NATO, een papieren tijger?

As we all know, thanks to a mixture of advanced warning from NATO sources, enormous courage and rapid action, huge stockpiles of Soviet-era artillery ammunition, and no small amount of luck, Ukraine was able to prevent Russian invaders from entering Kyiv and so Putin’s dream of a quick and easy victory was shattered. Unfortunately for those living in areas of Ukraine under Russian occupation, countless atrocities were committed as a standard part of Russian operations. Untold thousands of unarmed Ukrainian civilians have been raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered by Russian rabble-in-uniform who, often drunk, are encouraged to perpetrate such war crimes and are subsequently rewarded after doing so. Russian forces terrorize civilians and loot what they can.

Subsequent to their many recent battlefield defeats by Ukrainian forces, the Russian military is now focusing on destroying as much civilian infrastructure as it can so as to kill as many Ukrainians as possible over the harsh winter. Putin’s goal now is to reduce Ukraine to rubble, much as a stupid and nasty little boy would seek to smash the toys of his neighbor because he’s not allowed to play with them.

Since Ukraine’s liberation of some territory initially seized by Russian forces, and with overwhelming evidence regarding the abysmal state of the Russian military, overly-excitable Western journalists have coalesced around a triumphalist narrative in which Ukraine will inevitably win against the Russian horde and Putin’s days are numbered. The Russian economy is supposedly crippled by Western sanctions, the morale of Russian troops is rock-bottom, Russia is running out of missiles and shells by means of which to smash Ukraine, and so on. It’s a lovely little story and it has the virtue of enabling flabby Westerners to believe that they are “standing firm” against Putin and that Ukraine’s future is now assured.

Unfortunately, like so much media content, this self-satisfied little tale has only a very modest correspondence with reality.

Let’s begin with sanctions. History clearly shows us that sanctions have never succeeded anywhere nor anytime in deterring aggression. The reason sanctions are so popular is because they enable spineless Western politicians to pretend that action is being taken while carefully avoiding the need to do anything that would actually make a real difference. Western journalists, who need to sensationalize everything in order to grab fickle eyeballs that can briefly be monetized and thus preserve their jobs, talk up sanctions because when that’s all that’s happening, it must be important!

When we look at the economic data, however, we see the real picture: Russia’s balance of payments (the difference between the amount spent on imports and the amount received for exports) stands at $220 billion for 2022, which is double what it was in 2021. In other words, because sanctions have driven up the price of oil and gas, Russia is now making more money by selling less of what it used to deliver. Moreover, thanks to switching supply chains from Western producers to those in China, Turkey, and elsewhere, ordinary Russians have not felt much impact. Inflation has not soared, as babbling Western journalists proclaimed it would, but in fact is lower than in the OECD. Western inflation averages 9% while Russian inflation is around 4% according to analyses performed by organizations as various as Goldman Sachs and the US Treasury.

Nor have sanctions really harmed Russia’s capacity to wage war, contrary to excitable Western nonsense about Russian arms production being “crippled” by lack of hi-tech imports. Most of what Russia uses against Ukraine is actually very low-tech, as this is predominantly an artillery battle. Russian factories don’t need Western imports to churn out thousands of shells per day, nor to supply unguided bombs for Russia’s air force. Moreover, assessments by the USA regarding remaining Russian stockpiles of artillery shells are hopelessly wrong: the USA assesses Russian materiel based on its own standards of safety; Russia, meanwhile, is perfectly happy to use shells that are decades past their use-by date because at least 70% still work, which is acceptable to them given that few of their fire missions are precision but most are instead simply area bombardments.

And so US estimates of Russian stockpiles are woefully under-counting and thus leading to overly optimistic notions regarding what Russia has left. And sanctions are doing precisely nothing to impact artillery shell supplies, with millions of 152mm shells now arriving from North Korean stockpiles. Although it may be humiliating to Russia to have to go to former buyers of its weapons and beg to be allowed to buy them back, Ukraine can’t survive on the basis of Russian humiliation when it’s continually pounded by relentless Russian fire. Sanctions have done nothing to stop Russian purchases of essential materiel from willing sellers.

