Ukraine is the West’s Vietnam not Russia’s

The story of the Vietnam War was of a constant escalation by the West in the face of continuing defeats. First of all, there was France, which was forced to leave its colony (French Indochina) after the humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 (with the US funding 80% of the French military expenditures). Ho Chih Minh, the Vietnamese communist leader, had reached out to the West but was rebuffed; French Indochina was seen as a lesser than to be exploited by the West, not one to be accepted as an equal with its sovereignty respected. In 1954 French Indochina was split into three countries; Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Vietnam was further split into a North and South, with the possibility of reunification after elections in 1956. In 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem grabbed the leadership of the South and, backed by the West, reneged on the possibilities of elections and reunification. With aid and advisors from the West, he successfully kept the communist guerillas, the Viet Cong, at bay until 1963 when mass demonstrations by the majority Buddhist community against his Catholic leadership lead to violent repression and then a US-driven coup.

From 1963 onwards, US involvement was incrementally increased until it peaked in 1968 at over half a million US military personnel in Vietnam. The communist Tet Offensive of 1968 failed from a military perspective but succeeded greatly from a propaganda point of view as the US public was shocked after all the lies that they had been told about US “successes”. John Paul Vann’s book “A Bright Shining Lie” provides an excellent account of the realities on the ground versus the optimistic reports provided upwards and propagated in the US media. The Russian taking of Severodonetsk and Lysichansk may go down as the propaganda equivalent of the Tet Offensive in destroying the misleadingly positive propaganda of the West while also being a resounding military success. With the victory of Nixon in the 1968 US Presidential election, the focus turned to considerations of how the US was to extract itself from the Vietnam War; with increased urgency driven by the US trade deficits created by the vast expenditures of the Vietnam War together with the Great Society – guns and butter.

The process took an excruciating seven years, as US troop numbers were run down and then fully removed after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. The South Vietnamese army was trained to supposedly be able to resist a communist takeover. As with Afghanistan later, the US-trained army was no match for the popular insurgency backed by the North Vietnamese, with Saigon falling in 1975 and in 1976 the two parts of Vietnam became one nation. The US reneged on its agreements to provide aid to a devastated Vietnam, with the North having been crushed through massive bombing raids (more bomb tonnage was dropped on North Vietnam than was dropped during the whole of WW2) together with the extensive use of the poisonous herbicide Agent Orange. This again mirrors the US treatment of Afghanistan, which was left devastated after 20 years of US occupation, and then the US stole the nation’s US$8.5 billion in foreign exchange reserves to increase the level of misery. In the late 1970’s, the US government had intervened in Afghanistan to topple the progressive leftist government that respected women’s rights, using the local reactionary warlords; with the aim of forcing the USSR to intervene to create it’s “Vietnam”. The rest is a history of the utter destruction of a modernizing nation and the multi-decadal agonies of its population.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nation of Ukraine came into being. It immediately became an area of contestation between an ascendant West and a collapsing Russia. By the early 2000’s a successful “colour revolution” had been implemented to install a Western-leaning government, but this was reversed in 2010 with the election of a Russian-leaning government. In the interim, the Ukrainian nation was dominated by oligarchs and Western exploitation; with the result that Ukrainian GDP per capita never returned to its Soviet levels (unique among ex-Soviet bloc economies). In 2014, the West helped organize and support a coup lead by the most reactionary elements of Ukrainian society – elements of which had been nurtured from WW2 onwards in the UK, USA and Canada as well as other Western nations (e.g. the settling of the Galician Waffen SS soldiers in the West). Ukraine was to become the new battering ram for the West to use against Russia, with the Russian naval base at Sevastopol becoming a Western base to help turn the Black Sea into a Western dominated sea. Russia reacted by protecting the majority ethnic Russian Crimea and allowing it to become part of Russia; including the important naval base. The reaction of the West to the defeat of its plan to dominate the Black Sea was to sanction Russia; sanctions which forced Russia to carry out import substitution and to realize that it needed to make itself much more sanctions resistant.

After the Donbass Republics of the DPR and LPR managed to resist subjugation by the reactionary Ukrainian regime, attempts were made to come to a civil agreement through the two Minsk Accords. The reality is that it was only the two breakaway republics that were negotiating in good faith, as the Kiev regime were just using the negotiations to play for time. After the Ukrainian army had been thoroughly trained and armed by the West, up to 150,000 Ukrainian troops were massed on the border of the Donbass and the rate of shelling greatly increased. Russia stated its need for a demilitarized Ukraine and the removal of threatening NATO forces from its borders, but as many times before the West ignored the legitimate security interests of Russia. Then at the start of 2022, Russia at last recognized the two republics as a way to stall a Ukrainian offensive, but the West’s response was “sanctions from hell”. With ongoing escalation, Russia invaded; documents found by the Russians do seem to point to an imminent Ukrainian invasion that was forestalled.

