Defeat Russia First
by David Archibald
11 November 2024
In WW2, the Allies were fighting a European power and an Asian power at the same time. They decided that the easiest path to victory was to defeat Germany first, then Japan. Post that war, the overarching operating plan was to be able to conduct and win a two-front war, namely Russia and China, at the same time. Then, with budgetary pressures, that slipped to fight one and hold the other, perhaps.
Russia consulted with China before launching its attack on Ukraine, much the same way that Germany and Russia had the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to carve up Poland in 1939. Russia didn’t win its Ukraine War in the expected three days, or even three weeks. In fact, that war is coming up to its third anniversary. Russia is exhausted from its war. For example, a recent video showed a Russian hand-drawn cart, with supplies for the front line, being interdicted by a Ukrainian drone. The Germans, when they invaded in WW2, at least had horses.
In short, the Russians overestimated their own ability but were able to draw on stocks accumulated during the Soviet period, when they were spending 20% of GDP on defence. Satellite photos show that now those stocks are mostly gone. Russia now relies upon North Korea for half their artillery shells, but the North Korean stocks should also be exhausted by mid-2025. It wouldn’t take much to defeat Russia from here.
There are two good reasons why the civilized world should make the effort to ensure that Russia is defeated as soon as possible. One is the moral argument and one is the economic argument. We’ll do the economic one first. The 2024 US defense budget is $841.4 billion. That is to fund the war with China and have enough resources to fight Russia at the same time. If $60 billion a year is spent on defeating Russia, that is 7% of the defense budget. And for that mere 7%, we get rid of the potential for a second front and the need to keep forces dedicated to that contingency. An absolute bargain, and the ability to concentrate on one theater will save a lot of lives in fighting China. Even if we didn’t care about right and wrong, we should take that bargain.
There is a common misconception that the Biden regime has been fully supportive of Ukraine in this conflict. On the contrary, operating on the whacko notion that defeating Russia would be destabilising, Biden has been drip-feeding supplies at about 10% of the budgeted allocation. Even worse, the Biden regime has been stating that it is afraid of Russia going nuclear in response to Ukrainian battlefield gains. What China has learnt from that is that it can get what it wants in war by threatening to go nuclear. And then you have to call their bluff or lose.
It has been the worst strategic signalling ever, and has made nuclear war more likely than less likely. China is building two breeder reactors to make weapons-grade plutonium on Changbiao Island, Fujian Province. This is to increase their nuclear weapon stock from some 500 warheads to beyond 1,500. China is going from being able to retaliate to a first strike to a nuclear war fighting stance.
Weapons grade plutonium breeder reactors on Changbiao Island, Fujian Province to make warheads to kill non-Chinese.
By attacking Ukraine, Russia has taken itself out of WW3. That’s as long as they understand that they have been decisively defeated. They have to crawl out of Ukraine on their knees, begging for mercy. Otherwise they will lick their wounds and try again. Supplying the right amount of weapons now to Ukraine will save having to make a far greater effort further down the track.
Now for the moral case. A barbarian nation, Russia, in which 20% of the population doesn’t have internal toilets, invaded Ukraine so they could be an empire again. The Russians are killing and maiming perhaps a couple of hundred Ukrainians per day so they can feel better about themselves. Assisting Ukraine could be almost effortless. For example, the US Army has about 3,000 Bradley fighting vehicles parked up. The few the Ukrainians have received proved to be very useful.
The United States and the UK were signatories to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up 1,400 nuclear warheads in return for security assurances. The United States is not honoring its commitment of 1994. The message the rest of the world reads from that is that the United States is rather casual about its undertakings, and that they had better acquire nuclear weapons themselves. And it is encouraging China to think that the United States will talk itself out of defending Taiwan.
Some on the conservative side of politics seem to be operating on the premise that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” On that basis, if Biden says he is supporting Ukraine, they will support Russia. However, Putin is just another Russian psychopath. Back in the 1930s, Stalin went through lists of names to pick individuals to be executed, accumulating a couple of million dead and imprisoned from August 1936 to November 1938.
For the last couple of decades, Russia has had an unusually high death rate from people falling out windows. And in the UK, murders of Russians have used the nerve agent novichock and the nuclear weapon booster polonium. No sane intelligence agent would have left their calling card in this manner. This was Putin saying in effect ‘Only a great state has these things. I ordered these killings.’
Even Putin has run up against the limits of how many Russians he can kill in Russia. So in 2016, the FSB, successor to the KGB, murdered a Ukrainian electrician who had worked on the Georgian side in the Russo-Georgian War of 2008. Their excuse was the twisted notion that fellow Slavs shouldn’t fight each other. It was likely Putin feeding his itch to kill someone. Now his war is killing Russians at the rate of 400 per day and maiming a further 800. But even that rate may not make him happy. Putin is a sick puppy. There is no honour in being a Putin supporter. And Biden has really been stabbing Ukraine in the back — stopping other countries from supplying advanced weapons, so being pro-Ukraine is being anti-Biden.
This was Lincoln’s assessment in 1838 of the United States’ strategic position:
All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.
That was then. These days nuclear warheads can arrive within half an hour. And will more likely arrive if we are seen to been weak.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare