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Whichever way one games it out, there’s close to no chance that Kiev’s counteroffensive will meet the Western public’s expectations absent some black swan event, which means that Biden will be running for re-election with two losses under his belt in Afghanistan and Ukraine. It’s difficult to imagine that Americans will give him and his team another four years in office after they humiliated the US so badly, but tens of thousands more might still die before these warmongers are removed from power.
Senior Ukrainian presidential advisor Mikhail Podolyak told Italian media that his country’s much-hyped counteroffensive already began a few days ago, which is curious since that timeframe coincides with its proxy invasion of Russia’s Belgorod Region that was just copium for deflecting from Artyomovsk’s loss. That media-driven stunt tremendously failed to achieve any tangible gains, however, thus raising even more questions than ever before about whether the counteroffensive will succeed at all.
The Washington Post raised awareness in March about how poorly Kiev’s troops were faring in the NATO-Russian proxy war, which was followed by Politico citing unnamed Biden Administration officials a month later who worried about the consequences of it failing to meet the public’s expectations. Former Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov then concocted a conspiracy theory wildly speculating that Kremlin agents infiltrated the White House and sabotaged the counteroffensive before it even began.
This popular pro-Kiev figure seemed to have been spooked by Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul telling Bloomberg that “I think there’s going to be a lot riding on the line with this counteroffensive. If Ukraine is successful in the eyes of the American people and the world, I think it will be a game-changer for continued support. If they are not, that will also have an impact, in a negative way, though.” In other words, its failure could lead to the US severely curtailing aid to Kiev.
Therein lies the real reason why the counteroffensive is still going ahead despite the overwhelming odds against its success that were detailed in the preceding months by the Washington Post and Politico. Biden’s re-election hinges on the success of this campaign after NATO already sent over $165 billion in taxpayer-provided aid to Kiev, the vast majority of which came from the US. He needs anything that his perception managers can spin as a victory to justify this ahead of next year’s election.
It’s not just for the sake of placating taxpayers either in this increasingly partisan conflict that’s seen a rising number of Republicans calling for more pragmatism and restraint as opposed to their Democrat rivals who remain gung-go about going all in for as long as it takes. Biden presided over the US’ most humiliating military loss in history after August 2021’s chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, which infamously resulted in leaving a large number of Americans and allied locals behind to an unknown fate.
He and his team don’t care how many tens of thousands of Ukrainians have to be sacrificed in this conflict so long as they can achieve something that the Democrats can distort as having made the most geostrategically significant conflict since World War II worth provoking. A failed raid into Russia and an unsuccessful assassination attempt against President Putin aren’t considered by most Americans to be worth the risk of a Third World War by miscalculation.
After 15 months of fighting, Kiev has only managed to reconquer part of the territory that it claims as its own, which is unimpressive when considering that it has the full backing of what the US portrays as supposedly being the world’s most powerful military alliance in history. The NATO chief’s self-proclaimed “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia that he declared in February inadvertently proved that Russia’s military-industrial complex can compete with the entire West’s.
That was an unintended self-inflicted blow to this de facto New Cold War bloc’s reputation of being a military superpower and also thus discredited their information warfare narrative that the Russian economy is collapsing. In late January, the New York Times admitted that the West’s sanctions failed, and then they admitted at the end of February after the NATO chief’s dramatic declaration that they also failed to isolate Russia too.
The abovementioned facts already make Biden look like a bumbling fool for provoking this conflict, which only proved just how limited the US’ influence and power have become in recent years, but he looks even worse when considering the bigger picture. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, former US National Security Council member Fiona Hill, and Goldman Sachs’ President of Global Affairs Jared Cohen all acknowledged earlier in May that multipolarity is now a geopolitical reality as a result of this conflict.
It’s only the Biden Administration and allied propagandists abroad that remain in denial about this, which places even more pressure on their proxies in Kiev to achieve something tangible throughout the course of its counteroffensive that they can then spin as having made it worth provoking this conflict. The clock is ticking too since there’s a growing consensus across the globe that this is their side’s “last hurrah” prior to likely commencing ceasefire and peace talks by year’s end or early 2024 at the latest.
The West’s military-industrial crisis will inevitably limit the pace, scale, and scope of armed aid to Kiev, not to mention the US’ election season that’ll see this conflict unprecedentedly politicized. Instead of soberly admitting his side’s shortcomings and proactively trying to reach some sort of peace agreement that could then be exploited as the pretext for him winning the Nobel Peace Prize and thus boosting his re-election prospects, Biden is gambling against the odds that the counteroffensive will succeed.
Even Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley foresaw in late January that it’ll likely be impossible for Kiev to remove Russia from all the territory that it claims as its own by this year, which means that Biden and his team are trying to prove the US’ top military official wrong. This in turn confirms that they’re prioritizing politics over military advice, thus extending credence to the claim that this counteroffensive is all about Biden’s re-election and not pushing Russia back to its pre-2014 borders.
If it fails to achieve this maximum objective as expected by Milley and the earlier cited US media, then the Republicans will rightly pounce on Biden to accuse him of cooking up the worst conflict since World War II in a desperate bid to win re-election by deflecting from his humiliating loss in Afghanistan. With his back against the wall, it can’t be discounted that his team will advise him to escalate to unthinkable levels, though Russia’s hypersonic missiles will likely keep him from crossing the ultimate red line.
Whichever way one games it out, there’s close to no chance that Kiev’s counteroffensive will meet the Western public’s expectations absent some black swan event, which means that Biden will be running for re-election with two losses under his belt in Afghanistan and Ukraine. It’s difficult to imagine that Americans will give him and his team another four years in office after they humiliated the US so badly, but tens of thousands more might still die before these warmongers are removed from power.
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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.
