Utopian idealism and the war in Ukraine
How a liberal delusion is collapsing
This essay was also published in The Conservative Woman on 7 August 2023.
In his Warning to the West – a series of lectures delivered during the mid-1970s – Alexander Solzhenitsyn cautioned that Western intellectual life was succumbing steadily to perpetual lies. He said:
“Why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception.”
The cultural revolutions of the 1960s enshrined in mainstream thought a set of delusions that dominated every subject from the nuclear family, to traditional education, to utopian nation-building in Indochina. Yet, since Solzhenitsyn’s warning, Western culture has not only erred further from reason, but become increasingly authoritarian, too. Indeed, the authoritarianism flows from the worsening irrationalism of our discourse: the further that compulsory elite opinion deviates from reason, the greater the effort required to suppress common-sense dissent.
Everywhere one looks now, the liberal house of cards is creaking and fracturing under the weight of its own lies. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the fast-collapsing utopian narrative on the war in Ukraine.
Since Putin’s lawless invasion in February 2022, Washington has attempted to use Ukrainian resistance as a vehicle for inflicting long-term military-strategic damage on Russia. In April last year, US Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, explained quite openly that the guiding purpose behind US policy has been to “neuter the Russian army and navy for [the] next decade.” Such ambitious objectives explain why Boris Johnson, acting in tandem with Washington, urged Zelenksy in March 2022 to dismiss Putin’s offers of negotiation.
By March, Moscow understood that its scheme to enact rapid regime-change in Kiev had failed. Both sides had been given a bloody nose in the initial fighting and were ready for the negotiating table. But it was Western leaders that prevented peace at this juncture, driven by the hubristic, historically illiterate notion that an opportunity to deplete and humiliate the Russian behemoth lay before them. Hence, without peace-talks in sight, the Russian army pivoted instead to a grinding, steady advance from the east that played directly to its industrial and demographic strengths, and which has led to its dominating one-sixth of the Ukrainian landmass.
From the outset, Western mainstream discourse was ruled by a deadly combination of crass flag-waving and manifold lies that have distorted every aspect of the conflict. Take just two examples. First, the much-touted financial sanctions imposed on Moscow from March last year have in fact failed utterly. The ruble stabilised almost immediately after the sanctions struck; and the economic arteries between Russia and non-Western nations expanded drastically, compensating for initial losses. Oil exports to India and China soared, large portions of which have, predictably, been siphoned back to Europe at marked-up prices. Second, the Ukrainian offensive of September last year was trumpeted loudly as a great success; yet the truth is that casualties soared above the 600 to 1,000 daily losses that Kiev had already been suffering for months – losses far greater than those incurred by Moscow’s troops. Moreover, the territorial gains were in fact modest relative to the vastness of the map, and the Russian army was subsequently restructured and reinforced to guarantee that no such humiliating withdrawals could occur again. And so it has proved.
The truth has been deliberately suppressed by mainstream media across the West. A mirage of falsely optimistic propaganda has been held before the public, perpetuating support for the doomed Western policies that seek to escalate, not end, the war. Most dangerously, the media pillars have encouraged us at every turn to regard the Russian force as weak, ill-equipped, badly led, and perpetually on the verge of collapse. These premises are all false.
As the author, consultant, and former US Army colonel, Douglas Macgregor, observes, the Russian military is now not only exceptionally powerful, but dwarfs the forces of Kiev. For months on end, Russian might has bled the Ukrainians of lives and equipment. It is assessed that for every Russian soldier that dies, six to eight Ukrainians are killed, due to a seven-to-one advantage in artillery firepower and a routine five-to-one local manpower advantage on the battlefield.
This devastating imbalance was extant long before the catastrophic Ukrainian offensive was launched in early June. Within the first two weeks of the attack, it was estimated that 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, and hundreds of Western-provided vehicles destroyed. The Ukrainian force is yet to reach a single main objective. It has been lodged for weeks in the 25km-deep “security zone” of mines, tank-traps and delaying positions that the Russian army spent months developing in front of its defensive line.
By contrast, Russian losses, as Macgregor notes, have been virtually negligible. Moscow has a force of some 750,000 troops in and behind the frontline. It has immense reserves of ammunition and manpower. Critically, the Russian population is hardened and mobilised behind the war-effort.
The situation for Kiev is dire. The Ukrainian force is assessed to have been depleted to between 30,000 and 35,000 combat-capable troops. Much of the gifted NATO equipment has been destroyed, bringing into question the very assumption of Western military superiority on which our interventions have been predicated. The US is running extremely low on 100mm artillery ammunition and is thus resorting to increasingly desperate and ineffective measures, such as the provision of outdated cluster munitions. Support for the war among Ukraine’s already-divided population is waning; and surrender among frontline units is now rife.
