For Professor Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy — and one of the few experts on the subject who isn’t a charlatan — the formulation of effective strategy goes something like this. First, diagnose the problem. Second, adopt a guiding policy. Third, devise coherent actions, marshaling your resources to execute them. Everything else is irrelevant. Distraction is the enemy.

When it comes to diagnosing our problems in Britain, there’s much consensus among the public. Those services which are, relatively speaking, well-funded feel inefficient — parts of the NHS especially, with military procurement worse but less recognized. Meanwhile, for less generously furnished services like the police, what was once sold as prudence has long been recognized as crippling austerity.

Elsewhere, the economy isn’t productive enough. Recent immigration has been too high, at least in the abstract. Work no longer pays. The country lacks a vision of the future. And there’s litter everywhere. These are the issues that matter most to those who voted in recent local elections — and others who simply didn’t see the point.

They also seem central to Andy Burnham’s pitch to return to the House of Commons. Just days into his campaign to win the Makerfield byelection, the former health secretary has blasted the two main parties, declaring that Britain has been on the “wrong path” for 40 years. As a country, we keep doing bad strategy. And both Labour and the Tories are complicit.

Whenever I speak to punters, from Runcorn and Birmingham to Winchester and the Welsh Valleys, they tend to agree — embedding their criticisms in what they can see rather than abstractions. Thus their disquiet generally boils down to the simple fact that the physical infrastructure of the community has decayed while people feel less affluent. Conversations invariably drift to high streets, the ground zero of our national malaise. Such places combine the sense of a fraying built environment with the recognition that our economy doesn’t work. It is here where we feel poorer, both in body and spirit.

And so, in response, we get the Government’s Pride in Place program. Unveiled last September by the prime minister and Secretary of State for Local Government Steve Reed, it was expanded in February and now has a budget approaching £6 billion. The plan? To throw pots of money towards disadvantaged neighborhoods, with tranches of £20 million allocated over a decade to almost 300 areas. Almost all the recipients are outside London.

Alongside that deluge of cash comes a democratic innovation: rather than local authorities determining how the money should be spent, newly formed “neighborhood boards” will “co-create” a plan alongside the local community, as well as the constituency MP and council. “Local people are best placed to determine what should happen in their neighborhoods” as Reed put it last autumn, “and they don’t need government to dictate it.”

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Where I live, in Portsmouth, two areas stand to gain £40 million from this largesse. One is Landport, labeled “Fratton West” by Whitehall mandarins. The other is Paulsgrove, in the north of the city. Each is a small part of a single council ward. In ONS-speak, they are “Middle layer Super Output Areas”: neighborhoods comprising between 2,000 and 6,000 households. Fratton West is on the low end of even that, with the area home to just 5,000 residents. Over the next decade, and thanks to Pride in Place, they can now expect additional spending of £4,000 per person.

But as more historically middle-class parts of the city are being given over to HMOs, halfway houses and student housing — as family homes become lucrative bedsits for landlords — Landport and Paulsgrove already have high amounts of social housing and amenities for young families. Both also have youth and community centers and are, by the squeezed nature of Portsmouth, Britain’s second-most densely populated city, rather green. Castle View Academy, in the heart of Paulsgrove, has been rebuilt in recent years. In 2022 it was described as a “Good” school by Ofsted.

My hometown of Bournemouth is an hour’s drive up the coast. Three areas there — West Howe, Boscombe West and Hamworthy West — will receive £60 million between them. While there is no doubt these are similarly disadvantaged areas, it’s again unclear what such tiny places (West Howe’s population is 7,000) will do with such large sums of money, and so quickly. What’s more, the directors of these newly convened neighborhood boards, who will be responsible for managing £20 million of public investment, and generating plans as soon as November, will be volunteers — and expected to hang around for years.

But what is even being measured? What counts as success? And given the scale of the scheme, and the hundreds of locations where it will apply, how can we guarantee there won’t be corruption, grift and poor value for money on an industrial scale? Nobody seems to have answers to such questions.

Which brings us back to good strategy. Throwing money at poor areas might sound laudable, and if there are specific objectives it can be. But it isn’t an end in itself. As with defense spending, the Government fails to grasp an obvious point: that conflating more cash with a strategy — or, in the case of military spending, a higher percentage of GDP — is moronic. It’s also a world away from the promise of mission-oriented government that defined Starmer in opposition. Where before he promised “laser-like focus” on key priorities, now the Government appears indifferent as to whether this spending will even create skills and jobs.

Given the Government is expected to spend £1.6 trillion over the next 12 months, £6 billion doesn’t sound like much. You might also ask why I, supposedly a socialist, would begrudge a few hundred neighborhoods such a tiny slice of luck.

That’s a fair question. Returning to my seaside roots — my now-wife and I left London in 2018 and came to Portsmouth, her native city — has shown me how far even a little money can go. The point, though, is it needs to be spent wisely.

The older I get, the more I realize how that undermines the argument for government-led investment. Profligacy has become the enemy of progress. This is particularly surprising given Starmer’s promise of “deliverism” before June 2024, and his purported desire to do politics differently.

If anything, indeed, Burnham’s promise of “Manchesterism”, combining public control and the elimination of outsourcing with a pro-business, pro-development instinct, seems truer to Starmer’s original vision. It’s certainly a more sensible political offer than maintaining the outsourcing debacle and intermittently hosing areas with cash.

In the case of Portsmouth, £100 million would move mountains in its revival — not least for Fratton and the city center, both abutting the Landport neighborhood set to receive funding from Pride in Place. In these particular areas, urban renewal, done assiduously, would serve working-class communities more than anyone.

The recent pedestrianization of Castle Road, a conservation area in the more affluent Southsea, could be repeated in half-a-dozen smaller streets in the area. Roads around major transport hubs could also be developed. The local authority could buy commercial property in both areas, anchoring investment by providing municipally-owned space for small business. Whatever’s left over could be put towards investment for tourism, and reversing some of the worst horrors of postwar development. Who knows: some money could even be found to fund apprenticeships for young people, a worthy idea given the rising problem of youth unemployment.

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Of course, a minimal tram network, as Portsmouth once boasted, and a connection to neighboring Gosport (thanks to Dr Beeching the largest town in England without a train station) would also be sensible, value-generating developments. But unlike the items listed above, these would be large-scale capital investments. The painful truth, which should also provide succor, is that many of Britain’s medium cities don’t even need that level of investment to kickstart a renaissance.

But money, spent wisely, still matters. A good example is the recently opened “Mid Cornwall Metro”. It may not be the maximalist option that locals wanted, the re-opening of a line that was also subject to Dr Beeching’s axe. But at a cost of £56 million it means that, for the first time since the Sixties, a direct train will run between Falmouth and Newquay, helping tourism and businesses as well as residents. A reminder: Pride in Place will be spending almost as much in Portsmouth, and more in Bournemouth, just without a clear vision or goals. These, apparently, are the options: either game-changing transport infrastructure, or youth clubs in a neighborhood which already has them.

