinely chant pro-Hamas slogans and call for Jordan’s withdrawal from its 1994 peace treaty with Israel. Once more, the Iranians step gratefully in.

A presence in Jordan is of serious strategic value to Iran. It affords greater opportunity for direct strikes into Israel, which it now also surrounds with its proxies. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has already used Jordanian airspace for drone strikes into Israel — one shot down over Irbid in northern Jordan on 12 March was believed to be targeting Ben Gurion Airport. But more than this, it will allow Iran to stir political and social unrest in the West Bank, and to move equipment and materiel more easily over the border. Compared to Hamas, terrorists in the West Bank have limited resources or capacity to attack Israel. If Iran can make a success of its Jordanian proxy, that will change.

In the meantime, new threats emerge each day. On Friday, the CIA reportedly warned Israel that Iran is planning to launch an attack with a “rain” of drones, in revenge for its strike on Zahedi. If that happens, Israel will have to respond to an attack on its territory. Iran knows this, and likely calculates that any response, no matter how justified, will be seen as yet another example of belligerence from Jerusalem.

Yet much of this has been lost beneath the noise created by the focal point of the Gaza war. This week, Britain has been in understandable uproar over the death of seven aid workers, three of whom were British nationals. Condemnation piles upon Israel at the UN. Talk of sanctions grows. Washington, once the guarantor of international security, appears unable to stop the violence on both sides. And all the while, Tehran, the Middle East’s most murderous regime, continues to exploit events to its own advantage, and our cost.

The current mood of pessimism stems partly from Kyiv’s failure to punch through Russia’s defences in the south during the summer-autumn counteroffensive of 2023. No less important has been the doubts about continuing American military aid. President Joe Biden’s request to Congress for another $61 billion in assistance for Ukraine — most of it military — seems dead in the water thanks to dogged opposition in the House of Representatives from legislators loyal to Donald Trump.

This is already having repercussions in Ukraine: the fall of Avdiivka last week, representing Russia’s greatest territorial gain in nine months, has been directly linked to dwindling supplies of ammunition. Zelensky referred to this shortage as an “artificial deficit” created by slow delivery of supplies, and continued military support from the United States, supplemented by Britain and Europe, could still help Ukraine regain momentum, even if not this year.

However, if American support falters or ceases, Britain and Europe have the power not only to keep Ukraine in the fight, but, eventually, to help it make the advances needed to reach a favourable negotiated settlement. The second of these two outcomes will require Europe to rethink its military role in ways that it has never had to do since the formation of Nato in 1949. But if it proves up to the task, the repercussions will extend well beyond this conflict. Before the invasion, Russia was widely heralded as one of the world’s two superpowers. In the event that Ukraine can regain at least some additional territory and bring the war to a satisfactory end, Russia will forever be seen in a different light: as a threat Europe can manage largely on its own.

The ground game

That said, there’s no denying that Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive failed. It didn’t break through the Russian-held part of Zaporizhzhia province (on the Dnipro’s left bank) to Tokmak (an important supply hub) let alone to Melitopol further south. Russia had prepared well to foil that gambit, relying on the kind of extensive, layered trenches and fortifications — the so-called “Surovikin lines” — not seen in Europe for a generation.

Moreover, Russia’s increased investment in drones helped batter Ukraine’s armoured and mechanised brigades, while the improved accuracy of its artillery and helicopter gunships disabled Ukraine’s American-supplied mine-clearing systems. Belying stereotypes of a rigid and hyper-centralised force, the Russian army also learned from its mistakes, adapting better electronic countermeasures against the US-supplied HIMARS missiles and Excalibur artillery shells. During my most recent visit to Ukraine, in December, a drone operator described the advantage Russia had acquired in FPV (first-person view) drone variants, and its vastly improved electronic jamming technology — its new Izdeliye-55 miniature FPV quadcopter, is reputedly all but immune to jamming.

Still, the fact that Ukraine — which lacked sufficient airpower, long-range missiles and general materiel — failed to retake swathes of territory during its counteroffensive remains the war’s “dog bites man” story. The true surprise is that Russia is not only still fighting Ukraine two years after invading it, confident of a quick victory, but that it barely shifted the frontlines in the whole of 2023. Its net gain was a bare 180 square miles (for comparison, Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, covers 324 square miles), and that owed mainly to advances in and around Bakhmut, a town for which it fought for nine months, relying heavily on prisoners, a private army, and various militias. The conquest of Avdiivka similarly required four months of fighting and some 20,000 casualties, notwithstanding Russia’s massive numerical superiority in weaponry (8:1 in artillery shells, for example).

Despite Russia’s vast and continuing advantage in every measure typically used to assay military balance between states, it has failed to transform that superiority into juggernaut-like results. A vivid example can be found in the small beachheads Ukraine established in mid-November on the Russian-held bank of Kherson province, mainly in Krynky village, after a river crossing under heavy fire. Though Ukraine had only a small number of marines and no armour or artillery on site to speak of, it has preserved or extended the area it holds through repeated Russian assaults, killed numerous troops, and destroyed many armoured vehicles. All this from what a New York Times analysis painted as Kyiv’s Krynky “suicide mission”.

In Russian media, there is no such misconception: one military blogger lambasted the “idiots” who kept sending armour to Krynky, only to have “90%” of it destroyed; others demanded the sacking of Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky, the army commander in Kherson. And Krynky is not an aberration — Russia’s equipment losses have been remarkably high elsewhere. Returning to Avdiivka, one single extended assault in November led to the destruction of 100 Russian tanks and 250 armoured vehicles.

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Russia has also suffered many more casualties than one would have expected against a much weaker opponent: according to British estimates, 302,000 by late November plus “tens of thousands of deserters”. By contrast, US intelligence estimates around 70,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed and 120,000 wounded by last autumn. (This would bely Russia’s implausible claim, widely circulated, that 300,000-350,000 Ukrainian troops have died.)

The losses in some Russian units are devastating. Russia’s elite 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade was almost eviscerated when Russian commanders insisted upon their habitual “meat wave” assaults on Vuhledar — so high were the losses that the marines turned on their generals. A year into the war, the losses of the 155th at Vuhledar and elsewhere were so bad that the unit had to be reconstituted multiple times.

Russia’s overall equipment losses have also been staggering. The Oryx data base, which tracks destroyed, abandoned, or captured stock, lists as of mid-February: 2,735 tanks; 3,421 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs); and 1,020 artillery systems. Tank losses have been severe enough to require the requisitioning of models dating back decades. Ukraine’s corresponding losses have been significantly lower: 742 tanks, 848 IFVs, and 472 artillery pieces. Russia had an overwhelming superiority in tanks when the war began but, because of these losses, by July the two armies were nearly at parity.

