The return of the 'resolutional' war
From the policy of deterrence to that of aggression. The paradigm shift in the declination of war as an instrument of imperial power opens the doors to an era of chaos, beyond which - probably - a new, great war in Europe looms.
The Korean War is probably the last that the United States fought with the strategic intent and will to win it on the field. As we know, it ended in a draw. From that moment on, the USA - which is certainly the most warmongering country of the modern era - has made the armed forces, and therefore war, essentially an instrument of deterrence, aimed at containing communist enemies - USSR, People's Republic Chinese - in their political-ideological expansion beyond the borders of (respectively) Eastern Europe and mainland China.
Since the end of the 1950s, the United States has never seriously considered the possibility of a direct clash with one of the two socialist powers; they obviously engaged in a confrontation to try to achieve nuclear supremacy, and equally obviously they developed strategies and tactics based on a hypothetical clash of this kind, but these were pure school hypotheses. On a concrete level, this possibility has never been truly considered possible, much less desirable.
As long as the Soviet Union existed, it actually constituted one of the pillars on which American hegemony over Western Europe was founded. Faithful to the Yalta partition agreements, Washington never intervened directly against Moscow, even when (Berlin '53, Budapest '56, Prague '68) it would have had an excellent pretext. And when there has been a military confrontation, it has taken place on the periphery, and has always been indirect. Vietnam and Afghanistan docet.
If we look at the history of US military expansionism, and the infinite series of wars and small wars that it has fueled, from the second half of the last century onwards, we realize how military victories, those on the battlefield and strategic ones, not only did they almost never materialize, but they probably weren't even taken into account.
America's hegemonic grand strategy has been based on deterrence, rather than victory.
All the countries that, for one reason or another, found themselves having to confront the USA militarily, paid a very high price, which almost always involved almost complete devastation. And the higher and more lasting the challenge to the hegemon, the harder the price to pay.
In addition to the aforementioned Vietnam and Afghanistan, we remember Iraq, Syria, Libya... All wars which, from a strategic point of view, we can consider lost. But they cost those countries such a price that, decades later, they have not allowed them to recover.
This is the axiom on which the American imperialist strategy was built: simply, the deterrence of destructive power.
With regard to the opposing powers - Russia and China - the strategy envisaged containment (hence the enormous network of military bases along the borders of these two countries), in the belief that sooner or later their fall through strangulation would occur, or that - in the worst case scenario - they would have remained confined to their own spaces.
Which is why the United States military never really prepared to clash with the Soviet or Chinese militaries - much less both.
The conflict in Ukraine, from this point of view, represents a turning point. The United States, and its extended imperial army, NATO, had never engaged to this extent in a direct confrontation with one of the antagonistic powers. They had never engaged in a conflict that was not markedly asymmetrical. They had never engaged in a prolonged war of attrition.
And they did so without first putting themselves in a position to lead and support such a conflict.
They were not strategically ready (industrial war production capacity, reserves of weapons and ammunition), they were not combat ready (weapons systems never actually tested in the field, lack of knowledge of the enemy's capabilities), they were not doctrinally ready (strategies and tactics, structuring of the armed forces, substantially identical to those of previous asymmetric conflicts).
The setback was inevitable.
The Russian-Ukrainian conflict marks, for the first time since the Second World War, the transition to a phase in which deterrence is deconstructed, devastation is recorded in the Western camp, and the inadequacy of imperial power is fully evident.
This step, partially obscured by the difficult internal political conflict in the hegemonic country, therefore requires a radical overall reconversion of imperial policies, which must necessarily involve both the logistical-structural plan and the more specifically military operational one. This is a process which clearly cannot be completed in a short time, and which therefore opens up to a season of interlude, in which the capacity of the military instrument is no longer able to exercise its historic deterrent function, and is no longer still capable of moving to one in which deterrence is replaced by the ability to defeat the enemy on the field.
The change in the overall geopolitical and strategic framework, of which this US military crisis is partly the product, but which is at the same time its cause, therefore ends up determining extreme instability - of which what is happening in Palestine is the most evident manifestation - which in turn will affect the times and ways in which the USA will try to respond to the crisis.
What we can already see now, however, is the general direction taken. And which we could summarize in the transition from war as deterrence to war as a solution.
Washington must win the next war, it must defeat the enemy and bring it to its knees. And since it will not be a weak country, but one of the great war powers on the planet, and therefore among other things equipped with nuclear weapons capable of destroying America, it will not be easy at all.
The pattern, in all likelihood, will be the same as that of the Second World War. Europe will have to deploy the bulk of the troops, and this will be the battlefield.
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