What sanctions have done is to spur high inflation in the West and leave households with crippling energy bills. This has resulted in hundreds of thousands of self-centered Westerners taking to the streets to demand “peace” (e.g. appeasement) in Ukraine so that they can sit slumped on their sofas gawping at mindless entertainments in perfect comfort. The fact that leaving Russian forces in control of millions of Ukrainian citizens would result in yet more countless horrors inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people is of no interest to complacent flabby Western voters. Conversely, most Russians believe Kremlin propaganda about NATO expansion “forcing” Putin to invade Ukraine and believe that the West is trying to destroy Mother Russia.

For all the Western babble about people in Russia becoming unhappy with conscription, the reality is that most Russians will continue, albeit reluctantly, to support Putin’s war because — like ordinary people everywhere — they are basically too ignorant and too intellectually indolent and too morally weak to stand firm against the Kremlin narrative that is repeated every hour of every day of their lives.

Lest we imagine that Russians are particularly susceptible to being duped by inane lies, let’s remember that more than fifty-eight million US citizens still believe the last presidential election was “stolen” simply because an obese infantile moron keeps telling them so. And let’s also remember that millions of mindless British voters cast their ballots for national suicide merely because a few cynical opportunists fed them two meaningless soundbites. Ordinary people everywhere and at every time tend to believe whatever they are told by purported authority figures, and Russians are consequently believing what they are told by Kremlin-controlled Russian media. And as sanctions have had zero effect on the lives of ordinary people, there’s no strong reason for them to disbelieve Putin’s lies. Didn’t he promise them that sanctions would be powerless against his strong Mother Russia? Case proven. And besides, everyone knows that protesting against Putin’s regime results in imprisonment, beatings, torture, and falling out of windows. Better to keep one’s head down, keep praying to Бог, and keep reminding oneself that what will be, will be. Given their history, Russians have every reason to be passively fatalistic even when their sons are being sent off to die by the thousands.

So much for sanctions and their effects. What about the military situation on the ground? Surely Ukraine is hammering Russian forces and thus must eventually liberate all the still-occupied territories? What about all those HIMARS the West has sent, and which — so we’re told — have changed the odds in favor of plucky Ukraine?

Once again, reality is different. Ukrainian weapons systems have been so heavily used over the last few months that the systems themselves are wearing out, and Ukraine is desperately short of ammunition. European NATO stocks were always far too low, and have now been depleted to dangerously inadequate levels. The supply of Soviet-era equipment and materiel from former Warsaw Pact nations like Poland and Czechia is reaching its end as stocks have been drawn down dramatically in the last few months. Although NATO countries have begun to supply some modern weapons systems, ammunition is the limiting factor. Several weeks ago Germany made a big noise about promising RHC-155 self-propelled howitzers but then went very quiet when someone pointed out there was no ammunition to load into them…

NATO’s ability to keep sending vital supplies to Ukraine is nearly exhausted. The only thing keeping Russia’s airforce from carpet-bombing Ukraine has been Ukraine’s diminishing GBAD capability which Western military analysts expect to be entirely depleted by early 2023. At that point, Russian forces will be able to call on CAS while Ukraine’s air force will be able to provide little or no protection because Ukrainian airframes and weapons are a generation behind those of Russia, and are far fewer in number. The kinetic difference between a Russian fighter and a Ukrainian fighter means that there’s basically zero chance of any effective engagement of the former by the latter, which is why air defense systems have been so crucial and why the exhaustion of those systems will be so catastrophic for Ukraine in 2023.

Meanwhile, although Ukrainian ground troops are far better trained (thanks to NATO) and far better equipped (again thanks to NATO) than the rag-tag rabble Russia can muster, lack of ammunition means that standard Russian tactics of throwing endless bodies into the fray will eventually work. Putin can force hundreds of thousands of Russian men forward into Ukrainian bullets until there are no more Ukrainian bullets left. Putin and his cronies in the Kremlin don’t need to care about Russian public opinion; the brutality of the FSB and the police mean that ordinary Russians know to keep their heads down even as their children are being sent into a meat grinder. As Putin announces a general mobilization and imposes de facto martial law in Russia later this month, the supply of bodies will become effectively endless. Ukraine, conversely, can only sustain its fight with help from the West and that help — always too little, too late — is now faltering.