Sometimes I wonder if we even want large towns and smaller cities to succeed at all. Bournemouth is a Victorian jewel on the South Coast, once home to everyone from Robert Louis Stevenson and Tolkien to Mary Shelley. Yet today its town center, a sort of Dubai for the late Victorians, is synonymous with vacant shop fronts and vape stores. Nearby Boscombe, another fashionable 19th-century resort, has long been home to innumerable bedsits — many of which are owned by DWP Housing Partnership. Those letters don’t stand for the Department for Work and Pensions, but a property company started by the notorious Dave Wells, a recently deceased slum landlord.

Where’s the wisdom of building a community center with taxpayer funds while letting such men run riot, and permitting what feels like infinity HMOs? A refurbished play-park is always welcome, but if the area is also warehousing recovering addicts — as Boscombe does — how is that meant to transform the life chances of those living there? Just as important, how does any of this help those addicts in recovery? Nor is Bournemouth alone: this is an issue that afflicts places right across southern England.

But rather than address issues like rent-seeking, outsourcing and the treatment of addiction, Starmer’s government has decided on the easy option: a Frankenstein of David Cameron’s “Big Society” conjoined with Fabian welfarism.

In fact, Pride in Place seems particularly bizarre when viewed against the long-heralded Local Government Reorganisation (LGR). Merging councils, and integrating services and back offices, is meant to reduce costs. For their part, new metro mayors, including one planned in future for Portsmouth, promise to create a singular point of local accountability. So why, at the very moment that the Government is trying to create efficiencies, and focus scrutiny on a single individual, is it creating more bureaucracy through neighborhood boards?

In 2020, The Economist wrote that “other countries have poor bits. Britain has a poor half.” The first step in addressing that should be to drive up productivity, and the quality of life, in our large towns and smaller cities. There’s no reason Sheffield should be poorer than Katowice, or Birmingham less affluent than Lyon. But turning things around requires good strategy — more even than money and the best of intentions. That means Westminster must stop looking at the world beyond the M25 as a basket case whose only hope is a one-off cash bonanza amid inexorable decline.

Once again, Stefan Zweig has it spot-on. He understands the strategic complexity of a game in which just repeating known moves doesn’t necessarily result in victory. The puzzle changes with each move you make — and your opponent’s response. This understanding is central to his novella The Royal Game, and it has significant bearing to our current political moment: Zweig’s characters bear an uncanny resemblance to geopolitical actors.

The story takes place on a ship traveling from New York to Buenos Aires in the Thirties. One of the passengers is the reigning world chess champion. He is described as uncouth, semi-illiterate, the opposite of intellectual; he’s a transactional type who is only interested in money, but endowed with the singular talent of being able to win chess games by just looking at what’s happening on the board. His opposite character is a cultured intellectual, Dr B, in many ways the better chess player. Unfortunately, Dr B has never played against a real opponent. He taught himself to play while in solitary confinement, from a book. Having memorized all the games detailed in the manual, he then attempted to play them in his head. When two play against each other, Dr B is tormented by the world champion, with his irritating, unpredictable moves. He’s not playing according to the formulas Dr B committed to memory. Inevitably, Dr B folds.

What is Zweig trying to tell us? That to triumph at chess requires anticipation. It is not merely about logic. There are people who try to play intellectually, who have a capacity to memorize entire games and then try to repeat them. But then there are intuitive geniuses like Zweig’s antihero, who hasn’t memorized anything: he just knows how to exploit his opponent’s mental weaknesses. Remind you of anyone?

I have heard Donald Trump being described as post-literate. He has no understanding of European history, and confuses all-important details, like who started the war in Ukraine. Nor does he really care when he gets things wrong. When he expressed regret at his statement that the EU was founded “to screw the US”, he was only apologizing for what he described as a “bad word”. It is a complete waste of time trying to fact-check what he says. What we should be doing instead is trying to anticipate his next move.

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But we Europeans seem to have an institutional incapacity to think two steps ahead. As a result, we aren’t asking the important questions: such as what capabilities does Ukraine need to win the war? Where are the bottlenecks, and how can we fix them? What are the end-game scenarios? What would be an acceptable second-best outcome? What does it mean to win, or to lose?

Instead of strategic game, we Europeans have principles. We want Russia to be evicted from all occupied lands. Some of Europe would like to see regime change enacted. But as the passive tense in these statements suggests, we want someone else to do it for us. We need someone else to do it; not being strategic, we haven’t invested in defense.

This also means that no one has an intelligent response to the question of what would happen if Putin, when pushed into a corner, were to opt for nuclear escalation? This was, after all, a scenario deemed credible by the CIA back in 2022. He would almost certainly not begin with an all-out nuclear strike. But what if he were to detonate an underwater nuclear bomb in the Baltic Sea, close to the shore of a NATO member state? The Baltic Sea is very shallow. A nuclear explosion could give rise to a tsunami. The radioactive isotopes released from a nuclear explosion could contaminate coastal regions. There would be airborne radioactive fallout.

This is only one of many grey-zone escalation scenarios to which we have no answers. At a loss, what our leaders do instead is repeat the mantra that they will do “whatever it takes” to help Ukraine defeat Russia. The fashionable expression was famously employed by Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank. He used it as a credible threat against speculators. But what worked so well in finance does not play so well in war. When you fight a war, you are subject to all manner of constraints, physical, human, financial and political. That’s what it means to be in a democracy: it dictates that we quite simply cannot do whatever it takes.

But what we do instead, as non-strategic players, is deploy some ostentatious symbolism. When Volodymyr Zelensky walked around the table at last week’s European Council, every European leader got up to embrace him. They wanted to produce a counterpoint to that sofa scene in the Oval Office. But pointless posturing is not a strategy. I have yet to see any strategic purpose behind anything any of the Europeans, including Starmer, have done in the past two weeks. Everything they have done, including Friedrich Merz’s decision to exempt defense spending from Germany’s constitutional fiscal rules, has been as a result of Trump’s first move. They aren’t anticipating his second.

Trump, by contrast, is an intuitive, transactional strategist. He looked at Zelensky and concluded that the Ukrainian president was not ready for peace. Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, then doubled down on this by saying: “I understand that many people believe that a peaceful solution or a ceasefire is a good idea, but we risk that peace in Ukraine is actually more dangerous than the war that is ongoing now.”

Washington’s suspicions thus confirmed, the President promptly responded by withdrawing military aid from Ukraine, switching off the US satellites and halting intelligence sharing. The Europeans keep on expressing shock and dismay at every Trump move. But if you look at the situation purely from a strategic standpoint, his actions should hardly come as a surprise. He certainly knows what he wants to happen next.

