THE Washington Post’s plea to end “magical thinking” on Ukraine and Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg’s admission that “we should be prepared for bad news” are recognitions of the unfolding strategic disaster facing Nato following the defeat of Zelensky’s counteroffensive with its catastrophic loss of life — mainly Ukrainian, but Russian too.
 
There is no military stalemate as Stoltenberg claims; Russia is waging a ruthless war of attrition that is systematically destroying and degrading Ukraine’s military capability. While assessing the outcome of any war must be highly conditional, Russia clearly has the upper hand, a situation unlikely to change.
 
Washington knows the war is lost and a consensus is emerging that financing Ukraine no longer represents a sound investment. Biden’s dilemma is how to explain yet another self-inflicted foreign policy debacle and mitigate damage in the presidential election next year.
 
With no strategic contingency for such a defeat, the US elite will seek to blame everyone but themselves as they prepare to cut and run, claiming money to support Ukraine is “running out.”
 
Biden’s scaremongering propaganda that Putin will march westward if Ukraine falls, forcing the US to defend its European Nato allies, is face-saving grandstanding to divert blame onto his Republican opponents blocking his latest aid package, itself so nugatory it will make little difference to Ukraine’s military campaign.
 
The neocons chose to ignore warnings from recently deceased war criminal Henry Kissinger and CIA director William Burns not to embark on their dangerous adventure to weaken Russia by imposing a hostile Nato-affiliated Ukrainian regime on its very borders, advising instead to build bridges with their fellow exploiters in the Putin oligarchy. Now the consequences of this war will echo for generations, and way beyond the borders of Ukraine itself.
 
Limitations of US power have been repeatedly exposed in conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan, but the defeat in Ukraine of a Nato-trained and equipped army has revealed weakness on a qualitatively different scale, economically, politically, and militarily.
 
Decades of neoliberal deindustrialisation is one cause that explains why Nato cannot match Russia and its allies’ rate of shell production, a situation it will take years to remedy.
 
Predictably, Stoltenberg and Western politicians now demand massive increases in defence spending in a new arms race in conventional weaponry, which will deepen instability, reaction, and class antagonisms as further attacks on welfare, public services, and standards of living intensify.
 
The international “rules-based order” is collapsing under the weight of its own double standards and is being dealt a potentially mortal blow with Biden’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Global South nations increasingly conclude their interests lie with China and Russia in Brics, not in the instability and destruction that seems to follow US intervention against any regime that won’t toe the line.

As economic, political, and military rivalries develop and intensify, wars to secure markets and impose hegemony are not just probable but inevitable.
 
If “war is politics with other means,” then military defeat means political defeat too: what cannot be won on the battlefield will never be secured at the negotiating table.