Crucially, Kiev’s officials are now warning the West that a massive Russian attack against their own demoralised, fractured army is imminent. Macgregor notes that this was always Moscow’s strategy: allow the Ukrainians to exhaust themselves in a fruitless offensive before mounting a renewed Russian attack to extend the depth of its strategic buffer.
Importantly, this follows directly from the annihilative fighting in the town of Bakhmut, a battle chosen by Zelensky as a symbol of resistance. This, too, was a Russian trap. Moscow’s military chiefs knew that protracted, brutal urban fighting would play to their own strengths whilst depleting Kiev’s limited manpower and morale. And so it was: Russia’s troops are now anchored firmly in the town. The principal media outlets, eager to downplay the facts, now therefore claim that Bakhmut is a meaningless victory for Moscow – a mere sunk cost of no true military significance. This is simply a lie. Like the battles of Kursk and Stalingrad, Bakhmut’s strategic importance is its symbolism and the exhaustive breakdown of the Ukrainian force, not any specific territorial advantage.
It is commonplace in the liberal media to describe the situation as an “attritional stalemate.” But attritional for whom, exactly? The truth is that the Ukrainians are being defeated terribly. Indeed, US General Mark Milley warned as long ago as November last year that an immediate negotiated settlement was the best possible outcome for the Ukrainian nation.
Reality is now finally confounding liberal idealism: the ruinous offensive has focused minds. US policymakers know that a glaring defeat for Kiev – and a crushing humiliation for the West of global importance – is looming. Scepticism is bubbling steadily to the surface. At the Vilnius conference in early July, Ukrainian NATO membership was denied, as were Zelensky’s demands for an unlimited supply of top-end Western equipment and ammunition. Calls for the inevitable negotiations are increasing; yet talks will now certainly be undertaken in the shadow of unignorable Russian military supremacy.
The fundamental error lay at the very beginning, in the long-held belief that, if given enough Western money and arms, a small, bankrupt nation would be able to defeat a nuclear-armed superpower with a stark history of immense military resilience. By perpetuating that illusion, an estimated 300,000 to 350,000 Ukrainians have been killed by the Russian military. It does not absolve the Russians of moral culpability to recognise that many of the principal levers of war, and the decision to refuse Putin’s repeated offers of negotiation, have lain in Washington, not Kiev. It is a matter of historical fact that the US has tried – and failed – to humiliate and hobble Russia through Ukraine’s armed forces.
And the great lie at the centre of our folly is the notion that the war is being waged in an attempt to reconstruct the Soviet Union from the ashes of history – a Hitleresque imperialism from the east that civilised nations must resist at any cost. It is upon this false moral ideal that the entire liberal position has rested.
However, as Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, observes, the aggression in Ukraine, like the invasion of Crimea in 2014, has been based in Moscow’s long-held fears over the security of Russia’s western flank vis-à-vis the expansion of the NATO alliance in Eastern Europe. Indeed, Western diplomats, along with Angela Merkel, warned for years that meddling in Ukraine was a known path to certain conflict. And so it proved after the Western-enabled Kiev putsch of 2014 that sparked this conflict. The only route to peace, as experts have tried to explain for years, is through Ukrainian neutrality.
This vast delusion is a form of utopianism: an obstinate insistence that the conflict, morally and militarily, is the way the liberal wishes it to be. The idealists, in all matters from biological realism to economic policy, wrap themselves in sophistic, ignorant fantasies – a Plato’s Cave in which the shadows on the walls are the enforced slogans of one ideological incoherence after another. It is all part of the simplistic, confected, and Sovietised worldview in which we are all now expected to partake as a matter of course.
The only remedy to the lethargy, blindness and wilful self-deception of which Solzhenitsyn warned is the unfiltered glare of reality. Truth is the daughter of time; and she is rapidly unmasking the insanity – and the profound danger – of our utopian delusions in Ukraine.
Thanks - very interesting comment.
I think Johnson has used the Ukraine conflict since Feb 2022 to try and rehabilitate his reputation, and to pose as a tinpot Churchill. In the spring of last year, he was in serious political trouble over the “party-gate” episode. The conflict was a distraction that he used to try and aggrandise himself.
Likewise, Macron was deliberately photographed around that time wearing a French paratrooper hoody, as part of a pathetic imitation of Zelensky.
I think the conflict gave Western leaders a brief domestic leg-up, and the longer-term consequences were not considered fully in the groupthink of policy-making - like with the initial rush-to-failure over the covid policies.
Spectacular piece, the logic and reasoning is compelling. Indeed, a well informed, strategic, warts and all appraisal of this entire situation, much of which should have been obvious. It shows up the many failures of west's approach to Russia and the ideological inconsistencies.