Unable to Define Victory

The zealous pursuit of grand ambitions with no means of measuring success.

In a recent interview about the war in Ukraine, a former officer in Swiss military intelligence named Jacques Baud made a remark that I’ve been turning over in my head for the last three years—namely, the West cannot define what exactly victory in Ukraine would look like. In a recent Senate hearing, Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, admitted that he cannot define victory in Ukraine. See Baud’s remarks at about 17:30 in the following interview.

Whenever reasonable adults embark on an ambitious project, they do so with the understanding that their ambitions must be constrained by at least some sense of reality. For example, I believe that if a train extremely hard, I might some day be a competitive boxer in the USA Master’s Division (for amateur boxers over the age of 35). However, I would never embark on this project with the belief that I could become a professional boxer going up against guys in their twenties. This would be an insane fantasy. As Dirty Harry famously remarked, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Equipped with unlimited amounts of debt financing, the governments of the West have, in recent years, embarked on several grand projects that are the equivalent my insane boxing fantasy—i.e., catastrophically childish wishful thinking with zero concept of defining and measuring success.

Examine any major Western obsession and the same patten emerges:

1). Throw trillions at carbon reduction in Western countries. Hope that it reduces poorly defined notions of human-induced global warming. If it doesn’t, at least we tried.

2). Throw billions at sending weapons to Ukraine. Hope that Russian forces withdraw from eastern territories. If Russian forces do not withdraw and the war goes on indefinitely, “at least we tried.”

3). Throw hundreds of billions at mRNA vaccine development for illnesses that may not be realistic candidates for being controlled by vaccines. If the vaccines fail to prevent infection from these pathogens, “at least we tried” to control them with new vaccines.

4). Throw hundreds of billions at the black, urban underclass and hope that it improves the social problems that have afflicted this cohort of society since Johnson’s Great Society project. If it doesn’t, “at least we’ve tried” for the last sixty years.

5). Tell millions of young adolescents that if they feel confused about their identity and sexuality—a malaise that has affected adolescents since the beginning of time—they can “change their sex” with surgery and hormones. If these variations of butchery don’t resolve the malaise of these young people, “at least we tried to help them.”

I could go on. What all of the above have in common is the inability to define and measure success. Indeed, one suspects that the chief attraction of these projects lies in the fact that success can never be attained in a measurable way, thereby justifying (in the minds of the greedy and the incurably foolish) the endless need to throw yet more money at it.