Some of Russia’s best weapons — the S-400 air defence system, the supposedly unstoppable Kinzhal ballistic missile, and Yastreb-AV counterbattery radar, which costs $1.5 billion and was destroyed soon after its first appearance — have not lived up to their vaunted reputation. Ditto the famed, top-of-the-line T-14 Armata tank, withdrawn from the battlefield soon after its debut. Western weaponry has been essential here. Without American and European tanks, air-defence missiles, anti-tank guided missiles, multiple rockets systems, and cruise missiles (the Anglo-French Storm Shadow/SCALP) Ukraine could never have withstood the Russian army’s assault, much less have inflicted such large losses on it.

Russia at sea

Perhaps even more surprisingly, though it lacks a fully-fledged navy, Ukraine has severely hampered Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Crimea. Using missiles, aerial and naval drones, and commando raids, it has hit the Fleet and its infrastructure so many times (beginning with the triumphant early sinking of its flagship, the Moskva, in April 2022, using a homemade R-360 Neptune missile) that Moscow has had to relocate ships and submarines — in some cases all the way to Russia’s mainland Krasnodar region.

But Ukraine targeted the latter as well, damaging one Ropucha-class landing ship in August, before attacking the Black Sea Fleet’s Sevastopol headquarters in September, claiming to have killed 34 officers. The Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles have been indispensable here and, in all, Ukraine claimed to have damaged or disabled about a third of the Fleet’s vessels: 25 ships and one submarine according to most recent figures.

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These victories have had several repercussions, not least in sowing discord at the top of the Russian leadership. One attack early this month on the Crimean airbase at Belbek killed air force Lt Gen. Alexander Tatarenko, before Ukraine sunk another Ropucha-class landing ship (the Caesar Kunikov) using a swarm of sea drones, precipitating the firing of the Fleet’s commander, Admiral Viktor Sokolov, on 15 February. Any proper naval strategy these commanders might have developed has also been sabotaged. It has become much harder for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet ships to fire cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities, forestalling wintertime strikes on Ukraine’s electrical network.

Ukraine has also managed to maintain a sea corridor for food exports from its own Black Sea ports (even after Russia exited the Black Sea grain deal) despite persistent Russian attacks on its port infrastructure. Earnings from food have dropped significantly since the war started, but a blockade would have dealt the cash-strapped country a body blow. By January though, Ukraine’s seaborne exports (not just in grain, but all shipping) actually reached pre-war levels. 

“An army marches on its stomach”

This aphorism, attributed by some to Frederick the Great and others to Napoleon, highlights how essential supplies from the rear are for success at the front — not just armour and artillery, but food, fuel, and medicine. Ukraine has done a remarkable job of starving Russia of these supplies. To take an example, the 12-mile-long Kerch Strait Bridge was under repair for months following the October 2022 truck bomb explosion engineered by Ukraine. They then attacked the bridge again last July, this time with sea drones. Though bridge’s railway tracks remained intact this time, the damage to the roadway necessitated lane closures until November. Fears of attack also led to traffic suspensions on the bridge at least three times in 2023.

Ukraine similarly struck the Chonhar Bridge, which connects north Crimea to Kherson province, last June, July and August. And other military-related Crimean sites targeted include Saky, Yevpatoria, and the Zaliv shipyard in Kerch. These strikes have disrupted supplies headed to Russian forces in the south via Crimea, the main conduit, forcing Moscow to rely more on the land corridor it created after the invasion between Crimea and south-western Donbas. Yet that passageway too has come under Ukrainian fire. On top of that, in January and February, Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s energy infrastructure — loading terminals, oil refineries, and storage sites — in the Baltic Sea, the Bryansk region, and in Volgograd and Ryazan.

A RAND analysis recently asked whether logistics would prove to be “Russia’s undoing in Ukraine”. This much is clear: an important Russian weakness has been laid bare. This week, Western officials claimed that Russia was suffering from severe shortages of ammunition and weapons of its own. And, apart from making it harder to sustain prolonged offensives, supply shortfalls have deprived new recruits of the basics — in some cases family members have had to provide essentials. Morale has therefore become a chronic problem for Russian commanders, and played a role in the Wagner Group’s June rebellion. 

A vision of victory

The Russian army is certainly not, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. But, amid the negative coverage of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, its considerable flaws and failures have been overlooked. Still, the Ukrainian army’s successes would have been impossible absent the massive inflow of Western weaponry — some $100 billion since the invasion — and in particular the US capacity to send close to half, in dollar terms, of what its Nato allies have provided. But given the Russian army performance in Ukraine, the oft-heard claims that Ukraine’s defeat would expose Nato to attack has become dubious.

To be clear: Russia retains a formidable army that can still do considerable damage to Ukraine. What’s more, Ukraine’s vulnerability has increased because of the mounting shortages its forces now face and the uncertainty surrounding future American military assistance. Despite Russian losses, Putin has not seriously called for negotiations. On the contrary, he stated recently that the goals of the “special military operation” remained unchanged, would be pursued till victory, and that Western support for Ukraine would eventually dissipate.

Nor have the war’s human and material costs sparked sustained mass discontent among Russians, let alone threatened Putin’s grip on power. He seems confident that time is on his side. To push Ukraine into negotiating now would amount to decreeing its partition — and at a moment when Russia, despite assertions to the contrary, is hardly on a roll. That said, maximalist territorial goals — the ones originally advocated by the Zelensky government and its strongest Western supporters — will likely prove as unrealistic as betting on Putin’s political demise.

But an outcome in which Ukraine retakes even more of the territory it has lost since February 2022 would still be a major victory and, if it comes to negotiations, Kyiv will be in a stronger position if it has gained more ground. It should demonstrate to Moscow its readiness to fight on: by mobilising its planned 500,000 new soldiers and breaking up the corrupt, murky, and intricate system that helps men dodge military service (you can find plenty of these fellows in Kyiv’s trendy restaurants). The Ukrainian army must reconstitute itself and adopt a strategy of what Mykola Bielieskov calls “active defence”; not mount a major offensive that would risk high losses in troops and materiel, something it can ill afford. Russia may have lost more soldiers than Ukraine, but it also has a far larger pool of military-aged men to draw from.