NATO’s half-hearted support of Ukraine was misguided from the start. Terrified of doing anything that could cause Putin to escalate, NATO has trickled support into Ukraine but not enabled Ukraine to crush the invaders. What this means is that while NATO runs down stockpiles and runs out of capacity to provide further assistance, Russia can do what Russia has always done: use sheer numbers to win in the end. A rapid intervention by Ukraine would have shattered Russian forces and caused regime change in Russia, thus preventing disruption of grain supplies and preventing the use of oil and gas as a strategic weapon against the West. Instead, NATO dithered, and we are now experiencing an extremely low-quality outcome — but of course, no one is actually admitting that we could have performed less foolishly because that would (i) be embarrassing, and (ii) could lead to calls for more robust action, which no feeble Western politician has the stomach for.

This Western spinelessness is curious because over the last few months the Russian Duma (parliament) has been openly debating which European countries to invade once Ukraine has been subdued. There’s enthusiasm for taking the Baltic nations quickly, but equal enthusiasm for “de-nazifying” Poland as well. The Russian parliament itself is already making it abundantly clear that far from being satisfied with crushing Ukraine, the goal of Russia really is to establish a New Russian Empire. Given that Russia can potentially conscript up to eight million men and up to six million women, and when on a war economy footing has the capacity to manufacture at least one million shells, rockets, and mortar rounds per month, these statements by Russian parliamentarians can’t simply be dismissed as delusional, no matter how appallingly inadequate Russian forces may presently be. In less time than most people imagine, Russia could be ready to throw bodies against NATO member states. And the war in Ukraine — supposedly “a little local conflict” — has already exhausted NATO’s European members’ stockpiles despite not a single NATO soldier participating in the conflict. So the question must be asked: if Russia wins in Ukraine, and then pauses for a couple of years to restock, what would really truly stand in Putin’s way if he then decided to invade the Baltic nations?

It’s easy to mock Russia for the abject incompetence of the Russian military in nearly every aspect of waging war against its much smaller neighbor. But our complacency leads us to overlook the factors that could result in a significant reversal of fortunes in 2023. To a very large degree, NATO is a paper tiger lacking the political cohesion necessary to mount a robust response. Article 5 of the NATO Charter merely says that if one member is invaded then all other members have a duty to offer “aid.” But as “aid” can be as little as offering to send a few expired MREs, there’s no actual guarantee that (for example) a successful Russian invasion of Estonia would prompt a military response. It’s quite easy to imagine the major NATO countries looking at the situation and deciding that since recapturing Estonian territory would be very difficult and very costly, it’s better to accept the new status quo and try to “negotiate a peaceful settlement” (e.g. appease Russia by accepting its conquest).

We tend to forget that NATO requires the agreement of each member state in order to take large meaningful actions, and with NATO members Hungary led by Putin fanboy Orban and Turkey led by anti-Western Erdogan, it’s not difficult to see that consensus would be quite difficult to achieve, especially in the heat of a Russian military action.

There’s one very telling difference between Russian determination and Western spinelessness. Russia is pulling ancient T-60 tanks out of storage regardless of how poor a condition they are in, and sending them to the battlefield because any tank is better than no tank. The USA, meanwhile, has 3,700 Abrams MBTs and 2,800 IFVs in storage where they’ve been well-maintained and thus are operationally capable out-of-the-door. Giving these weapons systems to Ukraine would actually save the USA hundreds of millions of dollars of maintenance and decommissioning costs per year, as the USA itself will never again use any of these items. But instead of providing these systems to Ukraine — where they would very significantly alter the balance of power viz-a-vis the Russian invaders — the USA is sitting on its hands and refusing to provide them. There is no good reason for this posture. All issues such as training and logistics are readily surmounted by using contractors, which is a standard part of US military practice. Putting contractors in Ukraine would not cross the threshold of placing US military personnel into the combat zone, but would enable the logistics and repairs necessary to run and maintain such weapons systems. But still the USA leaves its weapons in storage depots.

