How Men Fight and Lose the Battle

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.  

William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, 1886

The global economic system is not a conspiracy. There are conspirators, and monopolists, cartels and oligarchs, and even cabals. But these are accidental contributors to a system that needs no more to explain it than the mechanical forces of capitalism. Its complexity is beyond the individual mind to design. It's beyond any private club, even beyond a world economic forum. All these are agents of markets that have evolved for centuries.

But the global economic system is not just a result. It is an expression of the unified fate of humanity, its aspiration for a world that overcomes the system that created it but that cannot carry it forward. The war in Ukraine would appear to contradict this.

Not for the strategists of empire, however. They have prepared for a world that is cracked into clashing blocs. This is where they have invested their surplus. For the general staff in Moscow the crack is drawn by fortune, their resources determined by opportunity, and the narrative is what works on their audience. Where the empire of the party once claimed the world, the new people have more classical designs for their matching orders.

They have been persuaded by success elsewhere that the waging of war, if the objectives are precise and limited, can produce political victory. They have watched the west overreach and stumble and convinced themselves that imperial practicality will bless their weaponry. So where have they failed?

Industrial warfare has been a trap for well over a century. Whether a great power is overwhelming a weaker one or two are fighting to a stalemate, modern military operations have proven useless politically while demonstrating an unbelievable capacity for destruction. In the early industrial era this did sometimes alleviate excesses of fixed capital. In our time it may give an assist to the profits of the weapons sector but its economic returns have diminished, are all but gone.

What has the Russian army achieved in Ukraine? Without a doubt its most significant result has been the impetus of the Ukrainian population to the west, fleeing in actuality and politically. In exchange they have gained territory in an era when territory has lost much of its significance. They have drawn the wrong conclusions from recent history.

The political furor over the unraveling of the American campaign in Afghanistan should have demonstrated to them, by its remarkable brevity, just how not unexpected and how unexceptional a retreat it was. The limitations of empire should be known to everyone by now. They have no workaround, and will constrict even tighter as our world simultaneously draws down on its resources and pays out for the damages already in the pipeline.

We are told that Moscow has prepared itself to be sanctioned and we are told their preparations have fallen grievously short. This crack in the world used to be called the Iron Curtain. It was built by the empire of the party to exclude the empire of capital and it failed. Given that a lesser war is criminal insanity and a great war is inconceivable, sanctions are both inevitable and an admission by powers whose own history is brimful of criminal insanity and who continue to invest treasure in the inconceivable that the failure of military ambitions unfolding before us is a lesson that needs to be applied globally.

A Disorderly Retreat

Ukraine is a borderland. That’s the meaning of its name. And the border that it sits on, between Nato and Russia, seems to run through the middle of the country. In such a way that it can be shifted quickly, as it has in recent years, from one side to the other. The shift in 2014 dislodged more in American politics than was apparent at the time. Five years later ‘western’ Ukraine is exhausted, bewildered by the loss of its American client status, and seeking terms with the east.

There are students of imperialism who maintain that Trump represents a faction of the ruling class who reject confrontation with Russia and favor confrontation with China. I have no doubt such theorists can be found and that they are well funded and have copiously documented strategies. Since the failure of the neo-conservative campaigns of the Bush era, however, I suspect all such strategies are no more than wish fulfillment and the true plans of the American empire are to hold the line and pray their credit holds out.

Moreover, everything indicates that if such a strategy is loose in this administration it is operating without any sort of executive control. In the case of Ukraine it would be possible for an American president to establish a policy seeking to mediate the conflict between Kiev and Moscow as part of a new detente with Russia, allowing American power to focus on an economically ascendant China. It would not be easy and would run counter to a great many positions that have been solidly entrenched over the last thirty years. But, just as with Nixon’s Chinese play, it becomes an option when the most strident voices of aggressive imperialism, those emanating from the Republican party, are brought to heel.

But nothing of the sort is going on here. Trump has no strategic ability and is completely without the friends required to carry out such a change in direction. Politically he is pure reptilian complex. Idiotic. What is being unveiled is just another instance where Trump, whose private interests were honed in the relatively primitive world of accumulation which is big city real estate, attempted to monetize his power out of the very complex world of global capital. But this time he has double-crossed the empire.

The allies he will need in the days to come are caught in what is likely to be a withering crossfire. Having never made a serious attempt to build a case for imperial withdrawal or for rapprochement with the Kremlin he is left without a political defense in a court where he will face a jury of imperialists instead of an audience of the devoted.

The deep state has never trusted Trump. It is indifferent to whether he is Republican or Democratic and it has no fear that he will subvert its authoritarian toolkit. But all candidates for high office need to display, by recognized pedigree or by cultivation of contacts, allegiance; not so much to the democratic traditions of the republic, but to the  position which it now occupies in international capitalism. Trump has never bothered.

Vetting candidates is a function of the parties. But, while the GOP made a half-hearted attempt to derail Trump in the last election, it failed. And its failure has now put in peril its fitness to rule the empire. If it defends its president it endorses the unsightly corruption of the worst currents of privately held capital and throws up its hands before the multitude of foreign policy crises which make landfall on our shores with the regularity of hurricanes. If it removes him it risks ending its status as a mass party.

What we know as the two party system was the outgrowth of national expansion, regional divisions, and the coexistence of slave and wage labor. Republican paranoia about a one party state may demonstrate its unconscious understanding that it has lost its utility as either a bulwark of American capital or as a contributor to any of the solutions which the entire world will require from the working mass of its citizens in the near future.

In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies.

Richard Wilbur