And he has a lot more room to escalate this stand-off. He could withdraw intelligence support for NATO. He could withdraw US troops from Eastern Europe. He could recuse himself from the commitment to NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause, on the grounds that the US has warned the Europeans not to engage in a proxy war against Russia. He could start withdrawing troops from Western Europe, too. He could warn US citizens against traveling to Europe and sound the alarm for investors. Has any European leader thought about how to respond to any one of these potential escalation steps? Or will it just be more photo ops with Zelensky?

Nor is Trump only just playing chess on the battlefield. He’s doing it in economic policy, too. On 2 April, the US will impose reciprocal tariffs on all trading partners. He could, and probably will, do more. Trump talked about 25% tariffs on most EU goods. If the Europeans retaliate, as they threatened, and if he responds in kind, what will the Europeans do then? Retaliate again? This is not a game they can win.

In chess, tit-for-tat is a terrible strategy when you play against an opponent who is prepared. The same goes for geopolitics. Forget the nonsense that there are no winners in trade wars. If you are the one with the large trade surplus — the EU’s surplus with the US is over $200bn — then you are going to be the bigger loser. A strategic response would be to take Trump’s trade tariffs on the chin, and to address the underlying problem of structural trade surpluses that make you vulnerable to such blackmail in the first place. But the Europeans have forgotten the art of thinking beyond the first move.

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The end of the transatlantic alliance

By Wolfgang Munchau

The extraordinary thing is we invented strategic diplomacy. Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian. The Austrian-French duo of Klemens von Metternich and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand were the masters of political strategy in the early 19th century. Around the same time, Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military historian, wrote his famous book On War, a masterpiece on strategic warfare.

So where have all our great European strategic thinkers gone? Certainly they are not in politics. Nor are they, I should add, in journalism. Instead, we now talk endlessly about relationships. The whole of the EU is a relationship project. We talk about the UK wanting to reset its relationship with the EU. We talk about the transatlantic relationship. Nobody is talking about strategic interests. But, then, if you believe in win-win games, as Europeans do, who needs strategy?

Zweig wrote The Royal Game in 1941, not long before he committed suicide, and the Nazis reigned supreme. He could see exactly what a lack of strategy had done to Europe. His chess story represented what was playing out in global politics as opposing forces clashed: the ancient order outsmarted by the new. Today, it’s happening again, and Europe is in check.

How times have changed since 1967, when socialist Israel still enjoyed the enthusiastic support of global “progressives”, but was so diplomatically isolated that it received no support at all from Europe or America when openly threatened with war by Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Before launching its pre-emptive attack, only France had been willing to sell weapons to Israel, but Charles de Gaulle stopped all further sales as soon as the fighting started. In Rome, meanwhile, a cargo of gas masks headed for Tel Aviv was intercepted at the airport, even though Egypt’s occupying force had recently killed many in Yemen with phosgene and mustard gas.

For Israel, however, the greatest penalty of its diplomatic isolation was the inevitability of the UN Security Council imposing a ceasefire as soon as it started to win. In 1967, this came after only six days of fighting. Israeli forces had just fought their way up the steep tracks onto the Golan Heights when they had to stop. I was there myself, eager to visit Damascus when the Soviet Union found itself unopposed at the Security Council in demanding an immediate ceasefire.

It was much the same during the Yom Kippur war of 1973. Caught by surprise by simultaneous offensives from both Egypt and Syria (overconfidence is definitely an Israeli trait), the Security Council did nothing as Israel suffered 10 times as many casualties as in all of the Gaza fighting to date. Moreover, when the US finally agreed to airlift urgent supplies, neither the UK nor France nor Spain would allow its transport aircraft to fly over their airspace. Only Portugal permitted a refuelling stop in the Azores, and even US supplies stored in Europe had to be flown there before being turned around to Israel.

But once again, as soon as Israel was able to overcome initial defeat, the inactive Security Council suddenly became active. With Britain just as vehement as the Soviet Union — which was desperate to stop the rout of the Arab armies it had lavishly equipped and trained for years — the Council powers tried to impose a ceasefire on 22 October. The Israelis tried to fight on regardless, but were forced to stop two days later when Henry Kissinger decreed a nuclear alert in response to Moscow’s threat to intervene with its airborne forces.

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At the time, the British and French were fiercely determined to gain the favour of the new oil nabobs who were such good customers for both Bond Street jewellery and jet fighters. As for Washington, whose foreign policy was entirely shaped by Kissinger, nobody wanted to bother with Israel, then still a poor country that had to spend one quarter of its GDP to rebuild its battered forces. This time, 50 years later, it has all been very different. The US, UK and European Union did not try to stop the Israeli counter-offensive against Hamas. The US found itself unimpeded in sending military supplies, while the Italian government came out in full support of Israel.

On the other side, in UN venues highly suited for empty words, Russia and China both ceremonially declared their support for the Palestinians. Yet Moscow has continued to co-operate smoothly with Israel’s air force as it operates over Syria to attack Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, while not one Chinese partner has withdrawn from any joint venture in Israel. Nor did the rising calls to reduce the bombardment of Gaza, led by Belgium of all countries and eventually backed by the White House, have any actual consequence — Israel’s bombing was reduced in any case by the diminishing supply of worthwhile targets.

Likewise, not one of the Arab countries with whom Israel has diplomatic relations has interrupted them in any way, while relations with Egypt have blossomed into a veritable security partnership over Gaza and Sinai. Even more important are the statements of Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, who has made it clear that normalising ties with Israel will not long be delayed once the fighting ends. Even though intelligence exchanges and multiple technology joint-venture negotiations have been underway for some years without any need for official relations, such assurances cannot be overestimated: they are, after all, definitive evidence that Hamas’s assault on October 7 has failed.

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The purpose of that deliberately horrific attack was precisely to stop any alliance between the Saudis and Israelis. That was certainly the goal of Iran, which has every reason to dread the fusion of Israel’s technology with Saudi Arabia’s financial resources: Tehran rightly fears this would entail some form of military co-operation, which in turn might bring Israeli air power within a short distance of its Iranian targets.

For now, though, Saudi Arabia’s declared goals are more prosaic. Just like the world’s venture capitalists, the Saudis believe that joint investments in Israeli tech will be profitable. But far more important is Israel’s proximity, which can greatly facilitate the training of Saudi engineers, technicians and skilled workers — thus achieving progress towards the central aim of putting Saudis to work and ending its reliance on expatriate labour. For Israel, it scarcely matters that the Saudis want a quiet Gaza ruled by reliably corruptible Palestinians, just as in the West Bank, before they start investing their billions; after all, the Israelis themselves obviously need some sort of political arrangement to retreat from Gaza without more rockets being launched the day after.

