Lessons From Nanking and Why the Ukrainian Summer Offensive Was a Success

Over the past several weeks I have seen a lot of commentators, with absolutely no evidence, breathlessly anticipating a Ukrainian collapse. I expressed skepticism, and apparently I was right. Biden plans to present Congress with a $100 billion spending package for Ukraine. Does that sound like something the USA would do if the war was almost over?

First, let’s look at the infamous 1937 Battle of Nanking during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Like Ukraine today, China was heavily dependent on on external help. And also like Ukraine, this external help was both a strength and a weakness. Outside material help was crucial to the war effort, but put massive pressure on the Chinese government to perform well. Just holding their own against Japanese advances wasn’t enough, the Chinese needed solid military victories that looked good in foreign newspapers. Unfortunately, this resulted in Chinese forces taking foolish risks and paying a steep price. All of this culminated at Nanking when Chiang Kai-shek, against the advice of his military staff, decided to hold the city rather than order a retreat. This decision ended in total disaster, with ill-equipped Chinese troops breaking into a full rout.

With hindsight on my side, I find this episode grimly ironic because it is quite clear that the western powers had already designated Imperial Japan as an enemy, and were going to continue supporting China even if and when they lost Nanking. Double ironic, losing the city actually turned out to be a propaganda victory, as the Japanese slaughtered prisoners and the civilian population.

Let’s take a step back and look beyond China. In the 1930s, the British Empire had five major rivals: Germany, France, Imperial Japan, the USSR, and the USA. None of these states were outright enemies of the British, but hardly friends either. Yes, even the USA was not a friend of the British in this period. The War Department anticipated American-British relations possibly breaking down, and created a plan to annex Canada if necessary, referred to as War Plan Red.

So the Brits started a game, and this game began to come together almost before World War I was even over. Germany needed to be neutered, but not crushed, as they needed to continue being a balancing force against France. The newly-formed states of Poland and Czechoslovakia came to be a “second Russia,” who controlled former German territory and served the former Russian Empire’s role of an eastern threat. Poland also served a double purpose of causing problems for the Russians themselves in the Soviet Union, and absolutely succeeded. This left just Imperial Japan and the USA to deal with, and the rest is history.

By September 1945, Germany and Imperial Japan had been crushed and occupied. The USSR was devastated with tens of millions of dead. Thanks to Charles de Gaulle, France escaped occupation under the Marshall Plan, but was war torn and humiliated. The USA had been cemented as a permanent ally of the British, with all tendencies toward isolationism swept aside. And the British achieved all of this at hardly any cost to themselves, not even much war damage or casualties, at least not in comparison to most of the other participants in the conflict. The British game of brinkmanship and “divide and conquer” was such a huge success it became the blueprint NATO has consistently used ever since.

Back to Nanking. My point is that Imperial Japan remained a threat so Chinese success or failure at Nanking ended up making no difference whatsoever in the long term. The same can be said for the Ukrainian summer offensive, which was in military terms even more disastrous than Nanking, with 90,000 Ukrainian troops killed or seriously wounded.

Overall, the summer offensive was a battlefield failure, as HistoryLegends summarized well on his YouTube channel:

Note I said a battlefield failure, not a failure in general because it’s not. Biden is planning to write another $100 billion check to Ukraine, so the offensive accomplished its political goal, if nothing else. The political goal might in fact be the only one that matters at this stage of the game.

RAND just recently published a new paper, Understanding the Risk of Escalation in the war in Ukraine. The problem with this information brief is that it is not an information brief at all. It is a sales pitch pretending to be an information brief. Simplicius summarizes the gist of the RAND piece well:

We’ve talked for a long time about how when Ukraine is finally on the precipice of total capitulation, there will be a dangerous period of heightened risk for a major falseflag from the West to save them. Thus, given the timing, and that Ukraine now does appear to be entering a declining phase, the Rand report strikes me as almost prescriptive in nature, i.e. a subtle ‘nudge’ to clandestine policymakers to begin a phase of operations that could provoke and goad Russia into creating a needed “overreaction” which would set the stage for some form of intervention to save Ukraine.