Further gains by Ukraine will require not only Congress’s approval of the 2024 aid package, but also Europe’s willingness to play a much bigger role. But, having long neglected its defence industries because of the ironclad American military guarantee, Europe cannot step in quickly. To take an example, the Europe Union was supposed to deliver one million artillery shells by March; so far it has sent half that amount and expects to meet its target only by the end of this year. At best, an increase in European help can keep Ukraine in the fight for the rest of this year so that a larger flow of weapons from Europe down the line will enable it to make bigger advances. That will not happen easily or quickly, which means that Ukraine is vulnerable in the near term.

But Europe does have the means to begin boosting military spending and investing more in its defence industries — and it should, if not only to gain a measure of strategic autonomy and reduce its generation-long reliance on America.

Sheer geography dictates that Ukraine’s fate will always matter more to Europe than it will to the United States, which will focus increasingly on China in the years to come. In addition to arming Ukraine, Europe should eventually take the lead in training and equipping Ukraine’s armed forces so that Kyiv has the capacity to adopt a policy of long-term, armed neutrality. Some describe this as the “Israel model”, though Finland’s defence strategy from the end of the Second World War until it joined Nato in April may be the better comparison. Alternatively, a subset of Nato states could guarantee Ukraine’s security, but on the understanding that any resort to force against Russia to defend Ukraine would not trigger Article V of the 1949 Nato Treaty, the commitment to collective defence. This would scarcely substitute for Nato membership, but it would give Ukraine more protection than armed neutrality.

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If the uncertainty regarding future American military aid to Ukraine marks a turning point for Kyiv, it does the same for Europe. It is often said that Europe cannot organise defence arrangements of its own because a large, disparate collection of states cannot act in consort. But that is belied by the centralisation the European Union and its associated institutions have undergone. And the EU has already taken some steps toward arming Ukraine autonomously: the European Peace Facility, established in March 2021, has provided Kyiv more than $5 billion in war-related aid.

The political obstacles to greater European defence autonomy and the challenges of ramping up European defence industries are well-known — Europe’s leaders have never looked less united around its continental institutions. Yet given the combination of the shortages Ukraine faces, the doubts about continued assistance from the United States, and the prospect of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Europeans ought to consider charting a new course, one that does not require them to dispense with Nato, but adapts it to the present. The impediment to such a change is not a lack of means, but the inertia created by an entrenched way of thinking that makes change seem impossible. The alternative risks not only Ukraine’s long-term future, but Europe’s too.

Unlike the two World Wars, the rival great powers are not challenging the superpower directly — at least, not yet. Instead, American hegemony is being challenged obliquely, as its rivals nibble at the edges of empire, targeting weaker client states in the confidence that the United States now possesses neither the logistical capacity nor the domestic political stability necessary to impose its order on the world. In the Nineties and 2000s, at the height of its unipolar moment, the United States made almost all the world its client state, writing cheques for their security it now struggles to cash: like bankruptcy, decline comes slowly at first, then all at once. The overriding theme of 2024 then, like 2023, will be that of imperial overstretch precipitating retreat from global dominance. From the Red Sea to the Donbas, the jungles of South America to the Far East, America’s security establishment finds itself struggling to contain local blazes that threaten to become a great conflagration.

Yet bad as things are, they could always be worse. We perhaps too easily forget that only six months ago, in the immediate wake of Prigozhin’s dramatic and unexpected rebellion, Russia’s security establishment was engaged in vigorous and public discussion over whether it was necessary to conduct a nuclear strike either in Ukraine, as a warning against the West, or against the West itself. So endemic has the sense of crisis, both globally and domestically, become that the most dangerous nuclear escalation since the Cold War went largely unremarked. We should be grateful that this moment passed, yet the fact it did pass is itself evidence of America’s weakening global position. The brief episode of nuclear anxiety came at a time when Putin’s Kremlin faced both an unprecedented internal threat and the risk of battlefield defeat, on the brink of Ukraine’s much-anticipated summer offensive. But the offensive, as we now know, faltered into a costly defeat for Ukraine, upturning the expected outcome of the war. For our now-lowered risk of nuclear war, Kyiv will pay a heavy price.

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Like an inscrutable game of chess, the battle lines in Ukraine have barely moved this year, but expectations for the war’s outcome have been totally reversed. This time a year ago, the consensus was that the invasion was already a strategic defeat for Putin: his armies had proved unexpectedly ineffective on the battlefield, and had crumbled before Ukraine’s rapid autumn 2022 northeastern counteroffensive. Rather than breaking apart through its internal divisions, the Nato alliance had found a new sense of purpose, consolidating itself against the Russian threat and devoting vast quantities of already-existing and soon-to-be-produced materiel towards military victory. That mood of triumphalism has already passed. The promised war-winning Western increase in munitions production simply has not materialised, while Russia’s transition to a war economy, and its seizing of Western companies in response to a sanctions regime whose effects have proved the opposite to those intended, have granted Russia both renewed offensive potential and an economic boom to pay for it. The West imposed on Russia a war stimulus it should have embraced itself. It did not, and as a result this winter is a bleak one for Ukraine; but the year to come looks to be far worse.

Through 2023, Kyiv and its Western backers gambled a successful conclusion to the war on a single armoured thrust in the country’s southeast, punching through Russia’s defensive lines and threatening its hold on the Crimea and Black Sea coast, forcing a humbled Putin into peace negotiations. That gamble failed, and there is now no viable path towards the expansive definition of victory adopted by Zelenskyy at a more buoyant phase of the war. Along the northern border and behind the current lines in the East, Ukrainian forces are hurriedly digging defensive lines, hoping to blunt Russia’s resurgent offensive power in the same way Russia’s fortifications chewed up its own newly-formed and Nato-trained armoured brigades. The “mountain of steel” donated for the offensive by the West will not be repeated; the wave of enthusiastic volunteers who initially manned the lines has been replaced by increasingly unwilling conscripts, with Kyiv planning a further mobilisation of half a million men just to hold the line.

When Zelenskyy’s over-optimistic prognoses of the war’s conclusion were punctured by his military chief General Valerii Zaluzhny characterising the current state of play as a “stalemate”, it revealed growing internal political strife within the Kyiv leadership. But the hard reality is that now offensive momentum has passed to Russia, Ukraine forcing the war into a stalemate that will lead to peace negotiations looks as close to victory as will realistically be achieved. But as things stand, an increasingly confident Moscow shows no inclination towards peace talks without Ukraine making territorial and political concessions indistinguishable from surrender. That Zelenskyy’s senior advisors are floating the possibility of Putin’s sudden overthrow in Moscow as a possible path to victory shows the scale of the threat facing Kyiv. Short of a revolutionary deus ex machina in the Kremlin, the challenge for Ukraine in 2024 will be to hold its defensive lines, degrade Russia’s offensive power faster than its recruitment and industrial production can replace, and maintain the necessary political unity in Kyiv to steer the war towards the least painful conclusion possible. Of all these, perhaps the last will be the greatest challenge.

