We are the new proxies

NATO's Ukrainian proxy war against Russia, contrary to what its advocates claimed, did not go as planned. Washington's long-prepared intent was to wear down and isolate Moscow, unleashing a conflict - about whose final military outcome the Pentagon could hardly have any illusions - which would allow the Russian armed forces to be engaged in a war of attrition, which in turn should have provided the pretext for economic strangulation and international isolation. None of this occurred. This resulted in an embarrassing strategic situation to say the least, since Washington found itself faced with the concrete prospect of a defeat on Ukrainian soil - military and political defeat - which would have seriously compromised the deterrence capacity of Western armies, encouraging those countries that seek to escape from the suffocating sphere of Stars and Stripes domination.

While the USA found itself having to face the threat of a debacle on the Eastern European front, the sudden opening of a second front in the Middle East complicated things further. The sudden escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in fact, has created new problems for US global control strategies. First of all, it ruined the intense and long diplomatic work to stabilize relations between Israel and the Arab countries, causing the Saudi ratification of the Abraham Accords to fail. A setback which, moreover, comes after the successes of Russian and Chinese action in this strategic area; the intervention of the first (and of Iran) blew up the project to subvert Syria using ISIS, while the second brought peace between Ryad and Tehran (with the consequence of the end of hostilities in Yemen, and the return of Damascus in the Arab League).

Furthermore, and not secondarily, it forced the United States to rush to the aid of its strategic ally Israel, supporting its war effort, at a time when support for Kiev had already consumed the capacity of Western arsenals. Furthermore, the current extremist government in Tel Aviv proves very reluctant to follow Washington's wishes, and continues to embarrass the US with its indefensible genocidal tactics.
In this context, therefore, it was necessary to develop a new line of conduct, which would allow us to emerge unscathed from the unexpected turbulences and strategic errors committed. Furthermore, keeping in mind the Indo-Pacific scene, where Washington believes it must operate to contain what it considers the greatest threat to its global hegemony, namely China.

The central issue is, as Western leaders obsessively repeat, to prevent Russia's victory. But since, as everyone knows well, and as these two years of war in Ukraine have clearly demonstrated, defeating Russia is impossible, there remains only one solution available: to prolong the conflict as much as possible. However, the Ukrainian armed forces are exhausted, the entire state apparatus - shaken by war and consumed by corruption - is at its limit; the entire proxy war mechanism set up by NATO risks collapsing at any moment. Therefore it becomes necessary to hurry up and equip ourselves (materially and psychologically) so that the Ukrainian proxy can be replaced by another, capable of taking its place and keeping Moscow busy for years to come.
And if until not long ago this replacement could have been imagined to be Poland, perhaps with the support of the Baltics, now it is all too clear that it will instead be made up of all the European armies. We are the new proxies.

In the context of the responses that the United States is trying to give to the global crisis, which it has militarized itself, this is a convenient strategy. In fact, on the one hand it allows us to reduce economic and military support to Kiev (while maintaining strict control over operations and intelligence) and to distance ourselves from a possible defeat, and on the other to deepen the gap between Russia and Europe , making it irreparable for the next decades.
One of the little-noticed aspects of the new US imperial strategy, especially in the old continent, is the paradigm shift in the historical relationship between the two sides of the Atlantic. If, in fact, up to now this has been characterized as colonial, yes, but overall cooperative, albeit in an ancillary form, with the change in the global geostrategic framework, Europe's role has quickly been downgraded to that of a frontier brand, which is responsible for task of keeping the barbarians away from the heart of the empire.

In this regard, what we might call the Trump factor deserves to be examined. In the NATO-centric narrative, the tycoon is represented as someone who intends to abandon the European allies, indeed even to dissolve NATO. Obviously, this narrative is largely the result of the current American administration, which has every interest (electoral but not only) in portraying Biden's opponent negatively.
Bearing in mind that, in any case, the President of the United States is not an absolute sovereign, and that he must deal not only with Congress but also with a series of variously distributed powers, within the federal apparatus and outside, we must consider that even if being substantially heterogeneous to the GOP apparatus gives Trump a certain autonomy, on the other hand it makes him partly weaker than he appears. In any case, however, he represents an internal current of the global dominus, and in one way or another he responds to these superior interests.

