Götterdämmerung Lite

When I started this blog, I began to tease out a theory of the post-2020 agenda as a Götterdämmerung strategy a lot like people who expected the world to end on December 21, 2012, but took this as a sign that they could run up their credit cards until that date and never have to repay them. What we saw over the course of 2021 was instead the gradual repudiation of the 2020 agenda, the legislative failure of Build Back Better, the marginalization of BLM, the Squad, and Defund the Police, and even more recently the functionial disappearance of many 2020-era COVID restrictions.

With Putin's invasion of Ukraine resetting Western security priorities, you'd think the 2020 agenda would continue to fade. Instead, for now, I'm beginning to think the elites are cooking up a way to reconstitute key parts of the 2020 agenda as Götterdämmerung Lite. The main problem with this approach is that events are coming so quickly that they're getting inside the lizard people's OODA loop:

The OODA loop is the cycle observe–orient–decide–act, developed by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Boyd applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is now also often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents. It is especially applicable to cyber security and cyberwarfare.

. . . According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe–orient–decide–act. An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby "get inside" the opponent's decision cycle and gain the advantage.

Remarks by the US national intelligence director suggest this is happening:

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said ‘Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling’ has put the West on notice.

‘We assess Putin feels aggrieved the West does not give him proper deference, and perceives this as a war he cannot afford to lose,’ Haines told the panel. ‘But what he might be willing to accept as a victory may change over time.’

Putin’s invasion has produced ‘a shock to the geopolitical order with implications for the future that we are only beginning to understand, but are sure to be consequential’, it was heard.

The problem for US intelligence is that, although deep-state spokespeople and groupies have been congratulating themselves for correctly predicting Putin's initial invasion, they've gotten everything else wrong. The certainty was so great of a quick and successful initial invasion that the US issued an invitation to President Zelensky to hop aboard a C-130 and scoot, presumably with a tacit offer of seats for his girlfriends and cronies and pallets to carry stacks of ill-gotten cash along. That he didn't immediately accept this was a surprise, from which the administration as well as key Republicans have been slow to recover.

The second big thing US intelligence got wrong was the strength and coherence of the Ukrainian resistance, as well as the incompetence of the Russian invasion force. I think the military and intelligence mindset has yet fully to understand the problem. In the words of talking head retired Col Douglas Macgregor,

“Well, the end of this phase is still a few days away. The first five days, Russian forces I think, frankly, were too gentle. They’ve now corrected that. So I would say another 10 days, this should be completely over. . ."

That was as of March 6. There's still a week to go on "another 10 days", but there's no indication the Russians are getting any closer to surrounding Kyiv. And what appears to be genuine captured intelligence suggests the Russians expected a 15 day war start to finish, which isn't all that far from the initial estimates of US intelligence.

It looks very much to me as though the Washington military-intelligence establishment is still operating outside a decision cycle it ought to have. How does this affect daily life in the US?

Clearly the initial establishment plan envisioned a quick and successful invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky and his clique flown out at dawn on the day of the invasion, Putin consolidating his reconquest within a couple of weeks, mildly hampered by slap-on-the-wrist sanctions, the whole thing over and forgotten in no time. Intead, Zelensky marshaled world opinion and drove much more severe sanctions to the point that most of the world, including the US under pressure, stopped buying Russian oil.

While a successful takeover of Ukraine would be mildly annoying, the silver lining would be an inevitable world oil price increase, given sanctions on Russian oil, assuming Biden administration restrictions on domestic US oil production remained in place. For the green agenda, not a bug but a feature, Götterdämmerung Lite.

That's not how events are working out. Biden's handlers were hoping for US fuel price increases that would be small enough that they could be passed off as temporary, while they could make a show of trying real hard to replace the Russian oil from, say, Iran and Venezuela. Meanwhile, people would get used to $6 a gallon gas while the Ukraine business went away, and their overall objective of forcing the working class to buy electric cars would come to fruition.

Just yesterday, the price of gas in our area rose by more than 50 cents a gallon, not far from $6 as we speak, and it isn't going to stop at six. The inflation this drives will be unprecedented. The Ukraine war is lasting much longer, with much less predictable effects, than anyone in Washington expected-- in short, events have gotten inside their OODA loop.

The collapse of Götterdämmerung Lite will be more consequential than Götterdämmerung 2020. I think the US DNI is predicting this without even understanding it.