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But as Kyiv struggles, the hegemon is already losing interest in Ukraine, distracted again by its decades-long enfeebling entanglement in the Middle East. Israel is both diplomatically and militarily dependent on the United States, but that relationship is not reflected in Netanyahu’s prosecution of his punitive war on Gaza. When US envoys beg Israel to scale down its war, Netanyahu immediately promises to intensify it. Even as American planners fret over the erosion of their precious munitions stockpiles by the Ukraine war, Israel is burning through US-donated supplies at an alarming rate. Until the US can increase its munitions production and replenish its arsenal, which may take years, every shell fired on Gaza or in eastern Ukraine weakens America’s deterrent power. The result will be the arms equivalent of the “hungry gap”, as its available military resources become increasingly unequal to its global commitments. This shortfall presents America’s rivals with a rare and unexpected window to challenge the superpower directly, in the knowledge that it will struggle to fight a high-intensity war of any great duration.

But if the logic of armaments production, as well as the diplomatic isolation and domestic outrage fuelled by the Gaza war, drives the United States to seek a swift resolution to the conflict, the logic of events leads towards escalation. The risk of the conflict widening to Lebanon has not abated — if anything, Israel appears to be straining at the leash to extend its full-scale war across its northern frontier, as thousands of Israeli civilians have fled their homes as a result of the tit-for-tat exchange of artillery fire with Hezbollah. Yet the blockade of Red Sea shipping by Yemen’s Houthi movement has shown that Western countries face direct costs for their increasingly qualified support of Israel, and that regional powers are increasingly confident in challenging the United States directly.

Having triumphantly survived a years-long war against Saudi Arabia, devastating to Yemen’s civilian population, in which Saudi forces deployed US jets, bombs and intelligence support to little battlefield effect, the risk of a short-lived American punitive bombing campaign must seem a manageable one to the Houthis. Knowing that America has no appetite for a wider conflict that will be seen both internationally and domestically as having been dragged into a war on Israel’s behalf, the Houthis now feel emboldened to attack US naval escorts directly. So politically toxic is Israel’s Gaza campaign that even America’s closest Nato allies prefer to keep their distance from American security efforts in the Red Sea, while as a result of poor procurement decisions, the US Navy is struggling to marshal the resources necessary to keep trade routes open, the basic function of a global empire. Balking at fighting Hezbollah or the Houthis directly, the prospect of a US attack on Iran, deemed an over-ambitious goal even at the height of US power, is unlikely in the extreme, which in turn feeds Tehran’s appetite for risk. Overstretched, wearing down its ships through over-deployment, and suddenly showing itself dependent on weaker, unenthused European allies to make up the numbers, in the Red Sea we are shown a glimpse of America’s naval performance in a future Pacific conflict: the results will be heartening to China.

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Like an ailing mammoth, weakened by a succession of individual spear thrusts, the hegemon staggers bleeding across the global scene. Though stronger than any individual competitor, America is not capable of sustaining three simultaneous major conflicts against powerful regional rivals, without mobilising for a war effort unfeasible within its current political dynamics. At the height of its power, when America’s rivals were cowed and isolated, the United States assumed global security burdens that looked easily achievable at the time, while running down the industrial base necessary to sustain them. Bad choices were made, which are now difficult to undo. As a result, the United States has already shifted into a defensive mode, attempting to preserve its gains of better times against resurgent challengers, and delaying the grand-political reordering of global affairs for as long as possible. Yet unlike Russia, Iran or China, America’s democratic system incentivises short-term planning, and offers its leaders the escape route of shifting responsibility for failure to the next, rival administration. Heading towards what looks like an inevitable political defeat in 2024, the Biden administration is already drained of political authority, as tired and absent-minded as the gerontocrat at its helm.

In an earlier phase of America’s history, the looming handover of power would be expected to happen smoothly, and continuity achieved in maintaining the empire’s strategic goals. No such continuity can be expected in 2024. America’s previous two elections were marked by the most serious waves of civil disorder and political instability in decades as each party and their factions within the state bureaucracy contested each others’ legitimacy, each deploying excitable civilians radicalised by their respective court press as proxy weapons. Over the course of the coming year, America will likely be roiled by its internal political dysfunction in a way we have never yet seen, and the rest of the world will live in the shadow cast by the contested imperial throne.

Not just the fate of Ukraine but also of the Nato alliance will be determined by the battle for power in Washington. For Netanyahu, the incentive of America’s election year will be to drag the war out for another year, or widen it into a regional conflict, gambling Israel’s future security on the presumed greater indulgence of the incoming Republican administration. Similarly, for Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis, the waning days of a cautious Biden administration desirous to avoid a Middle Eastern conflagration presents the greatest opportunity for escalation. For China, waiting in the wings to deliver the final blow, the optimum time to act will be at the moment of Washington’s greatest distraction by internal disorder: perhaps this election season will present an opportunity too rare to pass up, accelerating the timetable to seize Taiwan.

The world is living through its most dangerous moment in many decades, and the logic of events, in every theatre, leads towards further escalation over the year to come. In 2024, America’s fraught domestic interregnum will create a feedback loop with the already bloody global interregnum for the spoils of its empire. Last year was a hard year, drenched in blood and human misery through global conflict: but in retrospect, we may view it as the last golden summer of our world order, with the troubling storms still distant on the horizon. The coming year will be a historic one: we are right to dread its approach.

On the one hand, the very idea of formalising Britain’s role as Washington’s most loyal and reckless auxiliary, without even the hint that Britain may have vital strategic interests of its own, strikes the reader as a shameful metric of national decline. Yet on the other, it is merely a frank acceptance of Britain’s true role in the world.

