A Wilderness of Mirrors: The Hegemon’s Last War
Andrei Martyanov has carved for himself a unique, haloed place when it comes to deep critical thinking of all matters of war and peace.
Andrei Martyanov has carved for himself a unique, haloed place when it comes to deep critical thinking of all matters of war and peace.
In his previous books, in his blog Reminiscence of the Future and in countless podcasts, he has become the go-to source when it comes to the inner workings of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine as well as The Big Picture of the proxy war between the U.S. and its collective West minions against Russia.
Naturally every new book by this delightful human being with a biting sense of humor is something to cherish – and this one, America’s Final War, the fourth in a series, should be seen as the crowning achievement in his carefully detailed analysis of a real revolution in military affairs that has completely bypassed the “indispensable nation.”
Right off the bat, Martyanov addresses Russophobia – and how this overwhelming, Western-wide pathology “of a much larger scale than mere geopolitical contradictions between nations and states” is “taking on a metaphysical dimension, rising from its racial, religious, and cultural components”.
Russophobia has only been exacerbated by unpleasant facts on the ground concerning the “Real Revolution in Military Affairs”: a true “paradigm shift” in warfare.
Already in the preface, Martyanov outlines the state of things as we speak, or what I have recently defined as a War OF Terror:
“The current U.S. economy and military will not be able to fight Russia conventionally; it would face defeat if it tried. So, the United States and combined West have resorted to terrorism”.
Add to it that concerning the ongoing proxy clashes, “NATO is incapable of fighting a real war of the 21st century”. And even the U.S.’s “shortly to be overcome superiority in satellite constellations and NATO’s ability to fly with impunity in the international air space over Black Sea counts for little in real war, in which NATO would be made blind and its Command and Control disrupted.”
“The best strategic assessment apparatus in the world”
Martyanov engages in a necessary rewind to the situation pre- SMO, in late 2021, when the AFU was massing on the borders of Donetsk and Lugansk: “In a last-ditch attempt to avoid military confrontation with what at that time amounted to the best U.S. (and West) proxy force in history – trained and equipped with many critical C4 elements” – Russia presented the U.S. on December 15, 2021 with what Martyanov describes as a “diplomatic euphemism for demands” on Washington on mutual security guarantees: that was the notorious “indivisibility of security” proposal for Europe and the post-Soviet space.
Martyanov is correct in evaluating that this was not exactly groundbreaking; it was “a reiteration of the same points which Russia had insisted upon since the 1990s”. The crucial point was of course non-expansion of NATO, specifically applied to Ukraine, “which since 2013 was becoming in effect NATO’s forward operational base.”
That was Putin’s diplomatic g
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