Things keep ratcheting up in Ukraine, with France continuing its saber-rattling escalatory spiral. Let’s quickly run down the new separate signals being sent from all across NATO: In a new Le Parisien piece, Macron reportedly reiterated the eventual need for ground troops to save Ukraine:
Seeing from this perspective and what OP posted below I could see Russia trying to make Ukraine as the only battlefield and allowing the west to send in their troops, their F-35s, their whatever else they have and just aim for atrition against the west until their forces are no match for Russia while at the same time working with China to take all the countries in the Global South away from the west. The problem is that this could take too long and allow the west to reindustrialize enugh to be a problem.
So while I can see at least one possible strategy in this scenario where Russia doesn’t escalate I’m still not sure it would be their best path forward.
I am not sure that the West can reindustrialize. They are structurally and ideologically wedded to the neoliberal financialized economic model that has hollowed out their industrial base and there is no economic impetus to change that. They are and remain slaves to the profit motive, and even as that is proving to be their downfall they keep doubling down.
I do agree to some extent, but if the west sees their profits fall because they lose too much of the countries that they have selling them cheap goods/resources, as one of many possible examples, even they are capable of realizing that reindustrialization might be a necessity and that’s more of what I was thinking about. If this takes 2 decades and Russia can win in 1 then it might not a problem, but if the west industrializes fast that is a problem for Russia.
No country should underestimate their enemies after all.
Indeed. Yet that is exactly what the collective West is and has been doing for decades, and its current leadership class seem psychologically incapable of doing otherwise.