Just as the Five Eyes alliance, promoted as a valuable forum to share secret intelligence, can be more accurately viewed as a means to ensure the Anglophone intelligence establishment orientate themselves towards serving US foreign policy goals, the Nato alliance is as much a Cold War means of organising satellite states to serve imperial interests as was the Warsaw Pact. The distinction between Moscow’s loyal network of European generals, securocrats and pet politicians and those of present-day Washington is barely perceptible. Yet, in recent years, the value of the Nato alliance has declined markedly, both to Washington insiders increasingly disgruntled that the United States finds itself subsidising the defence of rich but feckless European states, and to some European leaders such as Macron, who famously termed the Cold War relic “brain dead”. The alliance’s most recent adventures, in Afghanistan and Libya, were disasters both to the countries fated to host its intervention, and to the European states who suddenly found themselves hosting the unwanted human floods that followed.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then, came as a godsend to the faltering alliance. Once again, Nato could focus on its core purpose: the American-led defence of Europe from an aggressive Moscow. Summarising an emergent  strand of thought on both the Left and Right of European politics, Wolfgang Streeck, writing in Natopolitanism, Verso’s collection of essays from the New Left Review, remarks that by “restoring the West, the war neutralised the various fault lines where the EU was crumbling… while catapulting the United States into a position of renewed hegemony over Western Europe, including its regional organisation, the European Union”. This precise critique, that a war-revived “Turbo-America” has consolidated its wavering hold on our home continent, grasping us ever more suffocatingly to the imperial bosom, is now commonplace in discussions of geopolitics following the Ukraine war: but is it true?

The authors in Natopolitanism robustly make the case that, as the writer Thomas Meaney observes, “in practice, Nato is above all a political arrangement that guarantees US primacy in determining answers to European questions“ and “administers US power in Eurasia, as a regional satrapy and launchpad for excursions elsewhere”. In essays spanning decades, which aim to “stand in contrast to the pieties and propaganda that saturate the Natopolitan scene”, the writers outline Washington’s strategy of “convincing potential competitors” such as Europe “that they need not aspire to a greater role”, while accounting “sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership”. As Europe’s leadership shows, this plan was entirely successful, so that “what was once presumed to be an artefact of the Cold War order sits so comfortably at the heart of the Western system that it is frequently mistaken for a natural feature in the geopolitical landscape”.

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The book reminds us of the fearful warnings of US defence establishment giants such as William J. Burns that the decision to expand Nato eastwards, enfolding the Baltic and Central European states while leaving Ukraine and Georgia in their current, fateful ante-room to membership, was an act of monumental hubris which. It would, he wrote, “cross the brightest of Russia’s red lines” by “indulging the Ukrainians and Georgians in hopes of Nato membership on which we were unlikely to deliver, while reinforcing Putin’s sense that we were determined to pursue a course he saw as an existential threat”.

Indeed, Natopolitanism’s essential thrust — and the limitations of its analysis — can be summarised by the title of Realist theorist John Mearsheimer’s contribution: “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin.” It captures a strain of thinking common to European strategic autonomists who regret that the alliance has kept the continent subordinate to Washington, Left-wing anti-imperialists keen to highlight the hypocrisy of the alliance’s newfound commitment to the inviolability of national borders, and to the American anti-interventionists whose stance is, at least in liberal interventionist eyes, now indistinguishable from “IR Realism” Outlining viewpoints mocked by American neoconservative broadsheet columnists and boisterous cartoon dogs on Twitter alike, the collection is perhaps the most sustained and articulate critique so far of Washington’s hubristic attitudes towards Russia.

And yet, much of its argument can be refuted by observation of the Ukraine war’s progress until now. The purported “last chance for peace” lamented by contributors, Russia’s eve-of-invasion request to rule out the alliance’s further eastward expansion, also included a demand to withdraw Nato infrastructure from the Central European and Baltic countries welcomed into the alliance a generation ago: a politically absurd demand made in the full knowledge it was impossible to grant. Far from the United States forcing European states into a stance of radical and self-defeating hostility to Russia, it is European states that have consistently pushed a reluctant Biden administration into delivering ever-more deadly and sophisticated weapons systems to Kyiv. The pattern of hawkish European states browbeating their cautious and reluctant overlord into greater escalation echoes the dynamic of the Libya intervention, where the bright-eyed and idealistic Cameron and Sarkozy pairing cajoled Obama’s intervention in what he later termed the Libyan “shitshow” against his better judgment. If anything, Nato displays the European tail wagging the American dog: instead of keeping Europe subordinate, weak but ambitious European states use the Nato alliance to advance their own foreign policy ends — that these ends would, in Libya, prove disastrous is a European failing rather than an American one.

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No wonder that American defence thinkers, such as the Realist strategist Elbridge Colby, dispassionately debate the idea of cutting the Baltic countries loose as a strategic burden a declining US can no longer afford. Yet the sceptical attitude to the alliance displayed by the American Right, and particularly Trump, points to another potential outcome from the war. While Streeck asserts that “the war also seems to have dealt a death blow to the French dream of turning the liberal empire of the European Union into a strategically sovereign global force, credibly rivalling both a rising China and a declining United States”, dwindling American political support for a war in which the EU has fully committed itself leaves Europe forced to assume a position of power, almost against its own will.

Ultimately, Europe’s future defence strategy will be written in the straits and islets of the Western Pacific: either the US will be forced to concentrate on the threat from China, forcing Europe to finally take up the burden of its own defence, or Washington will abandon its role as global hegemon, taking Europe tighter into its embrace as a rich and easily assimilable core empire. Either outcome is possible, and the decision will only come at the time of China’s choosing. But if the first eventuality comes to pass, with a giant and hostile neighbour to its east, and an imperial sponsor distracted from by its own great challenge on the other side of the world, Europe will be forced to extract itself from the position of helpless dependence its role in the Nato alliance has fostered.

For Left-wing writers such as Meaney, such an autonomous Europe is hardly a more appealing outcome than subordinate membership in the American alliance: “considering what the European Union is today, if it ever did succeed in taking a more militarised form, this would hardly be a rosy prospect,” he writes. “A competent EU army patrolling the Mediterranean littoral for migrants, enforcing an elaborate repatriation system, and forcing regimes in Africa and Asia to serve in perpetuity as extraction points for its resources and receptacles of its trash would only clinch the status of ‘Fortress Europe’.” European conservatives, accustomed by habit if not self-interest to look longingly for Washington’s approval, may yet come to welcome this new dispensation.

Certainly, the most recent iteration of Nato as a heavily armed liberal NGO would not survive this shift. As noted in Natopolitanism, Poland’s hawkish attitude to the Ukraine war has led Washington to forget its until-recently-held doubts about the strength of the country’s democratic institutions, just as concerns over Meloni’s purported fascism evaporated once she committed herself to the war. So, Streeck warns, controversies over the “‘rule of law’ will become increasingly obsolete as cultural conflicts between “liberal” and “illiberal” democracy will be eclipsed by the geostrategic objectives of Nato and the United States,” while “a shift in political power inside the EU may be imminent in favour of the Union’s eastern front states”. Poland’s massive programme of rearmament, plus the planned incorporation within the EU of whatever iteration of the Ukrainian state follows the war, already promises a shift in Europe’s gravity from the post-national liberalism of the continent’s northwest to the resurgent, militarised nationalisms of the eastern frontier. As long as the new Europe’s defence posture alleviates the burden on the United States, Washington voices which once promoted Nato as an engine for liberal idealism will no more protest Europe’s Rightward political experimentation than their equivalents of past decades did the pliant authoritarian regimes of member states Portugal, Greece and Turkey.