Israel’s diplomatic success is not just due to its changed economics however: its high-tech military equipment has arguably been more influential. It is the reason, for instance, why India has emerged as a steadfast ally, as it relies on Israeli tactical missiles for both its air and naval forces, along with much else. It is also the reason why the Pentagon does not begrudge military aid to Israel — it benefits from a constant backflow of valuable technology, including famous helmet-mounted display at the core of the F-35 fighters that now equip the Air Force, Navy and Marines.

Of course, such high-tech weaponry did nothing to prevent the October 7 attack, but it has proved itself since. Almost 10,000 Hamas rockets have been intercepted by the Iron Dome, avoiding many deaths and much damage, while a full-scale ballistic missile made in Iran and launched from Yemen was intercepted by an Arrow 3 out in space — mankind’s first instance of space combat. More prosaically, relatively few Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza, both a result of their training and their sophisticated equipment.

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Nothing could be more extreme than the contrast between Israel’s economic, technological and military strength and the chronic political paralysis afflicting the nation. But in this, modern Israel is also different. The day before Hamas’s attack, Israel was just about the world’s most divided country, torn bitterly between antagonistic camps that could not form a coalition government. But immediately afterwards, an instant coalition mobilised more than 230,000 civilian reservists, only to discover that, at a number of bases, the troop count was distinctly larger, because reservists over the age limits also turned up, some from as far away as Silicon Valley. There was even talk of calling in the military police to send these extras home, surely a first for an institution more usually tasked to return deserters to their units.

Yet no amount of wartime unity will remedy the political tumult — particularly over Gaza and the West Bank — that will return as soon as the fighting stops. Indeed, the Biden administration has been trying to exploit this division to induce the Israelis to accept a ceasefire, counting on the increasingly vocal demands of the hostages’ families to give up all other priorities and liberate them from their agony. Meanwhile, on the other side, an entire battalion of Israeli reservists, who had been withdrawn from Khan Yunis to be demobilised, staged a protest to denounce any reduction in the offensive. They were duly reprimanded for protesting while still in uniform.

Faced with nationwide Israeli support for the war in Gaza, Washington can still take solace in the respect it has earned thanks to the President’s unequivocal backing following October 7. After all, even the hardest of Israeli hardliners knows that US support might again soon be in demand, as it tries to drive back Hezbollah’s forces across the Litani river. Moreover, Biden’s demand that the Palestinian Authority be installed to govern Gaza has much support within Israel as well, simply because of the lack of any other alternative. For now, however, such a conclusion is still a long way off. The necessary ceasefire prelude to every post-war plan is still being held up by Hamas, which demands full control of the entire Gaza Strip, as if it had just won a war. So long as it persists, the Israeli army can continue its war — knowing that, this time, its days of isolation are over.

Don’t look to Netanyahu for the answer. He has been clear about the war’s objective: to destroy Hamas, particularly its military wing, the Izzedine ad-Din al-Qassem Brigades. Some of his far-Right politicians have gone further, calling for the levelling of Gaza, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, or expelling its entire population. But these amount to more of the same: rage-fuelled impulses. Neither Netanyahu nor anyone else in Israel’s government (some key members of the political opposition joined the cabinet after October 7) has yet articulated a coherent post-war strategy for Gaza, let alone for the larger dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. This failure bodes ill for both communities.

Even if the IDF eviscerates Hamas, Israel’s leaders will — regardless of whether Netanyahu survives politically — have to figure out how to organise Gaza in order to create and sustain stability there. Departing in haste from a place, large swathes of which have been reduced to rubble, will elicit universal condemnation. Worse, that step will not produce conditions within Gaza that increase Israel’s security, the justification for the war from the outset. The United States could walk away from its failed wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; those countries are distant from the American homeland. Israel cannot do the same with its neighbour.

Israel could decide to stay and occupy Gaza indefinitely. But given how much death and destruction has been wrought, IDF soldiers will police a hostile population of 2.3 million people, some proportion of whom will eventually turn to armed resistance, even if leaderless. The Israeli army has demonstrated, more than once, that it has the firepower to quell revolts; but heavy-handed repression coupled with a prolonged occupation will beget a self-sustaining cycle of violence out of which, in time, a variant of Hamas will emerge. The more draconian Israel’s occupation, the more likely a renewed intifada of sorts — one that will most probably spread to the West Bank. This means Israel will end up policing two Palestinian territories, resorting regularly to arrests, interrogations and military raids — all without diminishing Palestinians’ determination for a state they can call their own. Moreover, the United States, the one country truly indispensable to Israel, has already stated that an occupation of Gaza would be unacceptable, save for a “transition period”.

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As an alternative, a multinational peacekeeping force could be deployed in Gaza. But which countries will provide troops to patrol Gaza indefinitely given the calamitous conditions? The United States, Britain and France have been involved in discussions. But these countries have long been staunch supporters of Israel, and Gazans will understandably see their soldiers as Israel’s enforcers, if not impartial protectors. Deploying an all-Arab force might be a way around that problem, but because Israel’s war has aroused intense anger across the Middle East, the region’s rulers will be skittish about being seen as collaborators. And Egypt, a potential leading candidate in a peacekeeping operation, has joined Israel in blockading Gaza for nearly 20 years, inflicting tremendous suffering on its people, who are unlikely to welcome its troops. A UN peacekeeping force could be the answer. Yet the historical record casts doubt — Bosnia and Rwanda, for example — on their capacity to restore and maintain order in the face of large-scale violence, which cannot be ruled out in Gaza.

More fundamentally, peacekeeping troops, no matter their nationality, cannot provide day-to-day governance any more than a city’s police force can run the quotidian operations required for basic services, such as healthcare, education and housing (to say nothing of managing war-shattered Gaza’s reconstruction). Administering the territory in a manner that eventually meets the minimal needs of its citizens will be a multi-year task at minimum, and will require a government with local roots and popular legitimacy. Israel will understandably not allow any role for Hamas, but it has also ruled out one for the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. In any case, the PA commands scant respect among Palestinians. A recent poll found that a majority believes it should be dissolved and that it serves Israel’s interests more than theirs. That owes partly to the failure of its negotiations with Israel (since the 30-year-old Oslo Accords) to produce anything that remotely resembles a Palestinian state, or even to resist the construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the (continuing) evictions of Palestinians from their homes and grazing and farm lands.

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A viable governing authority in post-war Gaza will, therefore, have to be staffed by local notables who have earned public goodwill and respect. But those who do enjoy grassroots esteem are precisely the ones who will worry about forsaking it by joining what Gazans may come to view as a collection of quislings propped up by Israel to do its bidding. Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel will “continue to control security” in Gaza after the war suggests that one Israeli demand could be guaranteed access to Gaza for the IDF. His statement that the IDF could remain there for “an indefinite period” suggests that Israel may ask for much more than that. Even a government run by respected Gazans will lose legitimacy if it accedes to either demand, especially the second.