Nor does the US regularly train NATO partners on such systems, meaning that even if (for example) Poland were to be attacked by Russia in the next few years and the USA reluctantly decided to release its stockpiles, those Abrams tanks would be totally alien to Polish tank crews, maintenance crews, and logistics crews, and thus would be worthless. The lack of foresight here is stunning. As for European nations supplying their own tanks… the British Army now has fewer than 100 MBTs capable of operations and, aside from Turkey and Greece, most European NATO nations make the UK look like a tank superpower by comparison. The two NATO countries that do have sizeable tank forces (Turkey and Greece) regard each other as the primary enemy. Nor is there any European logistics capacity for moving Greek tanks to the Baltic region even if the political will was there. Therefore, Greek and Turkish tanks wouldn’t really factor very much in a struggle against Russia invading Finland or Poland or the Baltic nations. So US withholding of surplus MBTs achieves nothing except to keep European NATO members, and today Ukraine, dangerously weak.

When it comes to missiles such as the much-publicized HIMARS, the same story of US timidity appears. The USA is only supplying Ukraine with short-range missiles while Russia can draw on systems that can fire from hundreds of kilometers behind the line of contact. It is absolutely essential to understand what this means: even if Ukraine somehow managed to liberate all the territories Russia has captured via its multiple invasions, Russia would still be able to strike anywhere in Ukraine at any time. There is simply not enough air defense in the entire world to counter such strikes. Thus even a complete defeat of Russia on the ground would leave Ukraine exposed to continued relentless air strikes, making any sort of recovery impossible. Yet US-led NATO still refuses to give Ukraine parity in missile systems because of fears of “escalation.”

Given that Putin has invaded Ukraine and has reduced much of the country to rubble and is now destroying what remains of civilian infrastructure, and the Duma is debating which European country to invade next, one is forced to wonder precisely what sort of escalation NATO fears so much. Although journalists love to scaremonger by reporting Putin’s frequent nuclear threats because that draws in monetizable eyeballs, the reality is that (i) much of Russia’s nuclear stockpile is likely as well-maintained as the rest of its stock (e.g. very poorly) and (ii) no Russian commander, no matter how pro-Kremlin they may or may not be, would obey an order that would almost certainly ultimately result in all major Russian cities being reduced to smoldering radioactive ash. Putin’s kleptocracy is based purely on the principle of looting the state, not on any ideological principle that those near the top are prepared to die for. And if Russia is turned into radioactive ash there wouldn’t be anything left to loot. So Russian officers, already deeply unhappy with the way Putin has put the whims of warlords such as Preghozin above the advice of the Russian General Staff, are very unlikely to choose obliteration when the alternatives are all so much more attractive.

NATO, despite all evidence that the supposed nuclear threat is at best an empty bogyman, remains terrified of Putin’s nuclear blustering and therefore continues to make basic mistakes when it comes to longer-range thinking. The complete failure in particular of US policy in this regard is not just stupid but astoundingly mind-numbingly depressingly stupid. We can readily imagine the message being sent to every would-be tyrant in the world: as soon as you have even modest nuclear capability, you can do whatever you want because the West will be too afraid to intervene.

So much for any residual hope of nuclear non-proliferation.

But the bad news doesn’t stop there. Deep political dysfunction in many Western nations combined with total myopia regarding existential risk may turn 2023 into a disaster, not just for Ukraine but also for other threatened nations such as Taiwan, and will further undermine NATO’s limited credibility as the Baltic states and countries like South Korea and Japan see how ill-prepared their supposed partners and allies are to meet any sustained challenge.

In the USA the Republican Party has taken control of the House and has clearly signaled that it will do everything it can to choke off support for Ukraine. This is in no small part because the Zelensky administration refused to fabricate evidence against the Bidens so as to aid the creature Trump in his last presidential election campaign. As such, the Republican Party’s primary interest is not the USA but rather to punish Zelensky regardless of the adverse impact this will have on already-diminished US global credibility. Add to this the actions of ultra-right-wing members opposed even to a far-right Speaker like McCarthy and it’s obvious that the USA will be neutered by internal dysfunction.

