Changing of the Regime?

There seems to be a broad sense that the Ukraine Invasion and the ensuing war is proving to be an early century-defining conflict, drawing in its participants and transforming them and their relations with one another as it intensifies and generalizes. Despite the plethora of hot takes emanating from all quarters however, anticipating the direction of the conflict - and even the conflict's nature - continues to be difficult and elusive.

So much of the information pouring out of the conflict is showing itself to be unreliable, which is to be expected from a theater of war where information and perception make up additional aspects of weaponry, which doesn’t help. But further, making sense of the larger dynamics at play and attempting a speculative extrusion of the deeper currents is exceedingly tricky as well.

A key obfuscating tendency is the construction of the delineated combatant players "Ukraine" and "Russia," which as far as military necessity goes, makes sense concerning the immediate kinetic theater. As wars tend to do, there is a bifurcation in larger interconnected systems in which geographically circumscribed combatants concentrate power to do violence to one another. 

But this late industrial era is quite the interconnected one. Ukraine, with its history as an intermediary between jostling empires is suffused at this historical juncture with jostling oligarch factions from differing regions of the world system, and as a delineated nation its political and economic goals can be seen more as being shaped by its nature as a medium and as a pawn. Russia, on the other hand, is less the Soviet bogeyman of yore and more the composite of a series of regional and historical images, attempting to prop up a geographical claim on global capital. 

For decades the Russians were attempting to turn their nation inside out and join the Western economic and military unions, and then the Western powers - lead by the US anyway - relentlessly encircled them and continued to demonize them, as they were simultaneously directing wealth and resources into the very shared system dominated by the West in the form of raw materials, engineering talent, privatized public resources, and etc. And much of the Russian middle class still identifies favorably with the West, viewing the Western system as dynamic and promising, whereas so much of the Western middle class views Russia as the recurring evil empire; the various regions of the world system understand each other little. 

What this conflict really communicates is the breakdown and gradual realigning of a highly integrated world system. With each turn of the news cycle we see a superficial summary of factional ebbs and flows, but which are all connected to contracting resource flows and growing system-wide tensions: the buckling of various sections of either aligned side of the world system under the weight of sanctions, sabotage, and political tensions. 

But to reiterate a previous point, the character of the system can change, in accordance with the designs and machinations of the established hegemon. There are regional differences in character of vying empires for the position of hegemon, and the outlooks and associated methods for acquiring and maintaining power do matter. 

As hegemon, the US and its Western allies have taken to an increased emphasis on propaganda and the manipulation of a previously acquired surplus, while Russia and its allies - not without their own serious structural problems common to the industrial world - waiting in quiet desperation are more interested in national survival and eventual angling to hegemon, favoring a shift in more practical and utilitarian methods of attracting and directing surplus. 

This division is reflected in the observation that Russia is attempting to fight an early twentieth century-style war, in which material logistics and practical considerations drive progression in the theater, but that in the twenty first century, effective PR and the navigation of huge, complex industrial associations into directing overwhelming energy flows in one's favor is the way to win the day. It has also been observed that the recent surprising Ukrainian victories are also PR wins, that will eventually translate to an increased flow of material and fighters, restoring their forward momentum. 

However, given the increasingly severe resource contractions and increasing instability of the natural and political world, the time will come when the industrial world does regress back to that material utilitarian nexus of considerations. The pertinent question here however would be when? 

Not that this is a directly comparable historical parallel, but I think of the Lusitanian leader Viriathus who was far more accomplished military than a lot of the individual Roman generals sent in his direction, but that his people were eventually worn down by the relentlessness and the persistence of the Roman advance, until he was assassinated via bribe. And then it would be centuries before the western half of Rome would eventually be eaten from the inside out by the Germanic tribes, illustrating that the character of a world system can take quite a long time to change, regardless of the more localized gradients and contrasts between powers vying for hegemonic control. 

And besides, with the clash of nuclear-armed powers, it behooves the enterprising hegemon to reach the top of the value chain, as it no longer works for a simple plane to drop a simple warhead, calling it good. It takes a complex network of offensive technologies and defensive technologies to maintain military supremacy in such a climate, which itself requires a shift to PR in order to direct those complexes of industrial activity to maintain such technologies and infrastructures.