Andrew Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…Right, but what is the answer to the American question of what is our goal? Is that the same as the Ukrainian goal? No, I don’t think it is at the moment. It seems to be to wait until other countries, such as Britain, give a new set of weaponry, then to give much more of the same kind of weaponry, then to wait until somebody else gives some more advanced weaponry. You saw this with anti-tank weaponry, later with tanks, then with artillery, then long-range artillery. Now, you’ve been giving them these ATACMS, which are very impressive, but you’ve hung back a bit with fighter aircraft and so on. So it seems to be a piecemeal approach, where you wait until the Russians don’t respond, and then you give a bit more. Frankly, it would have been much better, I think, to have armed the Ukrainians earlier with the Leopards, essentially, and the tanks that they really needed for this big southern counteroffensive and come out wholeheartedly for them. Now, you’ve given a lot of money, obviously. $44 billion is a very significant amount of money, and the Europeans have given as much or slightly more now. But still, the Russians are in control of 18% of the country, and they’ve been building what the Ukrainians were expecting, hundreds of yards of minefields. In fact, there are miles of minefields down in the south there. And so I’m afraid it’s a long and bloody slog, but we’ve seen wars like this before. This is one of the things that we write about—the Korean War being a classic example, where you just have to thrash it out. Actually, I want to ask you about Korea in a second, but it does seem weird that we’re slowly funding a war of attrition. It’s classic Clausewitz to focus your effort on the point of attack. If you’re just slowly doling out this equipment, why not just give it to them all at once? So they can have a successful counteroffensive.…

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