In Europe, which has been under-prepared for decades, there is simply very little capacity to aid Ukraine even if the political will could be mustered. Germany, for example (which is Europe’s largest and most successful economy) doesn’t even have enough munitions to enable proper training of its own troops. The UK has nearly exhausted its totally inadequate stockpiles, and while Macron in France likes to make the occasional grand speech it is implausible to imagine the French capable of making up in even a small way for declining US support. Finally, Western capacity to ramp up arms and munitions production is modest at best and entirely non-existent in some cases (for example, the Stinger anti-aircraft weapon system).

After the collapse of the USSR some thirty years ago, the West became complacent. The so-called “peace dividend” was supposed to usher in a time of enhanced social services. In reality, thanks to endemic corruption in the USA, it ushered in a time of endless tax breaks for large corporations and billionaires and in Europe was largely squandered in poorly conceived social policies. Meanwhile, spending on defense fell every year in real terms. The USA was supposed to produce 750 F22 Raptor air-dominance fighters; it settled for 187, which has left the US Air Force chronically under-resourced to the point where airframes like the F-16 that are past their service life are being extended for another fifteen years. The F35 was turned into a multi-role airframe that can perform no individual task to anyone’s satisfaction. No European country, meanwhile, fields a fighter roster capable of taking on the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Russian air force. The British RAF can barely activate two fighter squadrons of barely-fourth-generation fighters as the other two squadrons are used for spare parts. The aircraft that do get into the air lack modern weapons systems and when parked on the ground are easy targets for even last-generation Russian missiles and Iranian-supplied drones.

Moreover, NATO is chronically short of munitions — a recent report assessed that NATO would exhaust its capacity to fight a high-intensity battle of the sort seen in Ukraine in less than 72 hours. The UK loves to pretend it has a modern military but the post-exercise report on a recent attempt to demonstrate all-arms capability in the Baltic earlier this year revealed a complete lack of capacity to do so. This is in no small measure because the UK squanders its limited defense budget on pointless ships (that have nearly zero ability to defend themselves) while failing to resource the army and the air force to anything like the degree required. Additionally, the UK’s stockpile and logistics capability is nearly non-existent. In a 10-day NATO exercise just a few years ago that simulated a modest conflict with Russia in a very small geographic area, UK personnel exhausted the entire UK supply of munitions in eight days. And because logistics are inadequate, those supplies couldn’t have been delivered anyway.

For reasons best known to those involved, Western defense planners, procurement officials, and finance ministers all persistently failed to grasp the obvious: if one lacks sufficient materiel and logistics capacity then nothing else matters.

For thirty years, NATO has failed to maintain stocks of critical equipment and munitions in favor of spending on expensive hi-tech weapons systems that enabled politicians to claim they were “creating jobs” and pose in front of exciting-looking prototypes but which without munitions are basically pointless. Stockpiles of munitions simply aren’t sexy and aren’t vote-winners, so it was easier to play pretend than to prepare for a real war. Ukraine is now burning through what little there was in NATO stockpiles at a rate no Western planner imagined possible.

As supplies are exhausted so too is Ukraine’s ability to resist the waves of cannon-fodder Putin is throwing into the battle as per WWII Stalinist tactics. Russian troops may be under-equipped, demoralized, and poorly led, but so long as Putin can keep throwing bodies at the problem — and there’s every sign that he can, with a new mobilization planned for January 2023 — the ultimate outcome in Ukraine will not be that predicted by ignorant and foolish sensation-mongering Western journalists.

How can it be that the world’s richest military alliance has so little capability and so little in its stockpiles? As well as political complacency and poor decision-making, all NATO planning assumed very different conditions to those we see in Ukraine.

