Never Going Back Again - 2023 Year in Review
2023 played out as The Year of Irrevocable Changes.
To be sure, a great many people refuse to believe it, and it will require even more major irrevocable changes in the coming few years to convince them. But, going forward from here, we will witness what I am wont to term The Great Acceleration.
We are now fully immersed in an end of empire epoch, with all its attendant uncertainties and unforeseen calamities. Ends of empire assume a malleable logic that defies precise prediction. And although this iteration, like those before it, will undoubtedly call forth a few great leaders and statesmen, it will be an era that will exalt many charlatans and fools into positions of great power where they will do predictably stupid and ultimately catastrophic things.
I will continue to write about these events as they develop and transpire, but on this first day of 2024, I will simply review a selection of my observations and analysis of the year just passed. This review will take the form of a list of what I have judged to be my most meaningful and well-crafted essays of 2023, in a somewhat arbitrary order from #10 to #1, with an “honorable mention” at the end, and this apropos musical interlude at the beginning:
We begin with what is, by far, the longest blog article I have ever written and will ever write. Its form and length were dictated by its purpose: to critique an academic paper from a very scholarly and highly credentialed author – one whom I actually hold in high esteem, but whose arguments I used as a springboard to argue vociferously against what I consider the much broader logical fallacies of a great number of western geopolitical thinkers of the “realist school”.
It acts to summarize almost everything I had written about the NATO / Russia conflict up to that point in time, and despite its somewhat tongue-in-cheek pretentious title, is actually aimed toward a general audience of the “common folk” – an aim I have since adopted as my primary objective in all I write.
I would also like to note that I have been criticized, on occasion, as being repetitive in my observations and analysis. This is not a bug, but a feature of my writing; something I do by deliberate design. I view my commentary on the geopolitical perplexities of our day as a “tapestry-in-progress”, and I intentionally revisit concepts I have previously discussed, and then seek to elaborate upon them, and connect them to new developments that both confirm and expand their scope.
And with that preface, let us proceed:
#10 – The Ontological Incoherence of American Imperial Exceptionalism (2023-02-23 / ~5000 words / 30 minutes)
#9 was written in the immediate aftermath of the NATO summit held in Vilnius, Lithuania in early July. Although less than half the length of #10 above, it still far exceeds my now self-imposed approximate limit of 1000 words per article. It reacts to what I and many others perceived as the obvious realization by most western leaders that the Ukraine #MotherOfAllProxyArmies gambit to weaken Russia was doomed to failure.
#9 – The Jig Is Up (2023-07-13 / ~2000 words / 12 minutes)
#8 articulates the now-indisputable fact that, beginning no later than the early summer of 2022, Russia came to see that it was going to be necessary to assume an active-defensive posture in order to fully prepare itself for much greater NATO involvement in Ukraine, and quite possibly even direct military intervention.
What followed will be viewed by military historians, in retrospect, as one of the most competently executed fighting retreats in modern warfare. The war of attrition Russia inaugurated over the course of the summer and autumn of 2022 has now not only reduced the Ukrainian military to a faint shadow of its original composition, but simultaneously attrited to near-exhaustion the entire military capability of the European NATO countries. It has exposed US/NATO equipment and weaponry as mediocre, fragile, and largely unsuited for modern high-intensity conflict, and also severely depleted the surprisingly limited stockpiles of American armaments.
#8 – Russia Is Winning with One Hand Tied Behind Its Back (2023-04-19 / ~900 words/ 5 minutes)
#7 addresses the Russian Sixth Column of doomers and naysayers who are perpetually murmuring, fomenting demoralization, and are inexplicably haunted by a sense that inevitable humiliation is lurking in the shadows just ahead.
Or at least it so seems on the surface.
My interpretation digs deeper. I am convinced that this entire class of Europhile / Anglophile Russians is actually ashamed of their Slavic heritage, and what they regard as the cultural backwardness of both Orthodox Christianity and the traditional “otherness” of Russian national identity.
#7 – Ok, Doomer (2023-01-07 / ~1000 words / 5 minutes)
#6 articulates briefly on the now self-evident reality that representative democracy in the United States is irredeemably corrupted. The sprawling permanent apparatus of empire in Washington has become an irreversibly metastasized malignancy on the American body politic, and an existential threat to the world – developments which Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw nearly two centuries ago.
