Luciano Bosso recently wrote, “Answers to complex questions often have to be sought in the classics” to which we can add, to understand war and strategy, one must read and understand at least these two pieces of classic work.
The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides written around 400B.C, and On War by Carl von Clausewitz written in 1832.
A lot of ink has been spread on paper in analysing the real thinking behind Putin’s motives to invade Ukraine. Carl von Clausewitz in his principal work On War supplies the answer.
For Putin this war is “the continuation of policy by other means”.
Warfare has three main objects according to Clausewitz.
a. To conquer and destroy the armed power of the enemy.
b. To take possession of his material and other sources of strength, and
c. To gain public opinion.
Putin has partially managed the first two but failed miserably on the third.
Public opinion is won through big victories and regime change by capturing the enemy’s capital. Something the Russian army has failed to do.
The West should have known in 2014 when Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula, that Russia will use war to maintain its influence in Ukraine when all other means of political persuasion failed.
It should also have known of the dangers of the immerging China- Russia alliance.
It was all there in the synthesis of Clausewitz’s thesis. “War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will” and “War is merely the continuation of policy with other means”.
How more clearly can one describe the thinking of the Permanent 2, Russia and China.
Clausewitz does it and provides us with the means to understand Putin’s decision to engage his country in the invasion to Ukraine.
Clausewitz is also the old glue that binds historically the old Soviet Union and China.
Lenin one of Clausewitz’s great admirers referred to him as “one of the great military writers”. His influence on the Red Army was immense.
Clausewitz as Lenin interpreted him defined Soviet military strategic thinking and Trotsky and later Stalin embraced the Clausewitzian “war” as” a continuation of politics” in the new Soviet Union.
Mao Zedong on reading “On War” in 1938 organised a seminar for the Party leadership to discuss his theory and we find a Clausewitzian vein in his writings from that moment onwards.
Both leaders understood clearly that war is a cruel relentless activity. An act of force to bend the enemy “to their will by bloodshed”.
It will therefore be a mistake to see the war in Ukraine in isolation from the steps that Presidents Putin and Xi have taken realign to their countries.
Both regimes’ military strategy had their genesis in Clausewitz’s philosophical writings and as the world was watching the Russian forces moving into Ukraine, the Beijing Winter Olympic Games provided the backdrop for China and Russia to display their ever-increasing friendship.
Presidents, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin openly declared their opposition to the further enlargement of NATO and against UKUS and accused the western alliance of having cold war approaches that should be abandoned.
Their released statement describes an era in their relationship that “knows no limits” and a relationship “superior to the political and military alliances of the cold war era”.
In return Moscow expressed its support of China in the case the Chinese regime decided to use its military might to pressure South Korea and Japan.
Having listened to the Olympic national anthem of the winter games, we found ourselves watching the unfolding of the worst-case scenario simply because since the collapse of the Soviet Union western strategists took their eye off the challenges that Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China posed to the post-cold War international order.
Drunk with the freshly collected grapes of Fukuyama’s theories about the “End of History” and believing that the new emerging “worldwide spread of liberal democracies may signal the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution” which was going to became “the final form of human government”, we did not see the deepest and cleverest geopolitical shift of the post-cold War period taking place.
The belief that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not reversible enable Putin’s Russia to engage militarily both in its neighbourhood and the Middle East and finally in Ukraine. It also enabled China to became an economic giant.
Putin twenty years ago when he took the reins of power told us that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was “the historical catastrophe of the Twentieth Century”.
What we missed in the translation was that he was going to correct that catastrophe as soon as Russia’s economic recovery was in place.
Whatever the fallout from Ukraine is for Putin, his closer relationship with China is helping him manage the damage the war is inflicting to the people of Russian.
The new Russia-China gas deals alone are valued at around $117 billion, with Russia agreeing to supply China 100 million tons of crude through Kazakhstan. Over the next 10 years, Gazprom will ship 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year to China through the new pipeline.
China is currently Russia’s largest trading partner with 147 billion been traded last year between the two nations.
Russia and China are moving to reshape a new world order and to correct what they perceive as the mistakes of the past.
Their 5000 plus word joint statement in February confirmed the trend that was emerging as they were trying to redistribute power around the globe.
Russia ‘s support of China’s increased role in the Arctic is a clear sign of that.
If Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union and Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative, are not challenged the world will head for a new global economic order where China and Russia will reign supreme.
Former Republican Governor Bob Riley, with who I disagree on many things put it right when he said “when good people stand by and do nothing while wickedness reigns, their communities will be consumed”.
The challenge now for the west how to avoid a two front confrontation.
Field Marshal Graf von Moltke, the best practitioner of Clausewitz theories found out when faced with the two front problem he could not solve it by military means alone.
His successor Schieffen formulated 19 plans for a perfect front war ignoring Clausewitz’s basic observation about the “fog and friction of war” and failed.
Unfortunately, the world community has allowed autocracies that masquerade as democracies to receive legitimacy and the result is the chooks are coming home to roost.
Whiston Churchill speaking in the House of Commons on 11 November 1947 having fought Hitler and as a reward lost the election, warned the post WWII nations.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except all others”.
Demetrios “Demetri” Dollis (Greek: Δημήτρης Δόλλης; born 19 May 1956 in Argos Orestiko) is a former Australian politician of Greek descent and a former Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Greece under the Cabinets of George Papandreou and Coalition Cabinet of Lucas Papademos. He was a Labor member for Richmond in the Victorian Legislative Assembly from 1988 to 1999, and Victorian Deputy Leader of the Opposition from 1994 to 1997