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Far from ensuring Europe’s political and economic subordination, America’s retrenchment towards simultaneously managing both a great struggle with China and its own internal political conflict is very likely to leave Europe functionally autonomous. American voters and politicians may already be tiring of what will be a long and bloody war: Ukraine has, it seems, already reached the high-watermark of Pentagon support. Yet committed as Europe now is, with expanding Russian armies on its doorstep, disengagement is a luxury European leaders cannot afford. Perhaps things might have been otherwise, if different decisions had been made at the zenith of American power: but there is no rewriting history, no going back, and we are forced to make the best we can of the cards our masters dealt us.

In all this, the Sixth Form Third Worldist anti-imperialism of Nato sceptics such as Corbyn has been superseded by events. The idea that Corbyn could ever have extracted Britain from Nato was fanciful. As Meaney observes of Central Europe, “were any political leadership in Poland, Romania, Hungary, or any other Eastern European state to become intolerable for Washington, it would have an open, exploitable channel to that country’s military, greased by years of mutual exchanges, including stints at Nato headquarters, bevies of Nato conferences, retreats, and ceremonies, as well as wars fought together in the Middle East”. Precisely the same is true, with the inclusion of securocrats and wonks as loyal devotees, for us Western European countries. As the desperate wheedling for an American pat on their head from Britain’s defence establishment makes clear, the idea of Britain pursuing strategic ends distinct from those of its imperial master is literally incomprehensible to our governing class. Updating this strategic calculus is more likely to result from a sudden external shock than dispassionate consideration of Britain’s interests.

Yet Macron’s sudden pivot from Nato-scepticism towards a full-throated commitment to the alliance’s eastward expansion reminds us that other outcomes are possible. In our current turbulent period of interregnum between American supremacy and retreat from global hegemony, the Nato alliance may provide the framework within which a future, sovereign Europe can establish itself, through the creation of a notionally subordinate European defence pillar ready to take up the burden of the continent’s security from its faltering sponsor. There is no political utility in railing against Nato, given the unshakeable attachment of European elites to their sinecures as loyal auxiliaries. Yet by working within Nato structures, to establish Europe as an equal partner within the alliance rather than a collection of weak and disunited supplicants, our home continent may still quietly prepare itself for the withdrawal of America’s protective shield, and the contested multipolar order already bloodily dawning on its borders. Just as Rome’s successor states, once the legions left, still proudly wore imperial titles, Nato’s ghostly form may yet outlast the empire itself.

Power politics was a barbarous relic of a rejected past; the world was destined to move towards harmonious free trade, in which Europe’s hard-won moral clarity would guide lesser civilisations, still trapped in history, towards the light. Timid, comfortable, fearful of change and obsessed with petty rules and regulations, once Europe reached middle age with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was happy to observe a changing world tutting from behind its net curtains, the parish council Nimby of continents. Half museum and half retirement home, Europe grew fat and complacent as history was made elsewhere. But from a cave in the depths of Asia something stirred, which would restart history: Covid fatally weakened the boomer continent, and now something new is straining to be born.

It is striking that it took a disease which primarily affects the elderly and unfit to finally make Europe’s leaders notice what had already been clearly apparent: that the continent’s willed deindustrialisation in favour of China had left it weak and helpless, entirely dependent on the charity and vigour of stronger empires. The conjunction of Covid with America’s worst period of internal political disorder since the Sixties also fed a perception among America’s rivals that the global hegemon was itself ailing in turn, fuelling Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Yet if Putin’s war has been markedly unsuccessful on the battlefield, in a pyrrhic sense it has proved the validity of the central assumption driving it: that the post-Cold War world is dead, and we already live in a multipolar order.

In the Middle East, South America, Africa and Asia, even America’s allies remain happy to trade with Russia and submit their disputes to Chinese arbitration, viewing the Ukraine war as a distant European border skirmish irrelevant to their interests, and America’s role as global policeman lost to history. Only now are EU leaders, such as its chief diplomat Josep Borrell Fontelles, able to face the dawning realisation that “many countries see the geopolitical influence of China as a counterweight to the West and therefore to Europe. They will seek to strengthen their own room for manoeuvre without picking sides”. The latest war in Europe thus helps mark the boundaries of a European civilisational space, delineated by solidarity with Ukraine. For decades, Europe’s leaders flattered themselves that their moral worldview was universal, fated by history to reshape the entire world. Instead, Europe’s values and its interests are revealed as utterly parochial: merely the customs and assumptions of one civilisation among many, and a weak one at that.

It took both crises, Covid and Ukraine, to awaken Europe from its post-war dream. Dependent on China for industry, Russia for energy and America for security, Europe suddenly realised its vulnerability within the new order. As Macron recently wrote in the Financial Times: “because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war Russia decided to inflict on Ukraine, we have acknowledged our strategic dependencies and decided to act to reduce them… We are no longer naive.” Rejecting the idealistic free-trade dogma that had dominated European thinking for decades, Macron further argued in a landmark speech that “we are not destined to become consumers of American industry”, nor is Europe’s relationship to China a choice between economic subjection and conflict: “Rather than trying to fight the Chinese, we are going to do the same as they do: defend our European sovereignty and produce what we need in Europe.”

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In a strange way, Macron’s civilisational dream of Europe’s role in a multipolar world echoes the foreign policy thinking of the two giants of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger. Writing from very different perspectives, just as Germany’s bloody attempt to unify the continent began to look doomed, the two friends tried to visualise a new place for Europe in the world. For Jünger, in his long essay “The Peace”, begun in 1941 and secretly circulated amongst the Wehrmacht generals plotting to assassinate the Führer he so despised, the historical result of the Second World War would not be a reversion to the pre-war order of squabbling nation states brought about by Versailles, but instead the consolidation of the earth’s continents into great civilisational power blocs: “For the first time, the earth as a globe, as a planet, has become a battlefield, and human history presses on towards a planetary order.”

This was a moment of great danger for Europe, Jünger warned: “Napoleon prophesied that in our day the world would become republican or Cossack. If he had foreseen our situation in detail he would have said ‘American or Russian'”, for “at the moment when Europe raises itself to the status of a continent, the gravitational pull of America will be­come more perceptible”. For Jünger as for Macron, history presented the mother continent with a great and fateful choice: vassalisation at the hands of one of the two great empires, or an autonomous civilisation state.

