What Is The U.S. Strategic Objective For It's War On Russia?

strategic-culture |  But was the destruction of Russia always the main strategic U.S. aim? Is the objective not – rather – to ensure the survival of the financial and associated military structures, both U.S. and international, that permit huge profits and the transfer of global savings to accrue to the western security ‘Borg”? Or, simply put, the preservation of the dominance of U.S. financial hegemony.

As Oleg Nesterenko writes “this survival is simply impossible without military-economic, or more precisely, military-financial world domination. The concept of survival at the expense of world domination was clearly articulated at the end of the Cold War by Paul Wolfowitz, the U.S. Under Secretary of Defence, in his so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine, which viewed the United States as the only remaining superpower in the world and whose main goal was to maintain that status: “to prevent the reappearance of a new rival either in the former Soviet Union or elsewhere that would be a threat to the order previously represented by the Soviet Union””.

The point here is that though the logic of the situation would seem to demand an U.S. pivot from an unwinnable Ukraine war to a ‘move’ to another ‘threat’, in practice the calculus is likely more complicated.

The celebrated military strategist Clausewitz, made a clear distinction between what we now call ‘wars of choice’ and what the latter termed ‘wars of decision’ – the latter being existential conflicts, by his definition.

The Ukraine war generally is assumed to fall into the first category of ‘a war of choice’. But is this right? Events have unfolded far from as expected in the White House. The Russian economy has not collapsed – as smugly predicted. President Putin’s support stands high at 81%; and collective Russia has consolidated around Russia’s wider strategic objectives. Furthermore, Russia is not isolated globally.

Essentially, Team Biden may have indulged in jaundiced thinking – projecting onto today’s very different, culturally Orthodox Russia, opinions that they formed during the earlier era of the Soviet Union.

May it be that Team Biden’s calculus then, has had to shift with the dawning understanding of these unforeseen outcomes. And especially, the exposure of the American and NATO military challenge as being inferior to its reputation?

This was a fear Biden actually exposed in his White House meeting during the Zelensky visit before Christmas. Would NATO survive such candour? Would the EU remain intact? Grave considerations. Biden said he had spent hundreds of hours speaking with EU leaders to mitigate these risks.

More to the point, would western markets survive such candour? What happens if Russia, over the winter months, brings Ukraine to the verge of system collapse? Will Biden and his strongly anti-Russian administration simply throw up their hands and concede victory to Russia? Based on their maximalist rhetoric and commitment to Ukrainian victory, that appears unlikely.

The point here is that markets remain highly volatile as the West stands at the cusp of a recessionary contraction that the IMF has warned likely will cause fundamental damage to the global economy. That is to say, the U.S. economy resides poised at the most sensitive of moments – at the edge of a possible financial abyss.

Might not Biden ‘going explicit’ that sanctions on Russia are not likely to be reversed; that supply-line disruption will persist; and that inflation and interest rates will be heading higher, be sufficient to push markets ‘over the edge’?

These are unknowns. But the anxiety touches on U.S. ‘survival’ – that is to say, the survival of the dollar hegemony.