In terms of geopolitical meta-strategy, US interests are univocal, and only the forms in which they are expressed change. In this sense, there is no substantial difference between the plan of the neo-con-democratic bloc, which is clearly aiming to outsource the containment and attrition of Russia to the European proxies, and that which refers to Trump, who more brutally wants to dump it on our. In both cases, this responds to the US strategic need to save resources (economic, military and human) to face challenges deemed more important. Challenges for which, as has been repeatedly underlined here, the USA requires a profound organizational, strategic and doctrinal review of its armed forces. This is something that – as Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth explains – essentially means “we are moving away from counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. We want to be ready for large-scale combat operations." And this requires time and investment.

The crucial problems that the United States must face, in this perspective, are: strengthening the industrial apparatus, making it capable of facing the stress of a conflict with high consumption of resources; modernization of the armed forces, especially the navy and air force, and strategic nuclear power; recruitment of personnel in sufficient quantity and quality for the comparison that looms on the horizon (China).
On an industrial level, the US (and European) situation is anything but rosy. First of all, the US military industry (all private) is currently focused on the production of technologically advanced, high value-added weapons systems that guarantee high profits at a relatively low production rate. While the new conflict model that is looming requires massive, less expensive and faster production, and above all less sophisticated but more robust weapons systems. The experience of the Ukrainian war has shown how many Western systems make a great impression on the glossy pages of trade magazines or at fashion shows, but tend to have a short life on the battlefield.

Furthermore, while the Western industrial system suffers from these problems (which require neither easy nor rapid reconversion), the Russian-Chinese one is doing well. As Ben Aris writes in Intellinews (1), “China is now 'the world's only manufacturing superpower' and Russia's production capacity is greater than that of Germany, according to recent studies of changes in the world's manufacturing composition. (…) after analyzing their manufacturing power, the picture that emerges is that China is the most powerful producer in the world and Russia is the most productive in Europe. Winning a war isn't about how much money you have; it's about how many bombs and planes you can make and how fast you can make it.”
Fighting a war on the European theater (as we have seen) means producing drones, tanks, armored vehicles and ammunition in gigantic quantities. A possible war around Taiwan means a large fleet of powerful and modern ships, constantly manned. And today China already has more ships than the US Navy (although the latter still predominates in terms of tonnage), almost all of which are more modern than the American ones. And the Chinese shipbuilding industry produces warships at a rate 3/4 times higher than that of the USA.

Finally, the US armed forces have major recruiting problems, not only due to a drop in motivation, but because the psycho-physical standards of young Americans are dropping considerably, and not even the consequent lowering of those required has been sufficient. Recently, the US army has started a program of functional redeployment of its personnel, in the aforementioned logic of moving from a model aimed at asymmetric conflicts to one for symmetric conflicts. But, as the experience of the Ukrainian war is showing, although quantity and quality of weapons systems are important, in any case manpower is fundamental. Hence the need to field subsidiary forces, recruiting the colonial armies for this purpose.

In an economic phase that is not particularly flourishing and expansive, and with increasingly complicated prospects, the United States also risks finding itself in a situation similar to that of the USSR on the eve of collapse: gigantic military spending (2), which must in some way way to be reduced, rationalized, spread across multiple economies (see pressure on Europeans for 2% of GDP to NATO). Which, among other things, means a rethinking of the exorbitant network of military bases abroad, which in a phase of economic wealth and technological supremacy was functional to the global control of the territory, but today in addition to being a heavy financial burden it has transformed above all into an extensive series of possible objectives.
The ability to maintain a global military presence was a fundamental element of American hegemony, but now that the ability to project power is declining, the United States will be forced to give up its influence on various regional powers and focus more on domestic problems.

All of this leads strategically back to a militarily essential issue. Since the Second World War, the fundamental assumption has been to maintain the ability to conduct and win two simultaneous wars in different theaters. The so-called "construct of the two wars" was maintained, substantially unchanged, for about sixty years. But already in 2018, with the publication of the four-year National Defense Strategy (NDS), the Pentagon adopted the concept of “one war” or “one and a half wars”; entering into a prospect of symmetrical clash with emerging powers such as Russia and China, the idea of two wars became unsustainable. But, once again, the Ukrainian conflict (and to a lesser extent the Palestinian one) have shown that in the absence of overwhelming technological supremacy - which the West no longer has - a war of equals becomes terribly bloody and wasteful, and requires a of considerable mobilization of human resources.

