Robert Kagan Foresees Critical Geopolitical Juncture
Neocon godfather Robert Kagan has written a new column for the Atlantic—and his decrees on the Ukraine war usually presage a critical time, for which he is summoned to rustle up urgent support. Most know Kagan as the husband of Victoria Nuland and co-founder of the seminal Project for a New American Century which has been credited with laying the blueprints for America’s disastrous Middle Eastern entanglements in the post-9/11 era.
In setting the dynamics of the Ukraine war, the column makes some fascinatingly candid admissions in the vein of realpolitik analysis. This gives an eye-opening insider look at the behind-the-scenes ‘establishment’ read of the crisis, as it differs from the surface-level frosting we receive from the standard MSM conveyor belt whose job has always been to infantilize and reduce complex issues into good-bad binaries.
The article was spurred by the drone scare over Poland—which we now understand had all the trappings of a false flag or hoax. Kagan frames it as being a kind of crossroads wherein Trump and America’s commitment to NATO has reached its “put-up-or-shutup” final decisive moment. It should be mentioned, on this note, that Trump just earlier today did claim that he would ‘protect Poland’ and the Baltic states if “Russia keeps escalating”.
Reporter: "Will you help defend Poland and the Baltic states from Russia if Russia keeps escalating?"
Trump: "Yeah, I would. I would."
But here’s where it begins getting interesting. After the setup, Kagan starts building a deceptive parallel argument, essentially in geopolitical support of Russia’s position:
Putin, on the other hand, had every reason to force the matter to a head sooner rather than later. The only thing surprising about his attack on Poland is that he didn’t do it sooner. (Russia denies having sent the drones into Polish territory.)
Of course, we must immediately assume any such concession represents a devious psycho-strategic trap on Kagan’s cunning part.
The legal case for Russia’s ostensibly justifiable actions that he builds, though, is convincing in its surprising historical impartiality:
Start with the fact that such an attack has always been a viable option for Putin. People don’t pay much attention these days to the “laws” of neutrality, but for centuries prior to World War II, it was understood that if one nation’s government provided weapons and war matériel directly to another nation at war with a third nation, that legally made the donor a belligerent in the war and therefore subject to attack. An exception was made for private arms sales, which was how the United States managed to supply weapons to Britain and France during the period when Washington was neutral in World War I. But direct, government-to-government arms provisions and arms sales were a violation of neutrality, which gave the third nation the right, if it chose, to go to war with the providing nation or to use force to cut off the supply. The laws of neutrality don’t distinguish between aggressor and victim, because those distinctions are not always clear-cut. If Putin had at any time decided to bomb the supply lines to Ukraine from Poland, Romania, or Slovakia, he would have been within his rights to do so.
Read that again: Kagan himself is here admitting that Russia technically has the legal justification to strike any and all countries supplying Ukraine. Admittedly, he’s being coy in revealing his own biases, and appears to be ‘playing’ the candid ‘impartial’ observer to give some semblance of authority to his subsequent thesis.
But first, he answers the question of: “Why didn’t he?” in regard to why Putin did not strike NATO countries earlier if Russia technically enjoyed legal precedent to do so. Here the spider begins weaving his subtle web; he explains that at first, NATO was simply too strong:
Had NATO entered the war at any time in the past three years, Russian forces in Ukraine would have been doomed. The United States, using ship- and submarine-launched missiles alone, would have been able to take out the Kursk bridge, thereby cutting off the most crucial Russian supply line and path for retreat. Russian forces trapped in Ukraine would have been sitting ducks for NATO missiles and aircraft. Putin would have faced the choice of a full-scale war with NATO that he could not possibly win—a nuclear war that, whatever else it accomplished, would destroy Russia—or surrender. Putin kept the Biden administration constantly on edge with threats of nuclear escalation, but in fact he was extremely careful not to do anything that might prompt an American and NATO response.
Here we glimpse one notable pathology in Kagan which again rears its head later: the sly brushing-under-the-rug of repercussions which doom his own argument (much less his own civilization). He quickly dismisses nuclear war as merely a zero-sum loss for Russia, covering up the fact that his own beloved ‘Western Order’ would likewise disappear, which sort of precludes the arguments he’s making; i.e. if Russia would “doom” itself by launching strikes on NATO, then NATO would likewise be dooming itself by attacking Russia in the ways he’s suggesting. This is precisely why cooler heads in Biden’s administration had thought better of it—but it seems Kagan’s ardent loyalties to the West belie his wanton indifference to the West’s destruction.
