America has no Ukraine Plan B

US foreign policy establishment blindly intent on beating Russia on the battlefield and crushing its economy. Neither will happen, writes ‘The Asia Times’.

Somewhere last weekend a few dozen former Cabinet members, senior military officers, academics and think tank analysts met to evaluate the world military situation.

Now, the US foreign policy establishment has staked its credibility on humiliating Russia by pushing NATO’s borders to within a few hundred kilometers of Moscow, while crushing Moscow’s economy through sanctions.

It has pulled every chit it has with European governments, mobilizing its legion of journalists, think tankers and stipended politicians to promote the Ukrainian proxy war, with the intent of degrading Russia’s armed forces and ultimately forcing regime change in Russia.

Instead of collapsing, Russia has become the focal point for a reorganization of global supply chains and their financing, and its economy is growing, rather than shrinking by half, as President Biden promised in March 2022.

Ukraine is running out of soldiers and can’t agree on a new conscription law. One prominent military historian expostulated, “Everywhere you go in Ukraine you see young men hanging around and not in uniform! Ukraine refuses to go all in.”

Russia produces anywhere between four and seven times more artillery shells than Ukraine. Ukraine’s air defenses are exhausted as its old Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles have been fired and NATO’s stocks of Patriot missiles are dwindling.

Russia has an inexhaustible supply of Soviet-era large bombs fitted with cheap guidance systems, fired accurately at Ukrainian targets from Russian aircraft standing 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) off. With five times Ukraine’s population, Russia is winning the war of attrition.

Taking the war to Russia’s homeland and destroying major infrastructure is one way to transform the proxy war with Ukraine into a general European war. Another is to deploy NATO soldiers in Ukraine, something that French President Emmanuel Macron has broached (but almost certainly does not intend to do).

Remarkably, not a word was said about a possible negotiated solution to the conflict.

Russia would emerge triumphant and American assets in Western Europe would be degraded. The impact on America’s world standing would be devastating: As several attendees observed, Taiwan is watching carefully to see what happens to American proxies.

The rules of the meeting prevent me from saying much more but I am free to report what I told the gathering: Sanctions against Russia have failed miserably because Russia had access to unlimited amounts of Chinese (as well as Indian and other) imports, both directly and through a host of intermediaries including Turkey and the former Soviet republics.

But Russia’s economic resilience in the face of supposedly devastating sanctions is only one reflection of a great transformation of world trade. China’s exports to the Global South doubled during the past three years and China now exports more to the South than to developed markets. China’s unprecedented exporting success, in turn, stems from the rapid automation of Chinese industry, which now installs more industrial robots per year than the rest of the world combined.

The assembled dignitaries, a representative sampling of the foreign policy establishment’s intellectual and executive leadership, simply couldn’t imagine a world in which America no longer gave the orders.

They are accustomed to running things and they will gamble the world away to keep their position.

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