My late, dear friend Jean-Marie Benoist, great democratic political philosopher, devout Christian, bon viveur and fervent champion of European Christian civilization is gone more than 30 years now and I still miss him - more than ever.
For Jean-Marie rejected the ponderous, arrogant, plodding Conventional Wisdoms of American nuclear deterrence theory: He stood them on their heads.
US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, channeled Rand think tank “genius” Herman Kahn during the endless Vietnam War almost 60 years ago and insisted on carefully, incrementally “escalating’ US firepower and commitments in Vietnam, ultimately to insane and useless levels of destructiveness: inch by inch. McNamara was predictable, slow, pettifogging, micromanaging at every stage. An impossible to teach, extraordinarily arrogant repulsive fool who needlessly killed millions and lived to a ripe old age, respected to the end by endless dupes who should have known better and burned him alive.
But Jean-Marie, writing in an age when deterrence really worked, peace was maintained and the Soviet Union actually collapsed without need of a world war – or any war at all – saw deterrence very differently.
Deterrence depends above all else on uncertainty, he patiently explained to me during our long, superb dinners at his favorite Parisian restaurants on the Rive Gauche, the Left Bank. Deterrence does not depend on certainty: It depends on uncertainty.
If your prospective adversary knows how your nation will respond with either conventional or even thermonuclear weapons, they will always be confident as to how and when they will ignore your “messages” with the so-called “calibrated” use of military force and weapons. And they would take you by surprise by acting in ways that the painstaking, anal the backroom theorists on your own side had not anticipated.
What was “logical” in the orderly, arrogant, tidy, closed, incredibly ignorant mind of Robert McNamara was only an irrelevant, obvious obstacle to be tactically outflanked or otherwise neutralized to the ever-adaptive intellect of North Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap.
McNamara never understood the mind of Giap, or why Giap always out-thought and confounded him. But Jean-Marie could see it clearly. That was why he all his life defended the independent existence of France’s independent nuclear deterrent system, the Force de Frappe, against decades of hostility by tidy-minded American deterrence so-called “thinkers” in the dire Kahn-McNamara tradition.
The American “thinkers” could only conceive that the extra uncertainty of a small but independently operated national nuclear deterrence system in the hands of Britain or France would add to uncertainty and the risk of thermonuclear war.
No, Jean-Marie energetically replied. Such X-factors strengthen peace and deterrence, they do not weaken it. Even if US nuclear policy is completely transparent and therefore US responses – and lack of them – can always be perfectly predicted by potential adversaries, as long as there remained unpredictable elements on the Western side that potential adversaries could not confidently or accurately track, they would remain uncertain and therefore restrained. Deterrence and world peace would therefore be preserved.
Today, more than ever, the leaders of the West have abandoned Jean-Marie’s wise and tested teaching. NATO has thrown all its conventional military chips on the table to support Ukraine: And they have all been exposed as busts.
The German Leopard II A6 battle tank was genuinely respected and even possibly feared up to two years ago by Russian military planners. That is no longer the case. Hundreds of Leopard tanks have been destroyed by Russian artillery, air strikes and effective infantry operated anti-tank weapons. The battlefield performance of the Leopards in the hands of three successive Ukrainian armies – all of them exceptionally brave in their troops but shamefully incompetently trained by their US masters – has been execrable.
None of this of course has dented the confidence of American and other NATO generals. Like previous military incompetents throughout history they are largely simple-minded racists. They blame the brave, slaughtered Ukrainian boys for their own ineptitude.
2,500 years ago, the magnificent Chinese military sage and master of war Sun Tzu knew better: When a battle, a campaign and an entire war is lost, do not blame the fighting soldiers, he always taught: Blame the generals who failed to train, organize and properly direct them.
It is not just the Leopards that have failed in Ukraine. US Abrams Main Battle Tanks, invincible in their day but now literally generations old in conception and design, are out of their depth there. The F-16 combat fighter plane, a superlative world beater for decades, cannot be continuously and magically upgraded forever. Now Ukraine has confirmed to the Russians what they have long expected: The F-16 has no chance any more against state-of-the-art fifth generation combat aircraft and modern air defenses.
Honest and serious US military planners already see this reality clearly too: Battlefield conditions in Ukraine are currently “not ideal” for the employment of F-16 fighters, Lieutenant General Douglas Sims, director of operations of the Joint Staff, publicly acknowledged on July 13. “The Russians still possess some air defense capability. They have air capability,” he told a press briefing. “And the number of F-16s that would be provided may not be perfect for what’s going on right now.”
As for the amazingly still ballyhooed F-35s – the only people who want the United States to keep building them, fielding them and forcing them down the throats of Americans allies/puppets are the Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians.
Even Russian President Vladimir Putin has now contemptuously openly and publicly commented on the dire performance of America’s venerable Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles in Ukraine. Twenty years ago, they failed to save thousands of US soldiers from having their limbs blown off by simple anti-personnel mines: ancient low tech, cheap weapons made to sound more impressively high-tech than they were or had to be by the ridiculous US Army term IEDs – Improvised Explosive Devices. “They burn nicely, as we expected, be it Bradley’s or Leopards, yes,” Putin told reporters. Inside the Leopards and the Bradley’s “ammunition detonates inside, and pieces fly off in different directions,” he said.
Even the M142 HIMARS light multiple rocket launcher, the US Army’s pride and joy, is now obsolete. The Ukraine war has given the Russian army excellent tactical experience in locating them and destroying them almost instantaneously after their first and only volley.
Jean-Marie Benoist would have been appalled by this squandering of military secrets and deterrence capabilities. They are clearly known to the president of Russia and his general staff. The Chinese and Iranians are obviously watching and studying them closely too. The only people who do not know are the populations of the United States and the NATO allied partner nations. Though it seems clear that the political and military leaderships of the US and NATO all remain equally ignorant, incompetent, clueless and hopelessly in the dark.
Many of these developments have been obvious or suspected for many years. But it took only a year and a half of actual full scale combat conditions in Ukraine to confirm these terrifying realities. NATO’s military bluff of the past 30-plus years has finally been called. There is no NATO military superiority to prevent Russia from rolling back the endless tide of Western military and strategic encroachments that has continued remorselessly since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The great tide of endless Western democratic, free market, capitalist influence that has apparently inexorably flowed eastward across all of Eurasia has finally been stopped. And more: It has been reversed. Payback is no longer coming: It is already here. But where will it stop?
For there is no longer any credible NATO military deterrent to stop it: The slow, ponderous moves, threats, provocations and subversions that neocon and neoliberal interventionists have remorselessly carried out on behalf of vague “Western” interests – which have certainly not been the interests of the American, Canadian or Western European peoples – are now well recognized and apparent to all, especially to the planners in Moscow and Beijing – and to their new partners in Delhi, Riyadh and Tehran. The opaqueness, the uncertainty, the multiplicity of forms of deterrence that Jean-Marie Benoist urged and recognized as vital are now all gone.
Instead, a single, demented arrogant, ignorant stupid, simple orthodoxy reigns and none must stand against it. US and NATO deterrence policy against the big bad Russians and Chinese and Iranians and everyone else is simple and clear – and stupid and worthless and idiotic and doomed.
That is the reality of our True Brave, New World that has such people in it.