Aside from Israel’s lack of a strategy for post-war Gaza, since 1996 it has not had (with some exceptions such as Ehud Barak) a leader with a plan for addressing the political aspirations of Palestinians. And its Right-ward political trajectory since the latter half of the Nineties, and especially in recent years, makes it unlikely that one will emerge without fundamental political change. Yet history and geography dictate that Israelis and Palestinians must live side by side.

American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was recently vilified, and later reprimanded by the House, for using the slogan “from the river to the sea”, which Hamas has used in calling for Israel’s destruction. (Tlaib clarified that her plea was for equal rights in that space for Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike.) But it bears remembering that Right-wing Israeli politicians have long used these same words to underscore their pledge to continue the occupation and never allow a Palestinian state, of any kind. Or that the 1977 platform of Netanyahu’s Likud Party likewise declares that “between the Sea and the Jordan [river] there will be only Israeli sovereignty”. If Israel remains determined to reject a Palestinian state, it will perforce revert to quarantining Gaza, as it has since 2007, and managing the West Bank in the manner that it has since 1967. Based on the past, that amounts to a formula for continued violence — perhaps not on the scale of October 7 but bad enough to intermittently unsettle the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike, though not in equal measure.

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By Gregg Carlstrom

Sadly, as things stand, even a mediator determined to kickstart talks between Israelis and Palestinians toward a two-state solution — that Biden has said he will revive after the war to ensure “a vision of what comes next” — will find that the pathways to it have been all but blocked by now. The West Bank has been chopped up: Israel fully controls Area C, which accounts for 60%  of its area and contains its richest agricultural lands. Area A and Area B, both under the authority of the PA, albeit to varying degrees, are archipelagos cut off from each other by roads reserved for Israeli Jews and a constellation of settlements. Moreover, settlement construction has soared since 2000, and the number of settlers living in those deemed legal under Israeli law plus the illegal “outposts” has increased from under 200,000 in 2000 to more than 485,000 today. What’s more, even as the war in Gaza continues, the Israeli government seems intent on building additional new settlements.

How, under these circumstances, can any West Bank state that even minimally meets Palestinians’ aspirations be created so as to marginalise Hamas-like movements? To make matters worse, the atrocities Hamas committed could make those Israelis who have warned that any Palestinian state, regardless of location and configuration, will pose a mortal threat to the Jewish state much more influential in the country’s public square. The dismaying upshot, then, is that Israel has no coherent strategy for managing post-war Gaza, or for resolving the larger Israeli-Palestinian dispute — save for a tougher version of business-as-usual. And that, it ought to be clear by now, is a dead end.

Yesterday, as a result, the Finnish government sealed its entire border with Russia, with Estonia threatening to do the same. Meanwhile, the European Union’s border agency Frontex has pledged to deploy personnel to Finland’s border.

Predictably, Russia has denied any foul play, but few are convinced. Moscow’s actions are doubtless linked to Finland’s recent entry into Nato and its new defence pact with the United States, negotiated earlier this month. In response, a number of media outlets have interpreted this latest episode in Russia’s hybrid war as an act of revenge: threaten Russia’s security periphery, and face chaos on your own frontiers.

But, though deeply tied to its security calculus, Russia’s motivations go much deeper than that. Nearly two years into his war in Ukraine, these actions play a key role in supporting Putin’s fear-based domestic propaganda narratives. By pitting the encroaching threat of Nato against the livelihood of Russia’s public, he can justify the gradual reorientation of its society and economy towards a semi-permanent war-footing. At the strategic level, the move is also part of a broader vision of Russia’s geopolitical future, and its conception of competing hegemonies in northern and eastern Europe.

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Can Poland ever forgive Ukraine?

By Michal Kranz

Before last year, Finland had been dependably neutral towards Russia for decades. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a national reckoning in the country, and support for Nato membership among Finns jumped to nearly 80% in late 2022. Despite never being part of the Soviet Union, Finland is no stranger to Russian aggression. It was under Russian occupation for over a century until 1917, and famously repelled a Soviet invasion during the Second World War.

Finland’s reorientation has thus predictably been utilised by the Kremlin as an opportunity to play the victim, presenting the current situation on the Finnish-Russian border as an attack on Russians, rather than a crisis of its own making. “They have to keep up the appearances, to make up these kinds of narratives, for themselves, for the population in Russia,” Pentti Forsström, a senior researcher at Finland’s National Defence University, and a retired lieutenant colonel in the Finnish Defence Forces, told me. “Now they are using every bit and piece of what we are doing, [like] closing the border, [to argue] that we are the ones to blame.”

In response to the border closures, the governor of Russia’s Murmansk region that borders Finland has already introduced “a heightened state of readiness… to ensure the security of our residents”, while Russians living in Finland have staged protests accusing the Finnish government of disrupting cross-border family ties.

This type of rhetoric aligns perfectly with Putin’s claims regarding a Russophobic West that infringes upon “the Russian world” and threatens communities in its near-abroad. Though the West used to take them less seriously, such claims have now become part of a longstanding narrative to validate Russian expansionism: protecting ethnic Russians was a large part of Moscow’s official justification for its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as well as that of Georgia in 2008.

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Not only that, but a crisis like the one along Finland’s border provides fresh “evidence” for the Kremlin to keep everyday Russians convinced of Nato’s aggressive presence. And this propaganda fodder is more necessary now than ever. Russia is quietly transitioning its economy and defence industry to a long-term war posture, and is facing a resurgence of political pushback from its people as it tries to recruit more troops for its fight in Ukraine. It is crucial that ordinary Russians continue to see the conflict as an existential threat to their way of life, for which it is worth sacrificing livelihoods — and lives.

Finland’s growing military co-operation with the US, and recent promises of support from Poland — a regular focus of Kremlin propaganda — make Finland a perfect place to roll out this strategy. For this reason, talking heads in the Russian media are already hinting that this is only the beginning of Russia’s hybrid war against Finland. In one notable clip, TV host Tigran Keosayan (who is married to the infamous head of Kremlin propaganda outlet RT, Margarita Simonyan) laid out the logic of this rhetorical campaign. “Dear Finns,” he said recently on his programme, “first you banned us from entering by car, now by bicycle” — a reference to the bicycles Russian authorities had allegedly given to migrants on their way to the Finnish border. “You leave us with no choice,” he finished, as a cartoon of a tank appeared onscreen.

However, there is a further element to Russia’s strategy that often gets lost in our feverish news cycle. Finland’s position in the north-eastern Baltic Sea and its proximity to Russia’s strategically important Kola Peninsula have made it critical for Russia’s naval ambitions for more than a century.

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For Russia, access to warm-water ports is a permanent objective, essential for projecting global power. A neutral Finland had meant that St Petersburg — which Peter the Great originally built as the country’s navigational and cultural gateway to the West — could provide Russia with a secure maritime corridor for a naval presence in the Baltic. But since the shifting of alliances over Ukraine, this has changed. With Finland now joining Estonia within Nato’s embrace, the military alliance could conceivably blockade the entirety of the Gulf of Finland, reducing Russia’s sea access to its militarily significant (but territorially microscopic) Kaliningrad exclave.

