John Mearsheimer: Bound To Lose

KJP: "If Putin thinks he can outlast us, he's wrong — he's wrong. We will have another package of aid for Ukraine soon." pic.twitter.com/VAVBs1kpWd

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 2, 2023

First, you should check out David French’s take on the war in Ukraine to get a sense of what the morons now calling for tens of billions of more funding for Ukraine have been saying about its counteroffensive. Here is David French in May before the counteroffensive was launched in June:

New York Times:

KYIV, Ukraine — This week, I was jolted awake by an air raid siren for the first time since my service in Iraq just over a decade ago. It was roughly 3 a.m. on Monday night, and I was sleeping soundly here in Ukraine’s capital. I’m visiting with a group organized by the Renew Democracy Initiative, a pro-democracy organization founded by the Russian dissident (and chess grandmaster) Garry Kasparov, and our small band was of course warned this was likely to happen. Missile and drone attacks are common in Kyiv. But this night was different. Ukrainian officials called it “exceptional.” …

Americans are weary of military entanglements. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a shocking, humiliating debacle. Most Americans believe invading Iraq was the wrong decision. We’re exhausted after a pandemic that would be an ordeal under the best of circumstances and proved particularly polarizing in our divisive times. In parts of the American right in particular, there is a sense of American failure and American decline. Yet in the most strategically important military conflict in generations, the reality is completely different. Here, the combination of Ukrainian valor and American technical and intelligence capabilities is proving decisive. …

Yes, it has taken immense losses, but no rational person could look at the military situation in Ukraine and think that Russia has achieved its objectives. It is Russia, not Ukraine, that faces the greatest military peril at the moment. …

Here is David French after the counteroffensive failed in late September:

New York Times:

When I traveled to Ukraine in May, I could see missile attacks firsthand, the vital role of Western equipment in the war effort and the remarkable courage of the Ukrainian people. But there were other things I saw that I couldn’t process immediately. I was there in the weeks before the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and while I was struck by the Ukrainians’ resolve, I was also struck by something else: a sense that the Ukrainians were, if not actually pessimistic, deeply sobered by the scale of their military challenge.

Why would Ukrainians feel this way? After all, the Ukrainian military has outperformed virtually every informed prediction of its combat capability. It has thwarted Russia’s initial military objectives, recovered 54 percent of the territory seized by Russia since the beginning of the war and inflicted staggering losses on the Russian military in both material and manpower.

Now, months into a counteroffensive that has struggled to regain the smallest amount of territory — for which Ukraine has paid a high toll — I see why. Ukrainian leaders weren’t spinning me when they tamped down expectations of military success. They were sharing genuine concerns. After more than a year of combat, Ukrainians know that, absent overwhelming Western support, they are David fighting Goliath. Russia still possesses immense, inherent advantages, and despite all its early success, Ukraine could still lose the war. …

Now, David French can see why Ukrainians were so pessimistic.

I strongly recommend reading all of this new article from John Mearsheimer about what happened with Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive, why it was always doomed to fail, the nonsense we were sold by pundits like David French and where the war in Ukraine is headed is in the future.

John Mearsheimer:

It is now clear that Ukraine’s eagerly anticipated counteroffensive has been a colossal failure.^[1] After three months, the Ukrainian army has made little progress pushing back the Russians. Indeed, it has yet to get beyond the so-called “grey zone,” the heavily contested strip of land that lies in front of the first main line of Russian defenses. The New York Times reports that “In the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to U.S. and European officials. The toll included some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — that the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians.”^[2] According to virtually all accounts of the fighting, Ukrainian troops have suffered enormous casualties.^[3] All nine of the vaunted brigades that NATO armed and trained for the counteroffensive have been badly chewed up on the battlefield.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive was doomed to fail from the start. A look at the lineup of forces on both sides and what the Ukrainian army was trying to do, coupled with an understanding of the history of conventional land war, make it clear that there was virtually no chance the attacking Ukrainian forces could defeat Russia’s defending forces and achieve their political goals. …

Nevertheless, there was pervasive optimism about Ukraine’s battlefield prospects among Western policymakers, pundits and editorial writers in the mainstream media, retired generals, and other experts in the American and European foreign policy establishments.^[4] Retired General David Petraeus’s comments on the eve of the counteroffensive capture the prevailing zeitgeist: “I think that this counteroffensive is going to be very impressive.” He then effectively described the Ukrainians executing a successful blitzkrieg against Russian forces. …

In effect, Ukraine had given up on executing a blitzkrieg, which can only be accomplished with a large body of armored forces, not with infantrymen moving on foot and backed up by artillery. Of course, it makes little sense to even treat blitzkrieg as a serious option when the Ukrainian forces had not been able to reach Russia’s first fortified line of defense, much less break through it. Simply put, there was no chance of Ukraine replicating the feat the Wehrmacht pulled off against French and British forces in 1940. Ukraine was instead destined to fight a war of attrition like World War I on the Western Front, where its heavy losses in the counteroffensive would put it at a major disadvantage moving forward. …

Mearsheimer was right.

Years ago, he famously warned that the West was leading Ukraine down the primrose path and that the end result would be Ukraine getting wrecked. Political support for the war is tanking in the United States and Europe. Ukraine is being pushed to perform miracles on the battlefield that it is simply incapable of pulling off much less sustaining in the long run. The United States would never launch a blitzkrieg against the teeth of Russian defenses without overwhelming air superiority.

Lindsey Graham and his ilk in Congress don’t really care about Ukraine. They only care about keeping on the spigot of military spending. They don’t care whether the money is spent on Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or Syria or now Ukraine. They don’t care about victory. Their ideal war is one in which the spending goes on forever and their donors are enriched. They don’t care how many lives are lost in the process. These ghouls have repeatedly argued that the spending is an “investment” in weakening Russia.

After Ukraine inevitably loses the war, these people will swiftly pivot to destroying some other country like they did after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. We will have the same arguments all over again about “defending democracy” in the next quagmire. It never ends because the incentives – retired generals sitting on boards, retired politicians becoming lobbyists – constantly generate new wars.