NATO’s strategic posture is based on the assumption that available assets such as stealth bombers along with fourth and fifth generation fighter aircraft, cruise missiles, medium-range S2S missiles, and plenty of maneuver group combined-arms operations would all be used in concert. With mostly US assets dominating the air, other NATO airframes would be free to conduct ariel bombardment using precision guided munitions. With airstrikes doing much of the heavy lifting, artillery becomes less critical. In Ukraine, however, NATO has refused to provide any of these key elements, leaving Ukraine to fight a WWII style war that relies heavily on artillery and what little in the way of air defenses it can muster. Thus shortages of basic materiel such as artillery shells and anti-aircraft missiles have become the limiting factor.

We’ve been here many times before before: in 1914 shortages of munitions became such a scandal that in 1915 the UK passed legislation aimed at boosting production. In 1939 the same lack of preparation was evident. When the Korean war started, it was discovered that the West had a terrible shortage of munitions. During the (very limited) operation in Libya NATO relied entirely on the USA to provide ammunition because European NATO countries had nearly zero stockpiles. And should we wish, we can go further back in history and see the same issue at the beginning of what we now call the Napoleonic Wars.

We evidently learn little or nothing from history, no matter how often the same lessons are repeated. It’s just so much easier to save money by failing to prepare for the next war, than to attempt to explain to flabby self-indulgent voters why money needs to be spent on non-sexy but vital materiel. Were it not for the USA’s stockpiles, NATO would have empty barrels. And even with US stockpiles, European NATO members lack the weapons systems in sufficient numbers necessary to fire US-donated munitions against a determined enemy with nearly unlimited bodies to throw into the fray.

So why, given the chronic shortages of munitions and even allowing for its own pathetically inadequate levels of equipment, won’t NATO assist with more adequate weapons systems and perhaps even accept direct involvement in the conflict in order to bring to an end the suffering and existential risk Russia’s invasion has caused? Surely if Russian parliamentarians are openly proclaiming that NATO member states will be next on the list of invasion targets, the time has long since passed when we should be worried about Russian escalation?

NATO is basically leaving Ukraine hanging out to dry because the primary focus of the USA (always the driving force within NATO) is not to defeat Russia but merely to watch it run down its capabilities and expose its many weaknesses as it throws itself against Ukrainian resistance. Doing more than this goes beyond US strategy even though that strategy is astonishingly stupid and naïve. European NATO members, meanwhile, are too divided and too lacking in capacity to do anything other than sit on the sidelines and watch. Germany has admitted it lacks the capacity even to defend itself, never mind provide meaningful aid to anyone else, and Hungary’s Prime-Minister-For-Life Orban is so pro-Putin as to render Hungary’s membership of NATO a hollow joke.

Tyrants generally succeed not because of their strategic genius but because their adversaries are flabby, complacent, self-serving, and idle.

Once again, history is repeating itself.

The situation on the ground is very different from that presented in the triumphalist narratives of Western journalists. Ukraine’s GBADs are wearing out and stocks of missiles are being consumed at a rate that far out-paces any chance of resupply. NATO has not provided Ukraine with any strategically important equipment: no current-generation battle tanks, no Western fighter jets, no long-range A2A missiles, no cruise missiles, no adequate APCs or IFVs or MBTs. NATO has mostly handed Ukraine stuff that cost less to donate than to decommission, or old Soviet-era stock that was sitting in depots. And while that milquetoast support helped keep Russia at bay in 2022, it won’t help to keep Russia out in 2023.

Russia, meanwhile, relies on its artillery-led approach to war and in addition to the three million plus shells per year it is manufacturing and reconditioning itself, Russia has also ordered millions more 152mm shells from North Korea. By using shells that US intelligence experts regard as too old and therefore don’t count in their assessments, Russia can keep up its level of bombardment for years. In fact, Russia’s main problem is logistics: it has enough shells, but getting them to its guns isn’t easy. Nevertheless, this is a better position to be in than Ukraine, which is running out of things to fire back at Russian forces.