For years now, Russia has been laying the groundwork to capitalise on warming temperatures in the Arctic Sea, which, in addition to opening up new trade networks and oil and gas reserves, present an opportunity to literally circumnavigate this hypothetical Nato blockade via its northern coastline. And this goal is intimately connected to the security of the ice-free Arctic port of Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula, which hosts a significant Russian nuclear-deterrence force just a stone’s throw north-east of Finland.

By this ominous logic, however, Russia’s geopolitical interests in the region are driven by the same strategic impetus as Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its push to cut Ukraine off from the Black Sea in 2022: a desire to control crucial waterways that allow Russia to escape the prison of the Eurasian landmass. Presumably with such considerations in mind, the Russian military confirmed earlier this year that it would be splitting its Western Military District in two and creating a new locus of military activity right along Finland’s borders, reviving the Leningrad Military District that had been dormant since 2010.

Well before this month’s escalation, it was proof that the escalating hybrid war playing out on Finland’s border is only the beginning of a broader Russian campaign against the country. For Putin, this is the culmination of his twin desires: to bolster his jingoistic narrative at home; and to reinvest in a neglected theatre of great-power competition. For Finland, though, this all means only one thing — the period of quiet rapport it enjoyed between Nato and Russia has come to a definitive end, replaced by an anxious new world of menace and instability.

Even the most ardent supporters of the maximalist victory-at-all-costs narrative are now starting to admit that the Nato-backed counteroffensive has failed. Despite billions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of casualties, Ukraine has barely made any territorial gains, while Russia continues to make significant advances, mostly in the north-east.

In a repeat of its year-long campaign to capture the town of Bakhmut, Russia is now doubling down on its efforts to capture the eastern city of Avdiivka, which has been a symbol of Ukrainian resistance since 2014. According to Oleksiy Arestovych, Zelenskyy’s presidential advisor until January 2023 and now a staunch opponent, the fall of Avdiivka, which would be the seventh city in a row lost by Ukraine, is almost certain. “Everyone in the military knows that troops from the southern front have been transferred to Avdiivka; this means goodbye to the southern offensive,” he further noted.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Arestovych also called the counteroffensive a “disaster” and directly accused Zelenskyy of making several strategic mistakes: “There will be no return to the borders of 1991, and there will be no Crimea in the near future,” he said. Even the US’s much-vaunted provision of long-range ATACMS missiles — which have allowed Ukraine to strike at several targets in Crimea — appear to be falling short of expectations: Russia’s military recently claimed that it had shot down two of them, showing that it is rapidly adapting to new military circumstances.

This reality — which many had predicted — is now starting to dawn even on Western pro-war pundits. As Max Hastings, a long-time believer in military support for Ukraine, put it, “whatever hawkish blowhards may say, the liberation of Crimea and the eastern Donbas is unlikely to happen”.

The real shocker, however, is that this is now being acknowledged, if in slightly more nuanced terms, by Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny. Last week, in a surprisingly frank interview with The Economist, Zaluzhny said that “just like in the First World War we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate. There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough”. This would require some major military-technological innovation — but “there is no sign that this is around the corner”, he added.

Zaluzhny made several other striking admissions. According to the general, Russia lost at least 150,000 troops — a much lower estimate than the numbers previously circulated by Ukrainian and Western sources. If that is true, it means that Russia has lost almost as many troops as Ukraine, despite having a much larger population; US and European estimates put the Ukrainian death toll at well above 100,000. Not only has this undercut Ukraine’s assumption that it could stop Russia by bleeding its troops, as Zaluzhny admits, but it reveals that, in fact, it is Ukraine that has been bled of troops, in large part as a result of the counteroffensive itself. As the general put it: “Sooner or later we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to fight.” The Government, in response, has reacted by enacting harsher conscription policies, but these are already showing their limits. As the Deputy Minister of Defence Natalia Kalmykova recently admitted in a television interview, “hundreds of thousands of citizens are currently trying to avoid mobilisation”.

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By Aris Roussinos

Zaluzhny doesn’t go as far as saying that the offensive should be abandoned, but this is one conclusion that could be drawn from his assessment that the war has reached a stalemate. Given Zaluzhny’s rank — and the fact that he went on record with this extremely bleak analysis — it’s not surprising to learn that this assessment is shared by most people in Zelenskyy’s entourage. In last week’s Time magazine cover story, Simon Shuster claimed that “Zelenskyy’s associates themselves are extremely skeptical about the [current] policy”.

The one person who seems unwilling to face reality, however, is Zelenskyy himself. In a recent interview with NBC, the Ukrainian president rebuked the notion that the war is in a stalemate — and indeed his office publicly chastised Zaluzhny for his claims, suggesting that his comments would help the Russian invasion. As The New York Times notes, this “signal[s] an emerging rift between the military and civilian leadership at an already challenging time for Ukraine”, as testified by the recent dismissal of Ukraine’s head of special operations forces. In the aforementioned interview, Zelenskyy reiterated his long-standing position: that Ukraine will not negotiate with Russia until it entirely withdraws from Ukrainian territories, concluding that Ukraine is not ready to concede its freedom to the “fucking terrorist Putin”.

As Shuster noted, however, “Zelenskyy’s belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers”, who described Zelenskyy’s conviction as “immovable, verging on the messianic”. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides told Shuster in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

Such pessimism, and distrust in the country’s civilian leadership, is palpable even on the frontlines. “We’re not moving forward,” the aide said. Some frontline commanders, he continued, have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the president. He further noted that, even if the US and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, Ukraine doesn’t have enough troops to use them.

The image of Zelenskyy that emerges is thus a truly desperate one: an increasingly isolated and delusional leader, pacing up and down his bunker, demanding a total military victory that everyone knows to be impossible. What’s tragic is that many of the claims now being aired by Zelenskyy’s own people have been made by critics of Nato strategy in Ukraine for over a year — only to be dismissed as “Putin talking points”. How many lives were sacrificed in the pursuit of an impossible military aim? And how many could have been saved if the West had been more willing to tolerate an open discussion about the limitations of Ukraine’s, and Nato’s, stated aims?

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Nato won't win a long war in Ukraine

By Thomas Fazi

Just 10 months ago, after all, Shuster himself was among those lionising Zelenskyy, writing the article in which the Ukrainian president was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year”, helping to forge the Hollywood-esque character he now can’t escape. Back then, the Western media had its own talking points, but they now appear to have changed. Shuster’s latest article, and others along the same lines, don’t just signal a rift among Ukrainian ranks — but among Western ranks as well. The message to Zelenskyy from certain quarters seems to be: “It’s time to fall in line.”

