Sun Tzu’s Odds
Resources take many forms. They can be
intellectual, demographic, military, informational, economic, or financial.
Experience is also a resource. If you surpass your opponent in every category,
he has no chance. If you lag behind in every category, you have none. Most
conflicts fall somewhere in between. One side is stronger in some areas, weaker
in others. In such cases, the decisive factor is not the number of chances, but
the ability to see the full configuration of those chances, both your own and your
opponent’s. It requires a sober assessment of the balance of forces, the
ability to exploit your advantages, neutralize the opponent’s strengths,
conceal your own weaknesses, expose his, and draw him onto ground where his
chances are minimal and yours are close to absolute.
The West continues its confrontation with Russia
from a structurally losing position because it relies on two hopes. One is
chance, some unforeseen event that could radically alter the balance of forces.
The other is the belief that the confrontation can be shifted from the military
and geopolitical arena, where it is losing, into the social sphere, where it
believes it can destabilize Russia from within.
But the West cannot win under these conditions. It
never had the necessary chances to begin with. In any confrontation, the key
requirement is a clear and achievable objective, one that can be reached with
the resources already in hand. If you begin a war without sufficient resources,
hoping to seize what you need from your opponent along the way, the war is
already lost. In theory, you may capture and use the enemy’s resources. In
practice, three outcomes are more likely. You may lack the strength to seize
them. The opponent may evacuate them. Or he may destroy them while retreating.
In all three cases, you lose.
It is like trying to build the Tower of Babel to
reach God. No matter how many resources you accumulate, how carefully you
design the structure, or how efficiently you organize the construction, the
plan is doomed. God will not need to intervene. The project will collapse on
its own when resources run out or faith in the plan disappears. You cannot
reach God by engineering alone. The created cannot equal the Creator, nor can
it fully comprehend him. The system cannot overtake the force that created it. The
project fails by its very nature.
The same logic applies to ideological utopias. No
matter how many supposed enemies of humanity are destroyed in pursuit of a
perfect system, the project cannot succeed. The principal enemy is always
within. Large groups of people cannot be molded into a single ideological form.
Even if they agree on something fundamental, they will immediately quarrel over
details. The list of enemies will never end, because as long as humanity
exists, there will always be disagreement.
For the same reason, the West cannot prevail. It
set itself the goal of preserving or restoring global hegemony at a time when
the resource base that sustained that hegemony was already exhausted. The
system that supported Western dominance began to fracture precisely because
resources were no longer sufficient to maintain it. Now, in an attempt to
restore that dominance, the West is pouring water into a bottomless vessel. The
same scarce resources must now be spent not only to preserve hegemony, but to
rebuild it.
This is why, despite constant planning and
mobilization, the West cannot achieve any decisive victories. Even what once
looked like victories is turning, over time, into strategic defeats. Tactical
gains consume resources that were already insufficient. Each such victory
leaves fewer resources than before. The more victories of this kind, the
farther the West moves from its strategic objective.
In Europe, this realization is beginning to spread.
The same understanding has reached parts of the American elite. Faced with the
impossibility of victory, some factions may adopt a destructive logic. If
hegemony cannot be preserved, then no one else should inherit the system. The
result could be a push toward a nuclear draw.
To prevent its own victory from turning into ashes,
Russia is pursuing complex diplomatic maneuvers. The aim is to buy time and
wait for the moment when a significant part of the Western elite is replaced by
more pragmatic actors, people capable of negotiation. At the same time, Russia
is working to accelerate that transition.
And they understand that, if necessary, there will
always be time to deliver either a retaliatory or a preemptive strike.