Right now two Lilliput-Brobdingnag conflicts are in progress. The one that dominates the headlines pits Ukraine (population 41 million, GDP $181 billion) against Russia (population 146 million, GDP $1.65 trillion). (All Gross National Product figures in this post are the estimates of the International Monetary Fund, which Wikipedia has compiled into a useful table.) Through the all-enveloping fog of war, the state of the battle front is obscure. As I write, much of the news is hopeful for the outnumbered Ukrainians, though it would be incautious to make predictions on the basis of current reports. Very few military operations move as swiftly and smoothly as, say, the First Gulf War. Over any but a short time frame, Russia is highly likely to prevail. It has been striving for the past decade to undo the decay that its military suffered during the late Soviet and early post-Soviet eras, while Ukraine didn’t begin taking its own defense seriously until not long before yesterday. Russian setbacks suggest that modernization hasn’t progressed as far as Tsar Putin hoped, but they don’t mean that Ukraine has more than a slender chance of survival as a genuinely independent nation.
And the reason why one can’t be optimistic very far into the future is the state of the other Lilliput-Brobdingnag imbroglio, between Russia and NATO. Judging by economic strength, the sine qua non of military might, Russia is barely noticeable. Its Gross Domestic Product (below California, Texas or New York) is one-fourteenth that of the United States. Five other NATO members (Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada) outproduce Russia. Their aggregate GDP ($10.68 trillion) is six and a half times Russia’s. That doesn’t count the other 24 NATO members, which are substantially larger than Russia in the aggregate. Even the combined GDP of NATO’s relatively poor, formerly Soviet-ruled Eastern border states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria; $1.45 trillion) is competitive.
The point of the last paragraph’s tedious array of numbers is that, next to NATO’s Brobdingnag, Russia isn’t even a very big Lilliput. The notion that it could successfully attack a country that, while not belonging to NATO, is a NATO ally and prospective member, is on its face absurd, like a Chihuahua taking on a pack of Pit Bulls. Moreover, it’s an isolated Chihuahua. Its only firm, reliable ally is Belarus. Even Kazakhstan, whose dictator Tsar Putin recently rescued from a popular uprising, has turned down a request for assistance. Russia does enjoy the benevolent neutrality of the communist-controlled region of China, which will be of some assistance, but Xi Jinping will risk very little to help Tsar Putin’s paper tiger. Meanwhile, any prospect of an open rupture within NATO died when the alliance’s least Putin-skeptical members, Hungary and the Czech Republic, denounced the attack on Ukraine.
How can Putin possibly think that it’s other than insane to go up against those odds? The idea that he is, in fact, mad has gained traction lately, but his “madness” is entirely rational. NATO did almost nothing to buttress Ukraine’s defenses while there was time to prepare. The possibility of war with Russia has been less than remote since 2014, when a pro-Russian insurrection began in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. How did Brobdingnag address that danger? It offered minimal aid the Ukraine, its European members (prodded by Moscow-funded pseudo-environmentalists) increased their dependence on Russian oil and natural gas, NATO defense spending and readiness declined, and, starting immediately after his inauguration, the current President of the United States began stifling American energy production.
The one absolutely confident prediction that we can make about the future of Ukraine is that no NATO soldier will fire a bullet in its defense. Nor is it at clear that, in their present condition, the NATO armies could successfully intervene if their political leaders wanted them to. Germany’s highest ranking officer says that the German army, once NATO’s second strongest, “is more or less standing bare”.
Far more than when Richard Nixon coined the phrase, Brobdingnag is “a pitiful, helpless giant”. Should Ukraine emerge unscathed from its present ordeal, it will owe its salvation more to St. Michael the Archangel, patron saint of Kiev, than to any secular power.
Update (February 27, 2022): One of the links above goes to Institute for the Study of War’s February 26th update on the war. The February 27th update is here. Tje opening paragraph summarizes the current situation:
The Russian military has likely recognized that its initial expectations that limited Russian attacks would cause the collapse of Ukrainian resistance have failed and is recalibrating accordingly. The Russian military is moving additional combat resources toward Ukraine and establishing more reliable and effective logistics arrangements to support what is likely a larger, harder, and more protracted conflict than it had originally prepared for. The tide of the war could change rapidly in Russia’s favor if the Russian military has correctly identified its failings and addresses them promptly, given the overwhelming advantage in net combat power Moscow enjoys. Ukrainian morale and combat effectiveness remain extremely high, however, and Russian forces confront the challenge of likely intense urban warfare in the coming days.
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