So, what comes next? Given the situation, there aren’t many options left for Ukraine. One is to hunker down and prepare for a long war of attrition — one in which Russia has the advantage, as Zaluzhny himself notes. But this would require a constant supply of weapons from the West, in even greater quantities than now, for which there is declining political support, especially in the US. Just before Hamas’s attack, Congress had frozen US aid to Ukraine.

Biden hoped to overcome Republican resistance to sending more money to Ukraine by linking aid to Ukraine and aid to Israel (for which there is overwhelming bipartisan support) into a single bill worth a whopping $100 billion. To further drive the message home, the President drew a direct link between Putin and Hamas: “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: they both want to completely annihilate a neighbouring democracy.” He also reiterated the claim that “if we don’t stop Putin’s appetite for power and control in Ukraine, he won’t limit himself just to Ukraine”.

Such excitable arguments, however, increasingly carry less weight in Washington. Indeed, the new GOP House speaker, Mike Johnson, spurned Biden’s request and demanded a vote on Israel aid alone, in a testament to just how toxic the issue of funding for Ukraine has become among Republicans. The US announced a new $425 million security package last Friday, but fell way short of the $60 billion requested by the White House. It’s likely that a new round of aid for Ukraine will be approved in the end, but it’s clear that US support for Ukraine is nearing its expiry date.

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Once that happens, given the EU is neither able nor willing to plug the gap left by the US, Ukraine will be left with no other choice but to negotiate a truce, if not an actual peace deal, which will necessarily involve some kind of territorial compromise with Russia. According to NBC, the West has already begun secret talks with the Ukrainian government about what peace negotiations with Russia might entail. Publicly, however, the topic is still taboo — not only because it would be a de facto admission of defeat for Nato, but also because it would have to explain why it prohibited Kyiv from conducting peace negotiations with Moscow in March 2022, when Ukraine had a chance to end the conflict on better terms than it could ever hope for today.

This situation has been further complicated in the past month. For the wars in Israel-Gaza and Ukraine are more closely related than one may think — not in the simplistic good-versus-evil terms used by Biden, but because they effectively represent two fronts of a global proxy war in which the West is pitted against a growing front encompassing Russia, China and Iran. This is why the West can’t accept a public defeat in Ukraine at the moment. What happens in the Middle East has direct implications for the conflict in Ukraine and vice versa, and both sides know it.

Ultimately, however, just as in Ukraine, it is hard to see how the West can win in Gaza. Even if Israel succeeds in completely eradicating Hamas, the high civilian death count will only harden anti-Western sentiments in the region, and beyond. If the West believed encouraging war would rekindle its waning influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, on both fronts, it seems we are fighting a losing battle.

That was the first lesson of the war: Putin collided head-on with the paradoxical logic of strategy. Military alliances need a shared enemy. Once the Cold War ended, Nato became weaker and weaker, because diverse interests — including the desire to spend less — naturally arose once there was no enemy to threaten all. Nato became so weak that in Europe there was talk of a military alliance without the US. Only irrelevant Leftists said this straight out, but many mainstream politicians across Europe kept hinting that the time had come for Nato to be replaced by a European Union alliance.

By February 2022, Nato was evidently no longer strong enough to deter Russia, so Russia attacked Ukraine. Because Russia attacked Ukraine, Nato suddenly had a threatening enemy, and the alliance quickly became strong once more. Many Nato countries sent military aid to Ukraine rapidly, which was essential materially, and very encouraging morally. Some of it was for show, but much was useful and some was just smart. Norway, for example, immediately sent 5,000 LAW hand-launched anti-tank rockets. Old, cheap and limited in range but the perfect weapons for the first days of this war, because anybody could use them even without training. Just point and shoot at an armoured vehicle.

Not only did Nato wake up, but it also grew. Within days of the invasion, the alliance started expanding. Australia, not a Nato member but an official “partner”, sent military aid (including Bushmaster armoured cars by airlift over 19,600 kilometres). Japan, not a Nato member, sent important financial aid. Even before they applied for Nato membership, Sweden and Finland also sent military aid.

The second lesson of the war concerned the silent role of seapower. In April, the sinking of the Russian flagship Moskva 80 nautical miles south of Odessa attracted much attention. Videos of the burning ship were everywhere. But there are no videos of aero-naval battles in the North Atlantic: even though Russia has effective attack submarines, both nuclear-powered and diesel-electric in Atlantic waters, the US and Canada have been able to support Ukraine by shipping aid entirely unmolested. Because Russian naval forces are totally deterred, Western Europe has its safe material and strategic depth in the Atlantic.

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Russia's 18th-century war

By Edward Luttwak

The third lesson of the war was a demonstration of the levels of strategy. Strategy operates at different levels: the tactical level, the operational level, the theatre-of-war-level, and finally, the level of Grand Strategy. It is possible to lose a war at any of those levels, but to be successful it is necessary to be at least adequate at each and every one.

The Tactical Level

In this war, the first fight took place at the Antonov aviation company’s airfield just outside Kyiv, a face-to-face tactical battle for the landing strip. It was to be used for Russian troop transports to fly in the assault force that aimed to swiftly seize the capital.

The Russian troops who arrived were elements of the 11th Guards Air Assault Brigade and the 31st Guards Air Assault Brigade — Russia’s elite troops. The Ukrainians had no such force to oppose them, only whoever happened to be at or near the airfield: some members of the so-called “National Guard” — just gendarmes with small arms — and then whoever could arrive right away from Kyiv: some scattered Ukrainian troops, civilian volunteers with whatever weapons they could find, a few elite soldiers attached to headquarters, even some exiled Georgian Legion volunteers…

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It was a recipe for a massacre: the cohesive, elite Russian units should quickly have killed them all. But because they had expected no resistance at all (as both Russian Intelligence and the always-wrong CIA had forecast), they were shocked by the ferocious resistance, and soon had to flee into the nearby woods. A Russian tactical victory would not have won the war, but the tactical defeat at the Antonov field was catastrophic, because the entire Russian war plan was based on a fast Coup de Main to seize central Kyiv in a matter of hours.

The Operational Level

When armoured columns invade a country, they should advance on multiple vectors. That way, if one vector is stopped by the enemy (a tactical defeat), other vectors can continue to advance, forcing the enemy to retreat or be captured, turning tactical failure into an operational-level victory.

But in the Russian plan, there was only one vector: all the available forces were to drive to Kyiv. But when the Antonov seizure failed, and thousands of airborne troops could not be flown in, Russia’s only advancing vector had to stop. Recall that double column of armoured vehicles and supply trucks in those satellite pictures: it could neither advance nor retreat without entangling itself in thousands of cumbersome U-turns. With tanks and other heavy vehicles, stop-and-go uses up vast amounts of fuel, and with many vehicles stranded, the double column was exposed to an increasing number of bold attacks.

