The escalation feedback loop

Duck and cover

Many of us thought that the conflict in Ukraine could somehow be contained, that the situation could still be managed and steered towards an uneasy compromise before further triggers in the escalation spiral were reached.

It seems we were wrong about this.

Just last week, it looked as though the war was drawing to a close due to the impending collapse of Ukraine’s defensive capabilities. This seemed as though it would lead to something akin to surrender, in spite of the mainstream media’s talk of negotiations that could be somewhat favorable from Ukraine’s point of view, or even the “freezing” of the conflict as per Mearsheimer’s optimal outcome.

But the “permission” of the Biden administration for long-range missile strikes and the predictable Russian response to these actions have changed the outlook significantly.

The background, of course, was that Ukraine’s situation was progressing towards the inevitable end that was obvious at the outset of the conflict almost three years ago.

This was only postponed by the machinations of the West towards prolonging its proxy conflict as long as possible, wasting the life and limb of what will probably amount to a couple of million people on both sides, totally devastating large parts of Ukraine, and at the very least displacing ten million of its citizens.

Even in early 2022, it was entirely clear to anyone with a pair of working eyes that Ukraine did not have the capacity to succeed in a drawn-out conflict, that the initial dominant positions established by Russia could never actually be overturned by the Ukrainan armed forces, and that a protracted attrition was the best they could hope for, barring actual NATO involvement in a wider hot war.

The objectives of Ukraine’s backers, on the other hand, were always to destabilize and unbalance Russia with no regard to the costs for the Ukrainian people, but until the beginning of this week, it seemed that they would indeed stop short of actually pushing Russia to the brink of a nuclear exchange. This tells us something of the importance of this conflict, and how desperate this side is to actually achieve its long-term goals.

So the war was obviously approaching its end, at least insofar that the Ukrainian state found itself unable to stave off the progressive collapse of its defensive lines. The European and American funding seemed to be drying up, which wouldn’t help that much anyway since the troops and potential reserves were and still are so attrited and demoralized that losses cannot be replaced, and since the West, up until now refused to take part in openly attacking the Russian Federation (through the much-debated long-range attacks on Russian assets).

Yet this changed just a few days ago, with the ominous “permission” granted by the Biden administration for the long-range missile strikes, and the inevitable Russian response has brought a process of escalation in motion that may be very difficult to halt at this point.

For that matter, I probably don’t need to point out the profound dishonesty in how the media frames these developments for the vast majority of my readers, but it may be useful to make a few observations here.

So the general sentiment, which is reinforced by constant propaganda and apparently shared by the bodies of elected officials in the West, is that NATOs “permission” was a long-overdue relinquishing of unjustified constraints upon Ukraine’s rightful defensive actions. A permission that ought to have been given much earlier if it wasn’t for the indecisiveness or even cowardice on the part of Western leaders.

Russia’s response accordingly gets interpreted as a totally disproportionate and irresponsible nuclear sabre-rattling in the face of what ostensibly is a serious challenge to its long-term war aims in the Ukraine conflict.

This is a quite brilliant sleight of hand.

The actual situation is that the “ATACMS” affair literally involves NATO forces attacking Russia due to the character and infrastructural prerequisites of the equipment involved. This is the main problem in the Russian administration’s perspective — that the armed forces of the United States, in this week’s missile launches, are now undeniably taking part in attacks on sovereign Russian territory. If one could gloss over incursions obviously supported by foreign “advisors” or mercenaries, there’s no possible ambiguity here. Russia is now under direct attack by the US military, and the Russian chain of command, management and political hierarchy can no longer get around this fact even if it wanted to.

The actual tactical importance of these attacks is negligible. 40-50 ATACMS, with 10% already wasted on some Soviet-era ammo dump in Bryansk, were never going to change the overall trajectory of the war.

At the same time, the entire process, under the veil of the “permission” rhetoric, gets marketed as simply a measured response by the embattled and heroic Ukrainian administration. A response which at the very least will give Ukraine a fighting chance at a favorable outcome in the negotiations that seemed to draw near, but which according to many imaginative propagandists may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of the degraded Russian war machine and its flagging public support.

With most of the European Parliament rising to its feet in enthusiastic applause over Zelenskij’s announcement of the ATACMS strike, and succeeding calls by parliamentarians to greenlight further strikes on sovereign Russian territory, it’s obvious that a significant portion of the Western political establishment is in full agreement.

Russia’s predictable response is now painted out as the dangerous, inexcplicable and unjustified escalation of the conflict, suddenly threatening the entire West with nuclear weapons in a desperate move to address the rapidly deteriorating outlook in terms of the Ukraine war.

But why is Russia’s response predictable?

Well, again, because we’re seeing an actual direct attack on Russian territory by NATO forces. It’s not openly designated as such by the West, but everyone, and not least the Russian political establishment, knows full well that this is the case. This means that the Russian response is essentially determined. The current Russian administration has its own set of hawks which will now hardly be placated with anything less than a shot across the bow, whereas a non-response would likely invite further coordinated measures on the part of the West.

And in terms of a non-response — we need to recall what the Ukraine war originally was about.

Its current phase began as the Russian response to NATO expansion and the absolutely intolerable situation of Western long-range strike capabilities on the doorstep of the very Russian heartland. A stone’s throw from Moscow. So if Russia were to sit idly by when NATO not only establishes and entrenchs this very capability, but actively attacks Russian territory with such long-range weaponry — and if this capacity would be maintained after a cease-fire — Russia’s main objective for the entire conflict would be relinquished. They would be effectively checkmated.

It seems conceivable that Russia could have just sat back and ratcheted up the war effort in Ukraine, attempting to push for a rapid end to the conflict while consolidating their gains and trying to enforce a Ukrainian surrender. This would have signalled weakness, however, and brought with it further provocations since Russia’s “red lines” would be considered just hot air, likely necessitating some kind of response in the near future anyhow.

And the prospect of intensified long-range strikes at Russian population centers would be politically difficult for the Russian administration. Actual attacks of this kind would very likely improve Ukraine’s outcome in any upcoming negotiations, increasing the probability of a “frozen conflict” and force Russia to give up some of its war objectives, most of which, in the current situation, are reasonable minimal requirements from a security perspective.

In this sense, the West has cleverly maneuvered Russia into a corner from which it’s going to be very difficult to escape, but this is also why the situation should be quite alarming for the rest of the world as well.

The media cycle now reinforces this escalation feedback loop, with the news feed looking like this:

What is likely to happen now?

So the argument for Zelenskij’s NATO-backed “no-fly zone” which was requested and denied during the very first days of the war suddenly got turned up a notch. I expect calls for ABM systems to be deployed on Ukrainian territory as a direct response to Russia flexing the IRBM weapon systems, which would be an additional step towards realizing the concerns that ultimately brought Russia to war in 2022.

In other words, with both ABM systems and long-range strike capabilities in place in Ukraine, the knife would literally be at Russia’s throat.

The situation is also ripe for a false flag of whatever kind you could think of. Ukraine’s current regime would certainly not mind a limited nuclear strike on its territory if that could expand the war and trigger a full-scale NATO mobilization.

And IF, let’s just hypothesize here, if there’s a coordinated media report in two or three days to the effect that Russia actually has hit Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon, complete with convincing imagery and purported first-hand witness accounts that get reproduced throughout every digital space — how would you know it was real, and how could you prove it?

And even if you could show it was faked, who would listen?

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery.

It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all.

Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

Orwell, 1984