After four months of war Russia has pretty much destroyed the well-trained and experienced sections of the Ukrainian Army, leaving behind a rag bag of ill-trained territorial troops, foreign mercenaries and a few fully competent units. All of the fake news in the West of Ukrainian “victories” and “strength”, together with Russian “weakness” and an inability to keep up the required supplies, has been proven to be false by actual events on the ground. The massive amounts of weapons and aid shipped to Ukraine since the beginning of hostilities have come to naught, with significant amounts stolen and resold on the black market. The Donbass cauldron will soon be closed and Russian operations to take the rest of the country, in the face of a greatly reduced Ukrainian military, will then proceed. At the same time, the “sanctions from hell” have ricocheted back onto the West, especially Europe, as 7/8ths of humanity refuse to implement them. At the same time, Russia is beginning to recover after the first immediate impacts of the sanctions and already emergent inflation in the West is now exploding. Any intelligent observer would assume that the West would take note of the new realities and start to back down and retrench to limit the damage to Western economies, and Ukraine’s loss of its territory. But, just like in Vietnam and later in Iraq and Afghanistan, the West finds it hard to accept defeat and back down.

Western leaders profess that they will support Ukraine until the end and search for extra meaningless sanctions (e.g. upon Russian gold exports) to make themselves feel good, while making insane childish statements about showing Putin who is the boss. In some cases, as with the Lithuanian attempts to cut off land-based supplies to Kaliningrad, they will understand the need to step back; but this appears to be a relatively rare occurrence. The disconnection of Western elites from reality is shown by statements that they will somehow control the global price of oil to stop Russia profiting from high oil prices; an absurd and completely unworkable venture. Reality may truly start to sink in as Europe approaches a “Winter of Discontent”, as industries shut down partially or wholly due to a lack of natural gas or affordable electricity, and increasing numbers of individuals and families have to make hard choices between household ambient temperature, food, transport and housing expenses. Weather forecasts may take on much greater importance, and the West may want to remember the two colder than average winters that met the European invaders (Napoleon and Hitler) at the gates of Moscow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The weather gods seem to have a liking for helping the Russians when needed. With the US natural gas export terminals running flat out to try to keep the lights and heaters on in Europe, US consumers will also have higher heating costs (but nowhere near those of Europe) to add to general inflation. In this respect, the Canadian refusal to release the Russian natural gas compressors, together with Germany’s refusal to open the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, provided the perfect opportunity for Russia to reduce gas supplies to Europe.

The US mid-term elections provide the chance for the US electorate to “throw the bums out” and give control of both houses to a Republican Party which is much less fixated on Ukraine and Russia, akin to the election of Nixon in 1968. But as with Nixon, it may take many painful years for a US establishment that does not like to accept defeat to come to terms with Russia; especially with a rabidly chicken hawk media that will attack any moves at such a reconciliation in the same way it did during the Trump administration. The continued success of Russia in Ukraine, and the continuing stability of its economy, will make such a reconciliation increasingly difficult for the US as time passes; the scale of defeat and the impact on US prestige will be an increasingly heavy pill to swallow. In addition, a Europe that has sacrificed its economy on the altar of anti-Russia groupthink will not be amused by any US backsliding. It is as if the West has created its own policy version of the Donbass salient, throwing more and more resources and prestige into it to forestall the inevitable loss. As with the Ukrainian army in the Donbass, the unwillingness to carry out a strategic retreat will greatly increase the scale of that inevitable defeat. The Western elites are caught in their own son-of-Vietnam policy salient, rather than Russia, one that will inevitably turn into a Russian cauldron. In the meantime, as with the Ukrainian army, the Russians may take their time to allow the West to waste as many resources and much prestige as possible while using the artillery of reduced energy and other material supplies to greatly weaken the West. There will no immediate cut-off, more a slow and painful strangulation.

China will sit on the sidelines providing all the support that Russia needs, while enjoying the show and the respite from the aggression of a West bogged down in the morass of its son-of-Vietnam policy salient. To add to the show will be an elite civil war in Washington, and the destruction of the parties in power within Europe. Given that the Democrats will still have the US Presidency and State Department until at least the start of 2025, and the European Union provides in depth defences against democratic forces, it may still take a while for any form of sanity and competence to visit the Western halls of power. The longer the better from China’s point of view, as the Chinese electric vehicle companies gorge themselves on German car manufacturers China market share and other Chinese industries use the gift of cheaper energy provided by Western sanctions and long-term contracts to increase their global market share. Then there may also be the added entertainment of a Kamala Harris presidency!

The West will have greatly aided its own relative decline, and Russia, China, Iran and many other nations may be greatly thankful for such a magnanimous Western position. The trick will be to keep that decline slow enough, so that the West can copy the success of the Soviet bloc in going peacefully into oblivion without destroying the world. Then at last, maybe humanity can make some meaningful attempt to combat climate change.