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The material losses were great, and the moral defeat greater because the Russians could not redeem the catastrophic operational-level failure that followed their tactical defeat at the Antonov field, because of a yet more fundamental error at a higher level of strategy.

The Level of Theatre Strategy

Geography enters the picture at the level of theatre strategy. Ukraine is much smaller than the Russian Federation, the largest country in the world. But Ukraine is not small — it is Europe’s largest country.

In August 1968, when the Soviet Union decided to invade Czechoslovakia (one fifth the size of modern Ukraine), it sent some 800,000 troops to invade from East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and westward from Ukraine. By the first night of the invasion, there were occupation troops everywhere, ready to stifle any Czech resistance.

But Putin, until 2022 a careful poker player who won territories without any fighting at all, became a reckless gambler. He invaded Europe’s largest country with a very small army of some 130,000 (including field dentists), hence he had no powerful combat forces ready to intervene when the Kyiv air assault gambit failed.

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The level of Grand Strategy

What counts at the level of Grand Strategy are two sets of fundamentals. First is Mass: population, economy, technology. Then Mass x Cohesion = power. With no cohesion, there is no strength at all, even with a lot of Mass. Second is what a country has abroad: allies, neutrals, enemies.

As for its economy, Russia, though not a rich country, is entirely self-sufficient in food and energy. This is not true of most countries. The same G-7 sanctions that could not stop Russia could stop Xi Jinping’s China, which must choose between fighting wars and eating protein. Yes, more than a year of rice reserves and some months of frozen pork can be stored, but not the immense amounts of soya beans China imports to feed animals for milk, eggs and meat.

We all saw that Russia is weak in allies, because instead of attracting neutrals to its side, it frightened them into joining Nato or at least to remain neutral. Russia is also weak in allies because, even though it has a navy, it is not a maritime power. Only the nearby Central Asian countries and Mongolia — facing an expansionist China — still need the counter-weight of Russian power, and duly fear its waning in Ukraine. But to succeed at the level of grand strategy, it would need something else: the willing cooperation of insular, peninsular countries and coastal countries that only a maritime power can have.

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But Russia still has sheer magnitude on its side. With many more people than any other European country, unless Putin changes his mind or loses power, he can keep trying and failing in Ukraine until he gets it right. Of its two million reservists, only 300,000 have been recalled to serve, of which 200,000 might reach the front. But 200,000 are enough to double the forces now fighting at the front, and once they catch up in combat experience, they could stop Ukraine’s victories. In other words, Russia’s mass means that it can lose many battles and yet still keep fighting.

White House staffers, and Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, would ridicule Biden’s repetitious perorations that simply ignored the expert consensus: both the civilian and military chiefs in the Pentagon, backed by leading “think tank” experts, fully agreed with Generals McChrystal and (Dr.) Petraeus. They were the commanders in Afghanistan who believed that progress was accelerating as more and more Afghans were rejecting fanaticism to embrace progress… and the first-class experts agreed with them! Petraeus would soon promulgate his Counterinsurgency manual FM 3-24 ( my review: “counterinsurgency as military malpractice”).

On April 1 2011, when Mazar-i-Sharif demonstrators attacked the UN Assistance Mission, they killed three “Christians” including the female Norwegian colonel Siri Skare. This after President Karzai (yes, him) had denounced a Koran-burning incident in the United States. At no point did Petraeus stop and deplore the Koran burning, nor the murders, or the responsibility of made-in-USA Karzai for the fiasco.

Biden’s Afghanistan problem was that he could not persuade Obama because Obama was already fully persuaded. But as a new President new to Washington, new even to politics Obama simply refused to oppose the Washington consensus of  media-savvy generals, would-be tough think-tankers and CIA-friendly columnists. It all had to wait till Biden himself became President, but by then his Afghanistan policy (evacuate) had become Trump’s and so…

But in 2009, Biden’s other problem was even bigger: one more reason he wanted the US out of Afghanistan (and Iraq) was to focus on China as a rising threat, when very few Americans agreed with him, and none in the White House. At that very time — the worst of the financial crisis — the US was asking the Europeans, Japan and also China to pump up public spending to save the world economy that was falling into a depression. The Europeans were skeptical (“Crisis? What crisis?  Just your Lehman crisis, you fix it”, was the European response). Only the British responded, and the Chinese, who immediately launched Belt and Road, and other projects that deliberately employed tens of thousands with shovels — not just bulldozers. Obama was grateful and the US Treasury Secretary Geithner was ecstatic —it took two years (!) for the Europeans to react, and even then they moved very slowly, and spent very little.

In this climate, Biden was again isolated when he pointed out that China’s helpful public spending included very fast-growing military spending that contradicted its Peaceful Rise policy proclaimed in 2004. Having long chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Biden heard warnings from several experts including the present writer [The Rise of China and the Logic of Strategy Harvard U Press 2012] and more importantly, Kevin Rudd, then Australia’s prime minister, who explained that China’s leaders believed that the fatal “General Crisis of Capitalism” had finally arrived. It had come too late for the USSR but just in time for the PRC to become the world’s most powerful state.

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America's failed Machiavelli

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When Obama White House aides plaintively asked (the Treasury was more dignified) for fast spending from the PRC, its leaders took it as their licence to assert China’s power in all directions. Of that I received a personal intimation from Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying 傅莹. She had always been a charming lady, but when I met her in Beijing at the height of the 2009 financial crisis she was almost shouting: “America is down! China is up!”. When I later complained to Zheng Bijian author of the Peaceful Rise policy he replied: “Shīkòng de mǎ”, 失控的 — “runaway horses”.

Rudd’s opinion was especially weighty because he was considered pro-Chinese (he happily speaks Chinese and even has a Chinese name, Lù Kèwén). In that year, 2009, Australia published a Defence White Paper that called for a broad coalition to contain China. At the time, India’s PM Singh refused to be diverted from the economy, Japan had its first neutralist government and Washington liked China better than Europe. It was only later that Japan’s 2010 Senkaku incident — which resulted in anti-Japanese riots, border intrusions in the Himalayas, and incidents at sea — changed attitudes. And it was only at the end of 2011 that Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State spoke of rotating out of the Middle East to focus on China, with Susan Rice on Obama’s staff strongly disagreeing… until Xi Jinping ‘s 2015 visit ended all illusions.

Again, as on Afghanistan, Biden’s China policy was anticipated by Trump, who in his own blundering way finally implemented Kevin Rudd’s coalition strategy, meeting Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe even before his inauguration, and India’s Modi as soon as he could, building up the alliances; while his White House staff cut off China from the US technology pipeline, in spite of Silicon Valley’s resistance. So it is only now that Biden can finally implement his 2009 policy — covered in opprobrium because the Afghan army had turned out to be a fraud exactly as he had predicted, leaving him only the cruel choice between sending troops back to Afghanistan or chaotic flight. But on China at least he has full support at home, and in every country around China except for Pakistan — which will not receive one cent more from Biden.