When it comes to the air war, not only is Ukraine exhausting its GBADs but the thousands of cheap drones Russia has bought recently from Iran make the problem even worse. A cheap Iranian drone costs perhaps $20,000 while a Ukrainian missile to bring it down costs $300,000, and unlike the drone the Ukrainian S300 missile can’t easily and quickly be replaced. By using thousands of Iranian drones, Russia can exhaust Ukrainian materiel in the skies with the same strategy that it’s exhausting Ukrainian munitions on the ground: unrelenting assaults that will deplete Ukraine’s capacity to resist long before Russia’s capacity to attack is fatally diminished. Having a couple of Patriot batteries won’t change the fundamental dynamics except to make it even more expensive to shoot down cheap Iranian drones.

When we realize that the conflict in Ukraine is primarily an artillery and air war of attrition, and that in both these areas Ukraine is massively under-resourced, and in both these areas Russia is pulling in cheap resources in order to overwhelm Ukraine’s capacity to fight back, we get a very different picture from what’s presented in Western news media. It may be possible for Ukraine to obtain some essential supplies from other sources such as Pakistan and South Korea, but none of this is certain and doesn’t remove the fact that NATO is woefully under-stocked and running out of capacity to help keep Ukrainian resistance going.

So why do our news sources present such a misleading picture? Surely our respectable news organizations aren’t intentionally lying to us like Fox News and the Kremlin-controlled Russian media?

We tend to forget that the “news” is merely a sub-category of the entertainment industry and as such its job it to attract our attention for a few monetizable moments. The job of the news is not to provide us with a reliable and accurate view of the world beyond our doorstep. Aside from propaganda-producing organizations such as the Russian media and Fox News, all legitimate news organizations are in the business of competing with every form of entertainment for precious eyeballs. This is why even supposedly “serious” news outlets such as the BBC are nowadays nearly worthless. Today, a dynamic exists in which Western news organizations cluster around an agreed narrative (so as not to confuse audiences with potentially conflicting opinions and thereby alienate them) and then simply repeat that narrative until such time as this no longer works. Any awkward facts are simply omitted. Western news organizations don’t need to invent infantile lies but instead simply omit anything that would risk disturbing the simplistic tale being told to Western audiences. There’s no master plan; simply a desire to remain competitive and thereby keep the paychecks coming in.

This situation pertains to everything we see in the news, whether it’s war, natural disasters, climate, change, aircraft accidents, or infectious diseases. And few people ever wonder to ask themselves why key information simply disappears; it’s much easier just to accept whatever narrative is being presented next. But if we stop to think, we can see that our much-vaunted “independent” news organizations are in reality simply entertaining us with fictions.

According to the highly respectable The Economist news magazine a couple of years ago, SARS-CoV2 was going to kill hundreds of millions of people across Africa, India, and Asia. Fast-forward to today and even the most elaborate constructions can’t conjure up more than a tiny fraction of that prediction despite the fact that people are living pressed against each other and there has been no significant program of vaccinations. But has The Economist admitted that its projections were ludicrously misleading and that journalists simply created a scaremongering sensation that did great harm in order to boost revenues? Nope: The Economist is now using precisely the same models to predict tens of millions of deaths in China. No doubt when those deaths likewise fail to appear, nothing will be said and everything will once again be conveniently forgotten. And let’s remember that The Economist provides the best we can expect from journalism; other organizations are far worse.

The same problem of misleading journalism appears when we consider economic predictions. Russia was supposed to collapse under the weight of sanctions, with diminishing revenues from hydrocarbons, high inflation, loss of investor capital, and all manner of shortages. In reality, Russia is now earning more from hydrocarbons than ever before, its inflation is less than half of the OECD average, investor capital has not radically altered, and ordinary Russians are not experiencing much in the way of shortages of anything at all. But have our news organizations apologized for misleading us about the supposed efficacy of sanctions? Not at all; they have simply moved on to babbling about HIMARS and other equipment that in reality has been provided in far too modest quantities to make a strategic difference.

Stepping back just a few years, the news media contributed greatly to the successes of Brexit and Trump. Because both these absurdities were built on a foundation of infantile lies that were grotesque and therefore sensational, the news media amplified the effectiveness of these lies by repeating them uncritically. In the UK, news organizations gave huge amounts of airtime to known liars and incompetents, thus providing a credibility that resulted in the UK voting for national suicide. In the USA, news organizations gave Trump 85% of their coverage, thus helping to sway the election in his favor. In neither case did any news organization anywhere own up to their culpability; they simply switched to reporting the inevitable horror stories that Brexit and Trump went on to generate.

