It was on this second visit to ruins of Tskhinvali, as dusk approached and the violence seemed to already acquire a kind of abstract tone, that I started to realize that I was looking at something much bigger than the current debate about Russian aggression or who was more guilty of what — pulling the camera much farther back on this scene, I understood that I was looking at the first ruins of America’s imperial decline. It’s not an easy thing to spot. It took years after the real collapse for Russians to finally accept that awful reality, and to adjust accordingly, first by retrenching, not overplaying an empty hand, slowly building up without making any loud noises while America ran wild around the world bankrupting itself and bleeding dry.
And now it’s over for us. That’s clear on the ground. But it will be years before America’s political elite even begins to grasp this fact. In the meantime, Russia is drunk on its victory and the possibilities that it might imply, sending its recently-independent neighbors into a kind of frenzied animal panic. Experience has taught them that it’s moments like these when Russia’s near abroad becomes, once again, a blood-soaked doormat in the violent epochal shifts — history never stopped here, it just froze up for a decade or so. And now it’s thawing, bringing with it the familiar stench of bloated bodies, burned rubble, and the sour sweat of Russian infantry.
We have entered a dangerous moment in history — America in decline is reacting hysterically, woofing and screeching and throwing a tantrum, desperate to prove that it still has teeth. Which it does — but not in the old dominant way that America wants or believes itself to be. History shows that it’s at this moment, tipping into decline and humiliation, when the worst decisions are made, so idiotically destructive that they’ll make the Iraq campaign look like a mere training exercise fender-bender by comparison.
Mark Ames
Another perspective on the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. While the author’s assertions about American’s imminent decline are quite hyperbolic in my opinion – he frequently shares similar takes on Twitter, so I’m familiar with his point of view – it’s remarkable how well some of these conclusions have materialized years later in Ukraine’s invasion.
The article reminded me of the often-presumed link between the United States’ messy withdrawal from Afghanistan and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, the argument being that Putin concluded that the US was weak, and he could expand Russia’s reach through military means and with minimal losses. Here we can see an example of something similar happening more than a decade prior (a US-trained military collapsing in days), which has not prompted Russia to further armed conquest.
I think that a proper takeaway is more limited in scope, namely Putin concluded not that the US is particularly weak or in decline, but that it would likely refrain from a full military response in an area it doesn’t consider critical to its strategic interests – and Afghanistan, Georgia, and Ukraine all belong to this category, no matter how stridently some might insist the defense of Ukraine is crucial to the future global order.
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