Warfare is a geopolitical tool of the first order; only wars of scale can measure the real strength of nations. For decades American claims of hegemony, and by extension that of the West, have been based on what has now proved to be a carefully constructed mythology of economic and military supremacy. This is Andrei Martyanov's fourth book addressing this issue, now as it concerns the war in Ukraine. In America's Final War, he lays out in detail the underpinning causes and extent of its self-deception.
Washington's eight years of preparing Ukraine and its armed forces for war with Russia was a mistake of historic proportions, due to its misperception of American military power based on its 1991 Gulf War victory against a minor military player. Washington believed its own propaganda about crippling sanctions on Russia, about the viability of its Ukrainian proxy army, and the economic and military weakness of Russia, spelling doom for the American empire and its "rules-based order".
Martyanov lays out Washington's utter incompetence and shocking military amateurism. But then, he claims, the US doesn't do strategy; it does business plans Through 2022-2023, Russia's Special Military Operation (SMO) exposed US and NATO forces as legacy armies stuck in the 1990s, still viewing the world from that vantage point. The massive destruction of the West's high-cost weaponry ensued, annulling their vaunted superiority. Western armaments, from anti-tank Javelins to APC Bradleys to air defense complexes such as the Patriot PAC3 or NASAMS, performed dismally and proved unready for what has become the largest military conflict in Europe since WWII. By 2023 the Kiev regime could no longer exist without the West's support, both financial and in war materiel. By 2024 Russia will have not just exhausted Ukraine, but also demilitarized NATO as a whole, exposing the industrial and military impotence of the US and its European vassals.
The finance and tech-based economy is not a real economy; expeditionary warfare and doctrine is not real war. The global balance of power has shifted to Eurasia. Western Europe has become a collection of weak and fast deindustrializing economies which will increasingly become irrelevant against the background of the explosive economic, technologic, scientific and military development in Eurasia
The world has noticed what has been exposed, and because of that, life as we knew it is no more. The rule of the West of the last half-millennium is over.