One Sergey Poletaev (quoted here) writes in RT about the Shock and Awe doctrine:
Russia also succumbed to the idea of the shock and awe doctrine.
After the war with Georgia in 2008, the Russian military was restructured to carry out rapid and destructive military interventions. However, Russia was the first to stumble on this doctrine. In spring 2022, it faced a critical choice: Either fight a serious, bloody war of attrition or settle for a disgraceful peace. Moscow chose war, and the Ukraine conflict has now entered its fifth year.
Trump now finds himself at a similar crossroads: Fight or to concede defeat. The problem is that the entire Western military-industrial complex has spent decades adapting to the shock and awe doctrine; NATO and the US possess unparalleled and exorbitantly expensive airstrike capabilities, but don’t have many other resources. If a targeted nation can withstand the initial air assaults, time will be on its side – unlike Russia, the West lacks the resources for a prolonged military campaign.
This explains the ‘gestures of goodwill’ Trump is currently making toward Iran. Just like Putin in spring 2022, he needs to buy time and figure out his next move: Continue fighting, launch a highly risky landing operation, or settle for a humiliating peace. The first option could spell disaster for Trump in the upcoming midterm elections, while the second could bring the US the most significant strategic defeat since Vietnam.
MoA commentator English Outsider replies to it: (Please read his use of “we” in scare quotes. It obviously does not include MoA readers 😉
The RT comparison between the war with Russia and the war with Iran has some force. In both cases the West committed itself to war on a gamble. We expected the Russians to fold at once under our Shock and Awe sanctions; and we expected the Iranians to fold at once as a result of our Shock and Awe initial attack.
Those were our plan A’s and we had no plan B’s ready. In both cases we thought they wouldn’t be needed. In the Iranian case we see Trump himself nonplussed that plan A hasn’t worked. Failure wasn’t supposed to happen, he’s saying, and he’s now at a loss because it has.
So both attacks, the sanctions war on Russia and the Blitzkrieg attack on Iran, were what the soldiers call shit or bust operations. In more elevated terms, both wars were gambles we had to win because the consequences of failure were catastrophic.
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So the RT comparison between the Ukrainian war and the war with Iran has some force. It’s not, however, entirely a foursquare comparison.
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The Russians always had options. There was only one option ever open to the Iranians. Fight with all they had because if they didn’t immediate destruction awaited them.And the comparison also breaks down when we consider the respective positions of Russia and Iran now. Russia still has the option of finessing the final outcome of the Ukrainian war. The Russians aren’t too bothered about how they stop the use of Ukraine as a Western attack dog, just as long as they get to stop it one way or the other. The Iranians do not have the luxury of alternative options. They have to put paid for good to Western power in the ME. They know very well that if they don’t, we’ll be back for more later.
The RT comparison fails another way too, on the all important PR side.
We talk grandly of “the West” or “the US” or “Brussels” as if we’re looking at monolithic entities. We’re looking at no such thing of course. We’re looking at a relatively small coterie of politicians, interest groups, and factions in control of the political, administrative and military power centres of the West.
That control goes for nothing unless those various Western politicians gain the acquiescence, if not the support, of the masses of people they are governing. That can only be done by ensuring the climate of opinion is in their favour.
In the case of the Ukrainian war that was ensured. A vanishingly small number of people in the various Western electorates knew what the true position in Ukraine was. We most of us believed, and still believe, that that war resulted from a Russian dictator seizing the chance to re-establish the old Soviet or Tsarist empire. There were none I knew, England or Germany, who believed otherwise. There were none I knew who did not believe we should therefore be resisting that Russian dictator with all our might. The coterie of Western politicians therefore had the enthusiastic support of the greater part of the various populations they governed.
Not so in the case of the Iranian war. When it came to the preliminaries to the two wars, very few of us knew, as one example, of the ultra atrocities during the ATO. Unless you kept away from the screens entirely, all of us knew of the atrocities in Gaza. When it came to the start of those wars, few of us knew of the true position on the LoC in February ’22. In ’26 all of us knew that the West had mounted a violent attack on Iran during peace negotiations.
The PR climate is therefore entirely different in the two cases and whereas in ’22, most of us were clamouring for the Russians to be hit with all we had, in ’26 many (including a component of Trump’s MAGA base) are dead against the Iranian war. There is also increasing concern across all the electorates of the West about the resources we are putting into that war and about the economic blowback on us.
For though the politicians and interest groups pay no attention to whether we are fighting a “just war” or not, most ordinary members of the public do. In ’22 we believed, almost all of us, that we were fighting a just war against the Russians. Now, few believe we are fighting a just war against the Iranians. It is that alteration in the PR climate that renders it inevitable that if they hold steady, the Iranians will win. I suppose the Iranians could always end up inhabiting a radioactive wasteland, but that itself would be no victory for our elites.
Is that true? Isn’t the PR machine in the West in override to change that picture?