Category Archives: defense policy

Abandoning Proportional Retaliation

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Israel hit a Houthi leadership conference and succeeded in killing a dozen or more of the Houthis’ top leaders, including their “prime minister” and “foreign minister” while injuring several other attendees. In the Wall Street Journal article describing the attack and its implications, the news writers noted that

Until Thursday’s strike, Israeli retaliation for Houthi attacks had largely been limited to infrastructure like ports and power stations.

Then they quoted Oded Ailam, ex-Mossad official and currently of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs:

Israel has abandoned the old formulas of proportional retaliation[.]

As it should. The old formulas had nothing to do with proportionality, for all that their users insisted so. Those old formulas centered on tit-for-tat responses, which did nothing to deter future attacks, but did succeed, very effectively, at running up casualties, especially civilian, on both sides as a result of repeated and escalating tit-for-tat exchanges of retaliations.

There’s nothing at all proportional in a strategy that increases casualty rates rather than reduces them.

True proportionality is much more than retaliating in the moment after an in-the-moment attack. Proportionality done correctly, which includes serious consideration of the morality of the response, takes a longer view and considers how a current retaliation would impact future attacks by an enemy and so impact the civilian casualties associated with those future attacks as aggregated to the damage done—civilian as well as military—by a proximate retaliation. A truly proportional retaliation would mitigate, if not preempt, those future attacks by being sufficiently heavy and not immorally tit-for-tat.

A Weakness in Good People

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A letter writer in Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal is deeply along the right track.

The most reliable way to understand dictators’ thoughts is to read their own writing…. From Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” (1902) to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (1925) and Mao’s “On New Democracy” (1940), the blueprints for conquest are there in black and white. So it is with Vladimir Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (2021).

Add Stalin to that, and there are a host of others in recent and distant history. A weakness that good people have, though, is that having read those dictators’ words, as many of us (most of us, at least of some of them?) have, too many of us don’t believe they really mean it—they’re just exaggerating for effect, or they’re too mad to be taken seriously, or…any excuse to dismiss avert our eyes will do.

It is a serious weakness: good people have an extremely difficult—often fatal—time believing the depth of evil and depravity that exists in dictators and especially of their willingness and intent on acting on their written intensions.

It’s necessary to take them at their word. And then to take the necessary next step: hold them to their word and move sternly to preempt them. And where preemption fails, to counter them decisively and totally, as we finally did in eradicating Nazi Germany and fascist Japan and Italy, remaking those nations as friendly to and respective of their neighbors.

Why Ukraine Won’t Surrender the Donetsk

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The reasons proffered center on the defensive lines of barriers that Ukraine as developed in holding onto the region and the barbarian’s demand that Ukraine surrender the region so he doesn’t have to fight his way across them.

Russia wants the entire region of Donetsk, including the 25% that Ukraine still controls, an unoccupied swath larger than Delaware. A heavily reinforced defensive line, known as the fortress belt, has stopped the Russians from rolling deeper westward, and Ukraine has no plans to surrender the area.

That’s entirely wrong. The Ukraine defense works are, in fact, every bit as formidable to a modern army as the Maginot Line was to then-modern armies. That’s why the Nazi German forces bypassed the line in Nazi Germany’s invasion of France, even violating Belgian neutrality to do so. So it is in eastern/southeastern Ukraine.

Is it a sign of Russian weakness to demand the region as the article’s subheadline has it?

It is the site of a reinforced defensive line, the “fortress belt.” Putin’s demand for it is a sign of weakness.

No. The defensive barriers are neither here nor there. As with that Maginot Line, it would be straightforward enough for the barbarian to bypass those barriers, here, around either or both ends. On the contrary, it’s a sign of Russian recognition of the industrial importance of the Donetsk to Ukraine (recall the deindustrialization of Germany and the packing up and moving of whole factories from western Germany into eastern France at the end of WWI), and it’s a sign of the importance of the mineral and rare earth wealth of the Donetsk both to Ukraine (and to the West) and to Russia.

The sooner the West recognizes that and internalizes it, the sooner the West can set about properly supporting Ukraine in the latter’s war for survival.

Wrong Question

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And it leads into a false premise. These errors are William Galston’s, writing for The Wall Street Journal last Tuesday. His subheadline lays out the false premise:

Kyiv will have to make concessions to Russia, but it will also need security guarantees.

No. Kyiv can make almost no concessions to the barbarian without rewarding him for his invasion and giving tacit encouragement (reminiscent of ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) permission to Putin that a small incursion into Ukraine would be OK) for a renewed, expanded, and better prepared invasion a year or two later. “Almost no:” perhaps—a weak maybe—an agreement might consist of a non-exclusive lease to the barbarian of the narrow confines of the port at Sebastopol. Note: that’s the port, not a naval base, and that’s the port, not the surrounding city.

The wrong question Galston posed in his lede:

Where does Europe end and Russia begin? This centuries-old question underlies the meeting between President Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and European leaders in Washington on Monday. The resolution of Russia’s war against Ukraine will settle this question, at least for now.

Again, no. The “centuries-old question” was answered centuries ago: the Ural mountain range is the demarcation (however blurry) between Europe and Asia. Russia west of that range is in Europe, and Russia east of it is in Asia. It really is that simple.

The real question is where does Russia end and the individual nations of the rest of Europe begin. The barbarian chieftain in the Kremlin insists that the boundary of his immediate interest lies between Russia on the one side and Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia on the other side. The barbarian already is making early, mostly political interference, moves against Moldova, and he’s already engaging in cyberwars against those three Baltic States.

Any “settlement” between Ukraine and Russia that involves land concessions to the barbarian only puts those other nations in nearby, if not immediate, peril: the barbarian has said many times, and unequivocally, that he intends to reconstitute the Russian empire, and that means absorbing into the Rodina those other nations (as oblasts, they’d be permitted to keep their current names), and results in the Russian border being pushed even farther west. It’s imperative for the safety of those other European nations and that of our own, that we all support Ukraine materially as well as politically, and enforce the eastern border between Ukraine and Russia along with the northern border between Ukraine and the barbarian principality of Belarus.

Beyond this, the barbarian’s behavior is putting a premium on expanding NATO to include Ukraine, or alternatively, the standing up of a new mutual defense arrangement that includes the Three Seas Initiative nations, Sweden, Finland, the UK, and the United States.

There are broader implications to this struggle. The fate of the Republic of China hangs in the balance, along with the subsequent fates of Japan, the Republic of Korea, and all of the nations rimming the South China Sea. As does our own fate.

“Security” and “Guarantee”

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US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff says that in return for an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine Russia would accept a US-led security guarantee.

Witkoff suggested the guarantees could be modeled on NATO’s principle of collective defense, which is codified in Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which says that an enemy attack against one member would be viewed as an attack against all.

But then the question becomes, what is the response to this attack against all? This is the text of that Article 5 [emphasis added]:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

Such action does not mandate use of armed force; it easily could be simply firm finger-wagging, stern speeches, and strong letters. All while the barbarian rolls on.

Keep in mind, too, that in the present invasion, the invader sits on the UN’s Security Council and so can block entirely any meaningful UN (leaving aside the contradiction internal to that phrase) response.

This is a guarantee without teeth. It seems Russian President Vladimir Putin has a better understanding of Article 5 than anyone in the West. That’s a mismatch as dangerous as the mismatch of wills between the barbarian and the West.