Choosing Victory

I’m going to restrict the three scenarios outlined by Philip Breedlove in Brendon Cole’s interview of him at Newsweek to just one:

“If the West chooses to give Ukraine what they need to win, Ukraine will win this war,” the four-star general said. “This war is going to end exactly how Western policymakers want and desire it to end.”

because that’s the only one that doesn’t result in outright victory for Russia. Let me translate it for you. Since neither the United States nor Germany nor France nor the United Kingdom nor all of us put together have sufficient inventories of what Ukraine needs to win or the basic industrial productive capacity to produce them, we must abandon green fantasies and start building up our productive capacity and making more munitions. That’s what “choosing” that alternative requires.

Since this is an election year, President Biden does not have the political capital, and, let’s be frank, he has shown few signs in his political career of being a sufficient “profile in courage” to abandon thoughts of re-election to promote rapid reindustrialization at the expense of support from the progressive wing of his own party, that appears very unlikely until 2025 at the earliest.