Instead, for Jünger, Germany’s defeat was also the moment for “Europe’s Declaration of Independence”, a time when “the old frontiers must be broken down by new alliances, and new, greater empires must unite the nations”. Here, Jünger does not sound markedly different to Macron in declaring that “Europe must become a partner in the great empires which are forming on this planet, and are striving towards their final form.”

Indeed, like Macron, the Francophile Jünger believed this should happen under French tutelage, as “for long the spirit of that country has been striving towards greater unity in which its labours too will be crowned”. Like Macron’s summoning of the Napoleonic spirit, Jünger celebrated the previous failed champion of a great continental empire: “For this reason secret shrines in honour of Napoleon have been maintained in all lands — for in that prince the old dream of one great monarchy had seemed to be realised.” No wonder Mitterand, meeting the Right-wing warhorse turned idealistic prophet of European unification in 1984, would remark that “Napoleon would have made you a marshal”.

Never quite rejecting his early Right-wing radicalism, the later Jünger directed it towards a pan-European identity and political Catholicism, and died lauded as a prophet of European unification and the Franco-German alliance. Jünger’s ideal European union indeed prefigures our own, where “there should be uniformity of organisation in what­ever concerns technical matters, industry, commerce, com­munications, trade, weights and measures, and defence”, where “the state as supreme symbol of technical achievement takes the nations in its toils, yet they live in freedom under its protection”. Like his fellow Nietzchean, Macron, who views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the catalyst to reform Europe into a continent capable of defending itself and preserving its unique civilisation, Jünger observes that: “it is thus that nature fashions shellfish, with a hard, gleaming embossed shell and a delicate interior in which the pearls are hidden. In this differentiation lies the welfare of states and the happiness of individuals.”

Jünger’s vision of a new world order divided into great continental empires reflects the influence of his best friend, the jurist and legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Unlike Jünger — a fierce and public opponent of Hitler’s regime — Schmitt famously attempted to find a starring role for himself under the National Socialist order, quietly rejecting it only when Germany’s defeat looked certain. It is ironic, and perhaps based on a cursory reading of Jünger’s earlier works, that while Jünger’s reputation is clouded (or among some fans today, enhanced) by his early Right-wing radicalism, Schmitt’s dalliance with the regime whose atrocities created the post-1945 order has only granted his work a certain transgressive glamour, particularly among the Marxist and post-Marxist intellectuals who first revived his thought.

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In The Nomos of the Earth (1952), Schmitt observed that the decisive event in world history came at the end of the 16th century, when “the British island detached itself in ideal terms from the destinies of the continent to undertake its own adventure on the seas”. The result was the creation of great seaborne empires, finally culminating in the United States, with the power and will to impose their order on the entire planet, relegating the Europe from the engine of world history to the scene of pitiless and total wars. In detaching itself from the continent, Britain set in train a sequence of events that would lead to Europe’s subordination to Britain’s monstrous child, America.

Yet for Schmitt, in his later writings, there were alternate historical paths on the horizon. As perhaps his most famous modern acolyte, the post-Marxist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, observes, Schmitt looked beyond the bipolar Cold War order he would not outlive to a world where the likely end of bipolarity, American hegemony, would in turn be superseded by “a new global order based on the existence of several autonomous regional blocs”. For Mouffe, a multipolar landscape of civilisational blocs would likely be more stable and pacific than American unilateralism, by dividing the world into distinct but broadly amicable spheres of influence (Ukrainians and Taiwanese, both unwilling members of other empires’ chosen spheres of influence, are unlikely to share her enthusiasm).

A critic of the War on Terror (whose own Schmittian basis has famously been argued by Agamben), Mouffe argued that the potential for world peace brought about by a “a pluralistic world order” is why, “against the illusions of the universalist-humanitarians, it is urgent to listen to Schmitt when he reminds us that ‘the political world is a pluriverse, not a universe’”. Rejecting cosmopolitan idealism, Mouffe argues that we should abandon “the illusory hope for a political unification of the world”. Trying to turn the world into Europe is futile and dangerous: “instead of the vanguard in the unification of the world, the EU should be visualised as a regional pole in this multipolar world”.

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In this multipolar order, as Jünger observed of a united Europe acting as the shield of nations, the EU would, “instead of being seen as announcing the end of nation-states, [provide] the conditions for their survival in a globalised world”. The continent’s survival in this post-cosmopolitan order, Mouffe declares, would entail a rejection of the ideology of free trade, which has meant that “an increasing number of vernacular industries have been destroyed, as local producers are unable to compete with cheap imports” from China and other rival powers. Instead, it is necessary to “to defend a Left-wing form of European protectionism”, in which it is essential “to envisage economic development according to a regional perspective”. This vision, of a protectionist, reindustrialised Europe is precisely that now championed by Macron, who recently announced that “we cannot be the last remaining market without an industrial policy”. In the stirring conclusion to his Financial Times essay, he declared that:

“We have to take back control of our supply chains, energy and innovation. We need more factories and fewer dependencies. ‘Made in Europe’ should be our motto. We have no choice, as sovereignty is intertwined with the strength of our democracies… We Europeans can prove that our continent, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, can once again be the home of flourishing industry and shared progress.”

The post-1945 order, in the simplistic folk wisdom that only fully took shape with the fall of the Soviet Union, adopted the comforting myth that the Allied victory in the Second World War, like the Western victory in the Cold War, was a product of superior liberal-democratic forms. Shedding their overseas possessions in the decades following the war, Europeans flattered themselves that the age of empires was over, but that even as their physical power waned, their moral example would still guide the world.

Instead, the consolidation of the world into continental empires was only beginning. Political morality does not come into the picture: Europe’s conquest and post-war division into two rival spheres was simply the product of America and the Soviet Union’s vast industrial output, and the abundant raw materials, derived from ruthless territorial expansion and genocide in the preceding centuries, which enabled them to feed their factories.

Power flows through a million factory chimneys, and both Covid and the war in Ukraine have revealed to Europe’s feckless and misguided rulers how weak our continent has allowed itself to become. But both crises have also finally brought that fragile, complacent boomer, the world born in 1945, to a close: the entire worldview of its political avatar, Angela Merkel, now stands repudiated, even if no fully-formed replacement has yet arrived. First there were two rival empires, then one unchallenged hegemon, and now a series of potential challengers stand on history’s stage. Belatedly, European leaders are realising that unless it can defend itself, and provide for itself, then as Macron warned, “Europe will disappear.”

