The Empire’s wars usually don’t require victory because they allow the Empire to pursue other, unstated objectives. Victory might actually hinder the pursuit of those objectives. From Pepe Excobar at strategic-culture.su:
Even if country 404 is utterly defeated in 2024, once again it’s imperative to stress it: this is far from over.
Selected players scattered around the Beltway silos of power, diligently working as messengers for the people who really run the show in the Hegemon, have concluded that a no holds barred confrontation with Russia would lead to the collapse of all of NATO; undo decades of US iron grip on Europe; and ultimately cause the Empire’s downfall.
Playing brinkmanship games sooner or later would meet the indestructible red lines inbuilt in the unmovable Russian object.
US elites are smarter than that. They may excel on calculated risk. But when the stakes are this high, they know when to hedge and when to fold.
The “loss” of Ukraine – now a graphic imperative – is not worth risking the loss of the whole Hegemonic ride. That would be too much for the Empire to lose.
So even as they get increasingly desperate with the accelerated imperial plunge into a geopolitical and geoeconomic abyss, they’re frantically changing the narrative – a domain in which they excel.
And that explains why discombobulated European vassals in NATO-controlled EU are now in total panic.
Davos this week offered bucketloads of Orwellian salad. The key, frantic messages: War is peace. Ukraine is not (italics mine) losing and Russia is not winning. Hence Ukraine needs way more weaponizing.
Yet even Norwegian Wood Stoltenberg was told to toe the new line that matters: “NATO is not moving into Asia. It’s China that is coming close to us.” That certainly adds a new wacky meaning to the notion of moving tectonic plates.
Keep the Forever Wars engine running
There is a total void of “leadership” in Washington. There is no “Biden”. Just Team Biden: a corporate combo featuring low-rent messengers such as de facto neocon Little Blinkie. They do what they’re told by wealthy “donors” and the financial-military interests that really run the show, reciting the same old cliché-saturated lines day after day, bit players in a Theatre of the Absurd.
Only one exhibit suffices.
Reporter: “Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?”
The President of the United States: “Well, when you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
The same in what passes for “strategic thinking” applies to Ukraine.