There are three takeaways from the RAND report that concern me the most:

1. Repeated references to chemical weapons. There’s no evidence that Russia didn’t destroy all of their chemical weapons to comply with arms control agreements, and even if there were a few left, using them on the battlefield just wouldn’t be sensible. A single chemical weapon probably would only inflict a few dozen, maybe at most a few hundred, military casualties and at a severe political and diplomatic cost. No, the most likely reason for RAND to mention chemical weapons is a “wink wink, nudge nudge” hint that the USA should use chemical weapons and then say Russia did it.
   
2. Consistently treating nuclear warheads as a standalone weapon. This is just propagation of the reassuring myth that Putin would nuke Kiev out of frustration or something equally ridiculous. If Russians decide to use nukes, they almost certainly won’t be against Ukraine. They’ll use nukes on us.
   
3. Related to Point #2, RAND portrays NATO as simultaneously involved and not involved in the conflict. In other words, we can inflict harm on others with no fear of retaliation. If RAND even suggested that inflicting harm on Russians has some risk, however small, of them retaliating directly against us, then the whole project would be too insanely dangerous for NATO to even attempt. So everyone has to pretend that there is no risk, and repeat this lie to the public.

The Imminence of Nuclear War

There is a long-standing feud between the civilian and military arms of the US government, which was apparent in the McCarthyist period and the Who Lost China wars. Throughout most of American post-WWII history, the Defense Department was clearly the stronger party, with the State Department the weaker party. There’s no better evidence of military men calling the shots than the “Global War on Terror.” Military men understand war and the risks that come with it because that’s their job, so they tend to pick as adversaries weaker, smaller countries that we can surely win against. On the flip side, there’s no better evidence for military men losing their influence than the way the USA has shifted from exclusively bullying smaller countries to picking fights with the likes of Russia and China. That’s not something any sensible military man would do, because he understands that even if he theoretically wins against Russia or China, there are nukes. So against the advice of the military men, the USA picked a fight with Russia. Now we’re neck deep in it, and are clearly losing with no graceful exit ramp.

Again, and I cannot say this enough, pulling out of Ukraine would not be like pulling out of Afghanistan, and this statement applies to both sides. The USA simply got tired of occupying Afghanistan indefinitely, that’s the long and short of it. On the other hand, Russia cannot give up in Ukraine, as this would be an admission of defeat against the USA, and it would be an absolutely catastrophic defeat threatening the existence of Russia itself, both as a state and as a nation of people. But the same is true for the USA, and for some reason it is a struggle for me to get anyone to understand this. The USA has spent almost every waking moment since 1947 spinning the tale of the imminent showdown with Russia and how we would easily crush them. As the story goes, Russians are barbaric and merciless, but also weak and incompetent. They’re cartoon villains. We’ve staked our entire reputation on this story.

Watch this opening to the 1984 (ironic, I know) movie Red Dawn.

Even if we pretend that there is no direct American participation in Ukraine, it’s a known fact that American weapons are there, and Russians have so far been able to beat them all. Let’s face it, defeating American weapons is the same as defeating Americans. That wouldn’t have to be true, but we made it true with generations of over-emphasizing hardware over people. If we lose the fight with Russia, no one will ever take us seriously again. We’ll never be able to pick a fight with anyone. The “Pax Americana” era will be finished. As time goes on, I become more convinced that this will all end with a direct confrontation between the USA and Russia, and that confrontation will almost certainly involve nukes.

Ian Kummer

Support my work by making a contribution through Boosty

• Facebook
• VK
• LinkedIn

All text in Reading Junkie posts are free to share or republish without permission, and I highly encourage my fellow bloggers to do so. Please be courteous and link back to the original.

I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.

Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).

---

---