John Batchelor and Michael Vlahos, in their roles as Gaius and Germanicas, ponder the West's "war fatigue and desperation" as it faces a defeat in Ukraine after months of promising a victory over Russia:
John warns that Russia can be very ruthless in war, but I don't think ruthlessness is the issue, if I may jump into the conversation.
The feedback loop in battlefield war is very short; it's very long in political war. The West has tried to fight in the political realm against Russia's battlefield war. This has led to a profound disconnection between what is actually happening in Ukraine and public perceptions. This has made is relatively easy for Russia to walk away with the store, as we say in the USA. They managed to destroy a big chunk of Ukraine's military and divide the rest into what Alexander Mercouris calls "penny packets," as Ukraine split its forces to chase Russian troops from pillar to post.
Yet the West doggedly continued to orchestrate a war that didn't exist outside the political realm.
Could the eerie situation touch off a nuclear war, now that the West is contemplating Ukraine's defeat on the actual battlefield? This is John's concern, one that should be shared by every reasonable adult.
It would be easier to scale back the threat if Western societies understood that modernity has allowed them to get away with actions that depend on a long feedback loop.
Many situations in the modern era allow us to stave off the consequences of bad decisions until the inevitable feedback happens. Many jobs have become less dependent on short feedback loops. An example is piloting a plane; it used to be that if the pilot made a serious mistake, the plane would crash. Fast feedback. Technology has to a great extent allowed pilots to compensate for mistakes, obviating the fast feedback loop.
Such compensations are a great achievement for humanity. The hidden downside is that they've created a way of thinking that tends to ignore longer-term consequences. This has led to the widespread idea that reality is what one says it is.
The public in Western democracies insists on addressing social problems in political and moral terms rather than epistemological ones. So, it's not easy to convey that survival for the human race now depends on a keen awareness that reality doesn't care about politics or questions of good and evil. Yet it takes time to get the point across.
At the moment, we'll have to depend on Russian President Vladimir Putin's lessons on short feedback loops to do much of the arguing, as one national government after the other finds him to be far more reasonable than Nato and the American president.
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