Božo forwarded me an article by Paul Craig Roberts this morning. Basically, the man is frustrated because Putin didn’t do any of the things the Americans would expect a stereotypical Russian leader to do:

As I have pointed out again and again and now again, Putin’s idiotic–indeed mindless–way of conducting war has destroyed the credibility of the Russian military. I am becoming convinced that the outcome of the nonsensical “limited military operation” will be either Russian surrender or nuclear war. By continuing to encourage provocation on top of provocation, Putin is backing himself into a corner where his only option is surrender or nuclear war.  It is extraordinary that the Kremlin does not realize the danger in the picture of weakness and indecision that the Kremlin and Western propaganda have created.

So, basically, the Americans created this image of a Hitler-like Putin who is the ultimate tough guy who just wrecks everything in his path, and now that it turned out that Putin is in fact an orthodox Christian who tries to do things in the least violent and disruptive way possible and prefers treaties and agreements to war, which every sane person who actually watched Putin knew from the beginning, they are unhappy because in their thinking to be peaceful and reasonable is to be weak, and their reaction to weakness is violence.

The problem with the Americans is that they perceive the world in terms of a wolf pack, and they even fail at understanding wolf packs. They think that you can be either “alpha” or “beta”, either dominant or submissive, and if you’re submissive then you’re worthless because only dominance matters. They don’t care about the engineers or any of the people who actually make things work – only the leaders matter, only the politicians and managers who are “dominant” and “in charge”, regardless of the fact that those are the people whose main tools are excel and powerpoint, for presenting their “narrative”, and not Autocad or CNC grinders and plasma cutters. They think submissive people need to be kept weak and afraid to not give them “ideas”, and if someone loses his position of leadership and control, he no longer matters. Basically, America functions exactly like a society of Satanists would be expected to function, and this doesn’t seem to be an accident. America looks very much like Satan’s pet project.

So, Putin has basically two options: the one where he conforms to American crazy ideas of him, and thus justify total war against him because he’s “literally Hitler” and must be destroyed at all cost, or he can try to de-escalate, keep the war “boring”, work to slowly grind down the enemy’s resources, avoid critical “Pearl Harbour moments”, use economic forces to divorce America from its actual source of power, which is the fact that people elsewhere have to get dollars in order to buy energy to power their societies and America is the only one who can print them.

So, option one, Putin responds to American encroachments by turning their bases in Europe into a glass parking lot and crushes Ukraine like an empty can of soda, which would be perfectly easy if he had more than the current 5% of his forces doing something about it. As a result, the American hawks would say “see, we told you so, he’s dangerous, he’s literally Hitler, we need to destroy him”, and America uses a decapitation nuclear strike against Russian leadership, Perimetr issues a strategic response signal, half an hour later America is a glass parking lot, the rest of America launches everything they have at Russia and China, about 2000 nuclear warheads go off within a day and the northern hemisphere is about as fucked as that carousel in Pripyat facing the Chernobyl reactor.

Option two, Putin grinds the Ukrops down slowly, allows all his enemies to throw everything they have into the meat grinder, slowly deplete their resources, and simultaneously works on establishing ties with other countries and re-route the lines of power and control that used to go to the UK and America, and now increasingly to Russia and China, and the kind of war the Americans get to have is the one Asimov described in his Foundation series, where there’s no shooting, but lots of dishwashers, washing machines, computers and cars breaking down and leaking fluids, with no replacement parts and no new stuff, and there are lines for bread and gas, and money is worth increasingly less, until the populace had enough and there’s a popular uprising in the West, taking down the governments who are utterly undemocratic anyway.

Option two is the only one that gives a non-negligible chance of a survivable outcome, because I expect there to be a limited nuclear exchange, but the overall emotional power of the conflict is intentionally kept low, which frustrates the attempts to justify a total escalation. This is the Scylla vs. Charybdis stratagem: you need to pick between a sea whirlpool that will destroy your entire ship, or a monster on the shore that will eat some of your sailors. So far, Putin has made the choice of Odysseus, and chose Scylla who will eat a few of his men but hoped that the rest will live. The warning of this stratagem is that Odysseus in the end had the worst of both options – Scylla first ate a few of his men, and then Charybdis swallowed his ship and the rest of his men, and he himself barely survived.