Building off of this obscuring excursus, Kagan continues with his callously unscrupulous geopolitics:
Then came Russia’s disastrous invasion. As many as 190,000 Russian troops—essentially Putin’s entire deployable army at that time—were literally bogged down in the mud, trapped in Ukraine and under attack from surprisingly resilient Ukrainian forces. Surely Putin was in a panic at that point, for had NATO even threatened to take any action—such as blowing up the Kursk bridge and thereby trapping his army in Ukraine—he would have been left with the choice of surrender or all-out intercontinental nuclear war. He could not have used nuclear weapons in Ukraine without irradiating his own troops, and even if he did, the United States and NATO would be left untouched and capable of striking conventionally at whatever remained of his forces: checkmate.
And yet—again—the United States did nothing. It supplied weapons to Ukraine, with significant restrictions on their use, and deliberately took no action that could be construed as aggressive. Putin thus passed through the greatest moment of peril for Russia since Stalingrad.
This passage is remarkable because it demonstrates the sheer lawlessness and amorality of the theoretical framework under which Kagan’s world view operates. There is a kind of coldblooded aloofness to the horrors of war and mass extinction which finds comfort in his soul. The casualness with which he invokes hypothetical NATO strikes on Russia while bragging “Checkmate!” like it’s some kind of tabletop game is a window into the man’s coldly inhuman metaphysics. This is only underscored by his seeming regret the US did not carry out such unprovoked attacks on Russia which would potentially see humanity’s swift extinction.
There is even something unsettling in the carelessness with which he mentions Putin irradiating his own troops in passing, as if the whole world is merely some kind of abstract boardgame for him, where flying nukes and radioactive exclusion zones are a commonplace or necessary evil, rather than a horrifying possibility to be spoken of in bated whispers and avoided at all costs. A person who comfortably operates in such a morally gray locus is dangerous: and it is precisely why this article is a fascinating glimpse inside the minds of the architects of the Ukrainian conflict itself, and many others like it, who all share Kagan’s unique pathologies.
Kagan goes on to name the main ‘logical contradiction’ at the heart of the war: seeking to “assist Ukraine while avoiding direct confrontation with Russia.” So, according to his recklessly amoral world view, the US should have merely waged war against Russia from the very start.
How can we reconcile this with Kagan’s own toxic contradiction that Russia was within its legal rights to attack the outside ‘belligerents’ supplying Ukraine with aid during wartime? If he truly believes Russia was within its rights to do that, then how could he possibly justify NATO’s own continued aggression against Russia? We can only surmise that Kagan and his ilk operate in a kind of nihilistic winner-take-all vacuum where anything goes and concerns for petty ‘principles’ are left to those unfortunates without the luxury of immunity from accountability.
He grudgingly mentions the news that Trump has quietly cancelled a multi-year defense training program with the Baltics, which had recently been reported:
This alone seems to answer the fundamental question of the article: whether the US will “be there” for NATO and Europe or not. But Kagan appears content to whimsically draw out the question to build suspense and a sense of dread for a chance at changing the course for the decision he himself knows is already made. It’s a kind of performative fear-mongering which puts him squarely amongst the blameworthy: instead of letting go of bygones and focusing on how to actually stop Russia within the real conditions at hand, he clings to the deluded wishful thinking of some kind of PNAC-honed prime-US military swooping down on a ‘helplessly’ mired Russia to save Ukraine in the eleventh hour.
Of course, it’s always amusing to read Kagan on Ukraine, winging anti-Russian incriminations while making no mention of his own spouse’s marquee role in igniting the conflict to begin with. It’s why the PNAC patriarch is able to operate within such a rootless matrix of brazen amorality: the clan he represents exists as a parallel branch of ‘untouchables’ within the private-public complex of the governmental machine. They write their own rules, follow their own codes, and have no one to answer to—which allows them to play the primordial game in the purest way, unburdened by pesky ‘principles’ and other such vestiges of mortal servants of the public who must account for their actions via the natural self-regulating mechanisms of any normally functioning government.
No, Kagan and his ilk are instead apex predators operating within the government’s dusky penumbra, where the boundaries of sanity and legality are conveniently blurred beyond recognition, and where only the echoes of rootless nihilism serve as guiding signposts. They of course always find outlet in places like the Atlantic, run by another Iraq war-neocon in Jeffrey Goldberg.
The clan serves its own.
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Not sure a genocidal fat bastard married to another genocidal fat bastard ranting in a rant rag about the usual crap they rant about requires any detailed analysis really.
The only thing either of them ever read was a menu. That and neocon tea leaves.
The proxy war against Russia is the culmination of a century long campaign to destroy an Orthodox Christian superpower. The Biden administration was filled to the brim with the usual tribesmen. If the war against Russia is to be stopped once and for all, isolating and removing the interlopers is an inescapable necessity.