Furthermore, the aggressive policy of the US administration in recent decades has not only failed to divide the two main global adversaries - Russia and China - but has even pushed them to strengthen ties and essentially form a bloc with other two minor powers such as Iran and North Korea. Consequently, there is a need for a return to the ability to simultaneously support (at least) two high intensity conflicts in different theaters, on the model of the Second World War. With one fundamental difference: the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) had limited or poor industrial capacity, and were essentially without their own energy sources, while Russia and China have gigantic production capacities, and are very rich in energy and materials first.
Not to mention the fact that the victory in war of '39/'45 was also possible thanks to the enormous contribution, especially in terms of manpower, of the Soviet Union...

The long-term global strategy, therefore, must deal with a series of objective and subjective conditions, which do not leave much room for choice. Recently, Raphael Cohen (3), a political scientist at the RAND Corporation (a very influential research center in the American military world), proposed a third way: fighting one war directly and another by proxy. He calls it the “Ukraine model”. And it is quite clear that, once again, objective conditions determine orientations. The European members of NATO are considered sufficiently capable at least of containing Russia, engaging it in a prolonged conflict on the European theatre, while the ASEAN allies would absolutely not be able to compete alone with China, which therefore will have to be engaged directly by United States.

This division of labor is not simply a project, but has been actively underway for more than a year, and is now being accelerated. This is made evident not only by the increasingly bellicose declarations of European leaders (who, as good vassals, promptly aligned themselves with US designs), but by a series of concrete and operational actions, ranging from the incorporation into NATO of historically neutral countries such as Sweden and Finland to the so-called military Schengen, from investments in the adaptation of road and iron communication networks for military needs (especially in Eastern countries, which have a different railway gauge, such as Spain and Portugal) to the adoption explicit expression of a "war economy" industrial model.

To proceed effectively towards this perspective, however, some steps are still necessary, not all of which are easy. First of all, a centralization of political command must be achieved, i.e. a growing transfer of competences and authority to supranational bodies, especially the European Commission. The integration/subordination of individual national armies to NATO is in fact already existing, as demonstrated by the story of the senior German officers who planned interventions in the Ukrainian war, even in explicit dissonance with the governments in office. There is obviously a need to rearm-reorganise the European armies, which in current conditions would not last a month in a possible conflict with Russia. Today, the strongest Western army in Europe is the Ukrainian one, in terms of numbers and combat experience, and this says it all. Just as the war industry needs to be strengthened.
But, above all, given the evident reluctance of European populations to get directly involved in a conflict, it is necessary to implement effective control tools to avoid pacifist uprisings.

The crucial issue, obviously, is not so much that of manpower, given that at present the various joint forces of European countries have a sufficient number of personnel to deploy on a possible eastern front (even if it extends for thousands of kilometres, from the Arctic to the Black Sea), as well as the fact that European countries - all of them, not just those on the front line - would become the object of missile attacks, on military bases, industrial settlements, strategic communications infrastructures and so on.
The Ukraine model, in short, means that the disputed cities along the contact line will become many Bakhmuts and Avdeevkas, and behind that line - with increasing depth - there will be significant and widespread destruction. The real danger, in fact, is not so much the agitated nuclear bogeyman (which would be very difficult to resort to in the event of conflict in the European theater), but rather the much more concrete systematic and prolonged devastation of a war of attrition.

This prospect is very concrete, and currently there are factors that on the one hand accelerate its timing (such as the ever decreasing resistance capacity of the Ukrainians) or that slow it down (such as the conflict in the Middle East), but it still has a short horizon , perhaps even a few years. And it is fundamental to understand that this perspective is an integral part of a desperate strategic plan, which the USA considers absolutely vital to maintain its role as global hegemon, and for which it is ready to sacrifice its vassals; “whatever it takes” (and the quote is not accidental).
It is a great race against time, in which Washington must try to defeat its adversaries before they become too strong to be defeated, which at the same time it is now unable to do. Likewise, since for us Europeans there is no other hope than a massive popular mobilization before the war breaks out, it is a question of acquiring the necessary awareness of the game at stake, faster than the preparation for the war itself proceeds. It is necessary that a critical mass is reached within a couple of years at most, otherwise we seriously risk being overwhelmed, once again, by events.

Notes

1 – “China and Russia, the industrial production superpowers that could win a war”, Ben Aris, Intellinews
2 – The U.S. fiscal 2024 defense budget is $842 billion, or about 3.1% of gross domestic product.
3 – Quoted in “U.S. faces 4 threats but only equipped for 1 war, experts say”, Asia Nikkei