But there is a clue, and perhaps some reason for optimism, embedded in the reality of the home front advantage, for the final outcome of the war - as well as a strong rebuke to anyone who thinks that nations, or national borders, no longer matter much in today's globalized world. The Russia-Ukraine war is a violent reminder that nations are not going away; in fact, nations have only proliferated and increased in the post WWII period, and seem likely to continue to do so. The increase in nations can be looked upon as a threat to world peace, or it can be looked upon as a means to world peace, if the home front advantage is properly understood.
The home front advantage is a force-multiplier.
It gives the nation defending itself an exponential advantage, particularly today when people have sophisticated lives, working and living under relative freedom, even in Russia, even in China. Sophisticated sanctions (modern day sieges), exoduses by people by car, plane, boat and all sorts of methods not available centuries ago, mean that citizens can choose not to be cannon fodder, or, in the case of Russia, to simply vote with their feet, against a war they strongly oppose. The days of autocratic rulers simply ordering people to lay down their lives in foreign battlefields for wars they don't believe in are probably over, even if they will do so willingly to defend the home front. Does anyone disagree that the war, and support for Ukraine, would go very differently if Ukraine tried to make the kinds of invasions into Russia that Russia is making into Ukraine? The few, relatively minor attacks on Russia territory, compared to Ukraine's blitzed destruction, are largely seen as defensive. The Kerch Bridge, the bombing of weapons caches just over the Ukraine-Russian border, barely if at all acknowledged by Ukraine, are nowhere close to equivalent to the damage suffered by Ukraine. Strategically, and encouraged by America and NATO, Ukraine wisely has refrained from equivalent attacks on Russian territory, which it would certainly lose since Russia is so much deeper and better equipped, but also because if Russia were attacked directly by Ukraine, Ukraine's defensive reasons for the war would come under serious question, and Russia's claims that it was being targeted for break-up by Ukraine and especially its Western allies, would seem more justified. Ukraine is supported by most of the world because it was attacked. This is another under-valued home front advantage, on the global front.
No one has offered a coherent or complete end-war scenario. Biden admits Putin is in a "tough position" and wants to leave Putin room to deescalate. American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has said: "If Russia stops fighting, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends." But these are not roadmaps to the end of the war, any more than Putin's widely derided illegal annexation of the four Ukraine regions Russia partly occupies. Declarations are not resolutions. But perhaps the home front advantage, placed in its proper importance, can offer a roadmap. If wars of aggression, vs. wars of defense, are so difficult to win, even for super-powers, then perhaps that will provide Russia with the security it seeks, while also ensuring Ukraine that if Russia leaves Ukraine, it will not return. A separate, but also important consideration, is "what is Ukraine today?" Zelensky says it is everything Ukraine had prior to 2014, including Crimea, but figures as widely disparate as Henry Kissinger and Elon Musk have said Ukraine will have to give up some territory. Again, the question of what to do with the Russian port at Sevastopol is paramount. It's hard to imagine Russia giving that up except under very dangerous escalation that no sides in the war are eager for. The exact definitions of territory and conditions of future relations have to be worked out, painfully and under conditions that don't yet exist in the battlefields. But home front advantage should give all parties to the war some comfort that the nations involved will continue to exist, that war is ultimately futile, unnecessary, and even more intensely destructive and wasteful than in the past.
It should provide a basis for a negotiated peace.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