The news, of course, has always been this way. Pulitzer and Hearst were both out-and-out fantasists who sold lies to the simple-minded because it was their most profitable course of action. In the UK, rags like The Sun, The Mail, and The Mirror, along with more grammatical rags like The Telegraph continue to generate revenues by telling stupid people what soundbites to repeat. British people like to forget that right up until the mid-1960s The Daily Mail was relentlessly and explicitly pro-fascist; today it merely dresses its far-right populism in less obviously out-of-date terms. In the USA print media is less influential but this deficit is compensated for by TV news that to all intents and purposes is aimed at people with IQs smaller than their hat size. Wherever we look, the picture is much the same. Only by treating audiences as retards and spoon-feeding them with highly misleading narratives can news organizations compete for attention in today’s sensation-overload always-on smartphone-gawping world.

If we want to understand what is really happening, and especially what is happening in Ukraine, we need to consult sources that don’t depend on monetizing credulous eyeballs. We have to be patient and wade through research papers, technical briefing documents, declassified information, and other boring but informative providers of key information. Then we have to think carefully about what these sources are unable to account for and what implicit biases they have. It’s well-known that intelligence agencies and military organizations have a vested interest in exaggerating the capabilities of adversaries in order to secure larger budgets and greater importance so we have to be very cautious about accepting intelligence reports at face value. Some discount factor needs to be applied. But overall, we will find more useful and accurate information in primary sources than we’ll ever find in our so-called “news” media.

When we do take the trouble to look, analyze, and assess, we can see that the situation in Ukraine is far from what is presented on our screens and in the pages of our newspapers. Unless we in the West quickly find ways to stop being so astoundingly stupid, Putin will ultimately get what he wants in Ukraine because we keep doing the wrong things. Putin may have suffered humiliations and lost his all-powerful status, and it may well be that characters like his former chef and a certain well-known Chechen warlord may claw their way to the top in the months to come. But unless such internal struggles result in Russian collapse, they will make no difference to the overall military situation. Indeed, if one of these thugs replaces Putin they will have every incentive to throw everything Russia has at Ukraine in order to prove their “worthiness.”

Sanctions have hurt us infinitely more than they’ve hurt Russia. What would have stopped the war overnight would have been NATO involvement in the conflict, eliminating Russia’s capacity to wage war. Putin’s regime would have collapsed, and we would not have seen the disruption of critical supplies such as hydrocarbons, grain, and fertilizers that are blighting so much of the world today. Instead, we dithered, we did things that were ineffectual, and we helped to produce a very low-quality outcome: high inflation in the West, food shortages across Africa and Asia, and the near-total destruction of Ukraine due to relentless Russian bombardments, with the loss of thousands of civilian lives. Putin and his criminal regime did this, but we stood back and let it happen.

Moreover, persistent Western weakness in the face of even an incompetent threat like Russia has shown Xi in China that his forthcoming invasion of Taiwan will be relatively cost-free. Taiwan is in even worse shape than Ukraine when it comes to defensive capabilities and it’s now clear that nominal allies lack the means to provide decisive support. Through deep political divisions in the USA which continue to paralyze US decision-making, to persistent weaknesses in Europe arising from sheer complacency, it’s apparent that the West no longer has the capacity to maintain a somewhat rules-based international posture. Weakness is always exploited by those who imagine themselves to be strong and therefore our inaction in Ukraine has opened the floodgates to conflict around the world — conflict that will further exacerbate energy and food insecurities, further stoke inflation, and further diminish the international trade upon which hundreds of millions of jobs depend.

We seem to forget that most people in the world live in countries that support or at least accept Russia’s invasion, not the Ukrainian resistance. This means that cynical tyrants across Africa, South America, and Asia will exploit Western weakness to the full, and that Chinese invasion of Taiwan is merely the most obvious consequence of our inaction.