#6 – The Ashes Will Come First (2023-09-04 / ~700 words / 4 minutes)
#5 very succinctly touches upon what is arguably the single most significant military revelation of the Ukraine war: The Russians have demonstrated that they can routinely shoot down ANY species of strike missile the US/NATO can field against them — not all of them all of the time, but most of them most of the time.
And they get better and better at it as time goes on.
The significance of this battlefield development defies exaggeration. It alters the war-fighting calculus that has been assumed for many decades. It substantially mitigates what was imagined to be the greatest strength of American military might – and make no mistake, militaries all around the world are fully aware of this sea change.
#5 – Empty Quiver (2023-12-21 / ~500 words / 3 minutes)
#4 discusses another shocking revelation of the Ukraine war:
The US military is not built nor equipped for protracted high-intensity conflict.
Much to the surprise of many around the world, the US and its NATO allies are utterly incapable of supplying the massive material demands of modern industrial warfare.
For all its massive plunder of the public purse, the US armaments industry is effectively a modestly scaled high-end boutique.
And there is simply no way domestic US industry can expeditiously expand its production. It would literally take years – probably a full decade – for the US to expand its military production to a seriously potent industrial scale.
#4 – The Arsenal of Democracy Isn’t (2023-02-03 / ~800 words / 5 minutes)
#3 has been one of my most frequently reposted articles. It elaborates on a concept I have incessantly reiterated ever since the Ukraine war began: the object of war is to destroy the enemy army.
If that objective is most effectively achieved by fighting on the offensive and conquering territory, then that is what you should do.
If, on the other hand, you can more efficiently and economically destroy the enemy army from a strong defensive position, even if that means ceding territory in order to assume such a position, then THAT is what you should do.
Absent some overriding strategic imperative, the acquisition and/or retention of "territory", per se, is a purposeless objective.
Indeed, if prosecuted wisely and professionally — and particularly if your firepower greatly exceeds that of your enemy (as is overwhelmingly the case for the Russians in this war) — one can almost always more efficiently and economically destroy enemy forces from a defensive posture.
The Russians have consistently excelled in this respect over the course of this war.
#3 – The Object of War (2023-06-11 / ~1200 words / 6 minutes)
#2 presents of big picture review of the entire NATO / Russia war in Ukraine as of mid-November 2023 – just a few weeks ago. Its analysis and conclusions remain current here on the first day of 2024. Perhaps its most significant argument is one still largely unappreciated by most people in the west, but it is nonetheless true and will be universally acknowledged as such in coming years:
“Russian strategy, tactics, and operational results in this war will be admiringly studied by military historians for generations to come.
“As far as the current moment in time is concerned, I submit that the Russian armed forces, fighting on their own ground, on and under their adjacent seas, and in the air above their spheres of control, constitute the most potent and battle-hardened military force on the planet.”
#2 – Bleeding the Beast (2023-11-14 / ~1000 words / 5 minutes)
#1 is quite arguably the single most succinct thing I have yet written in relation to the ongoing decline of the American Empire and the resurrection of a multipolar world. I will excerpt only its last paragraph, and encourage the reader to spend the three minutes required to read it in its entirety.
“The empire of debt and lies has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. All that remains is to see if it will go gently into that good night, or in a fit of humiliated rage, set the world on fire.”
#1 – Open Defiance (2023-11-30 / ~600 words / 3 minutes)
This is the state of affairs as it currently stands at the start of 2024. Where does the Ukraine War go from here? Well, in answer to that query, I have opted to include one last article as an “honorable mention” for 2023. Aside from a brief but important preface, it is an exact reprint of an article I first published in the midst of the widely celebrated Ukraine counteroffensive in Kharkov region in the late summer and early autumn of 2022.
It was widely derided at the time. It was largely ignored when I republished it on its one year anniversary in 2023.
As with many things I have written over the course of this war, it anticipates developments far in advance of their actual realization. And, even now, its full consummation is not likely to be realized until any earlier than the summer of 2024. That said, I personally regard it as highly as anything I have authored since I undertook to formally commentate on matters geopolitical and military.
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Honorable Mention – Lightning Strikes Twice (2023-09-14 / ~2300 words / 14 minutes)
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For all of you who have previously pledged to support this blog, I express my genuine gratitude. I hope my writing has been informative in some small manner and aided you in your quest to understand our crazy world a little better.
— Will Schryver