Amplifying this view is the emergence of a renewed Sino-Russian axis, which, according to Vladimir Putin himself, has “consistently worked to create an equitable, open and inclusive regional and global security system”. China’s CCP-controlled Global Times is equally optimistic, suggesting that the Russia-Ukraine conflict serves “as a catalyst for the burial of American hegemony”. A recent University of Cambridge study seemed to confirm this: it found that, for the first time, developing countries are now more supportive of Russia and China than the US.

Yet while America’s unipolarity is undoubtedly fragile, we should be cautious about what this means — particularly when interpreting the motivations of states in the Global South, the symptoms of American decline, and the fragmentary potential of the new Sino-Russian relationship. Most obviously, states in the Global South are not some homogeneous non-Western “Other”, but a collection of different countries with competing interests. The historian Timothy Garton Ash recently argued that the West urgently needs a “new narrative persuasive to countries like India”. This may seem like a harmless observation to make, but it confuses soft power’s capacity to woo a diverse range of self-interested nation states: what is persuasive to India isn’t necessarily persuasive to Indonesia.

Rather than acting as a unified bloc, it is far more likely that states will play sides off against each other, especially as the division between the West and a China-centred global economy gathers pace. Indeed, their capacity to withhold support is a rational strategy to enhance their bargaining power and to win concessions from the West. It is a form of enticement, not indictment. In India, for example, record imports of Russian oil have boosted Narendra Modi’s position with key actors, such as the European Union, which has rapidly accelerated its free-trade negotiations with Delhi. This follows the rapid conclusion of a major semiconductor supply chain and innovation partnership with the US, which will be followed this summer with a visit by Modi, designed to shore up the two countries’ defence and economic links.

Meanwhile, those who posit the decline of America, and by extension the liberal world order, often get key metrics wrong. For instance, it has been argued that as the unipolar moment fades, so will the dollar’s international reserve currency status. Writing in UnHerd, Thomas Fazi recently argued that Western sanctions on Russia have “enhanced the yuan’s reserve currency status”, while Bloomberg reported that the dollar has reached a “critical inflection point”. Even the IMF has signalled alarm.

However, the use of the dollar is based as much on geopolitics as it is on economics. Foreign investors will continue to use the currency not just because of its incredible liquidity as a store of value and medium of global exchange, but because of the US’s legal and governance infrastructure. It remains, after all, the currency of choice in foreign-exchange swap transactions, accounting for nearly half of the $6.6 trillion daily foreign-exchange turnover. Of allocated foreign-exchange reserves in late 2022, the dollar accounted for 60% of the world’s total. The Euro, by contrast, stood at 20%. The Chinese Renminbi? 3%.

The case for a renewed Sino-Russian axis is equally unfounded. Although Putin recently hosted his “dear friend” Xi at the Kremlin, underlying this friendship is the stark reality of a deepening Russian vassalage to Xi’s China. A loss of Russian prestige and status in Ukraine, and by extension an American victory, would prove a mortal blow to Putin’s project of contesting the world order that, from the Kremlin’s perspective, represents a greater civilisational struggle. Given this existential framing, Putin has little choice but to deepen his reliance on China as a market for Russian commodities and supplies for his war machine (via useful proxies such as North Korea).

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Moreover, simmering tensions within the Sino-Russian axis already exist. The Siberian Pacific seaboard, which includes regions such as the Russian Far East and the Amur river basin, is rich in natural resources, such as timber, minerals and fisheries. China’s infrastructure and development projects in the region, including through its Belt and Road Initiative, have been primarily economic. As Moscow’s dependency grows, China may seek to salami-slice Russian interests, including the eventual reabsorption of the Pacific Seaboard. And this could lead to a weakening of the Federation as a whole, as well as its disintegration in the long term. None of the Central Asian states have supported the invasion of Ukraine, and are increasingly distancing themselves from Putin’s integration projects. As such, despite proclamations of brotherly love, the chaotic Sino-Russian axis remains unlikely to become a “soft power” pole around which much of the Global South will seek to organise.

The US, meanwhile, retains an incredible capacity to leverage its military power into structuring the international preferences of politically equal but security subordinate states. The threat posed by the emergent Sino-Russian axis increases its capacity to corral powers as diverse as Sweden, Finland, Taiwan and Japan under its strategic superintendence, all of whom look to the US for protection. Underlined by its newly energised Aukus deal, and growing role within Nato, America’s status in major centres of world power remains as strong as it did in the early post-Cold War period.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s masterful dissection of world politics, The Grand Chessboard (1997), recognised that Eurasia has long been the centre of world power. As a consequence, he identified that “the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among [Eurasian] vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together”. The “most dangerous scenario”, Brzezinski argued, “would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances”.

How can a US-led West keep the “barbarians” from coming together? By 1943, the US State Department had recognised that Nazi Germany could not win the global struggle for mastery, so it planned the kind of world order it wanted, which included incorporating a defeated Germany within a new, American-led global order. As the Ukraine crisis rumbles on, the West’s programme is clear, with the nascent expansion of Nato along Russia’s borders and the likely emergence of Ukraine as a fearsome buffer state. Under this strategy, in 10 years, Poland will become the preeminent land power in Europe.

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What “carrots” can it leverage? While history never repeats itself, it often rhymes. As in 1943, it is clear that Putin cannot win the Ukraine war. With this in mind, it is not inconceivable that a post-Putin European security order could seek to re-incorporate Russia into a new security and economy architecture. This new “grand bargain” would seek to settle the intersection of historical grievances and fears over status and security. Through institutional reform and transformation, it would attempt to entice a post-Putin Russia into its orbit. Doing so would settle many grand strategic dilemmas driving post-Cold War Nato expansion and Russian hostility. This new post-Putin security order would be right on Beijing’s doorstep, across the 2,615 miles between China and Russia.

In a tripolar world, with America, Russia and China operating as individual actors, any alliance between two great powers inevitably spells doom for the third. And by wedging apart the developing Sino-Russian coalition, America would also be free to “buck-pass” its superintendence to regional European powers, allowing it to finally move more decisively in its long desired “strategic pivot” to East Asia. The popular narrative of America’s secular decline therefore seems overblown. The US enjoys the Pacific and Atlantic moats, and regional hegemony in the Americas. China and Russia, on the other hand, live in a much rougher neighbourhood, and there’s no reason to think their axis could not be wedged apart. Whether that takes a year or a decade, it seems more likely that America will still be front and centre, playing its role as a global protagonist.