Grozny Rules: The Enduring Global Disorder

A discussion with Jason Pack, author of "Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder" and co-host of the "Disorder" podcast.

Jason Pack is the Founder of Libya-Analysis LLC, and the co-host of Disorder, a geopolitics podcast co-produced with Goalhanger Podcasts. His most recent book, Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, is a “cross-over” academic book that explores what Libya’s dysfunctional economic structures and its ongoing civil war reveal about our era of 21st century geopolitics.

Jason’s concept—that we no longer inhabit the post-Cold War World, but have entered a new era: the “Enduring Disorder”—was conceived to describe the collective action failures that have come to define international politics. It’s also been a useful frame for me to view and understand the world’s various bad actors, from Tehran to Moscow to Gaza.

I spoke to Jason last week, after the death of the Iranian president, and before yesterday’s guilty verdict. As always, he taught me a lot—and his theory on how British politics influences U.S. politics is both fascinating and, pace the New York Times, good news for Joe Biden.

Here are three takeaways from the discussion:

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The death of Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, won’t change much in that fundamentalist theocracy.

Raisi died last week when his rickety old Soviet-era helicopter crashed in the fog—or, as The Onion put it, he was “stoned to death by mountain.” Attempts to blame Mossad or cook up similar conspiracy theories fell flat. Already, the wider world seems to have forgotten about this hateful leader.

I asked Pack if Raisi’s death will move the needle at all in Tehran. He told me:

The death of the Iranian president doesn’t portend any change. The Iranian president is just an implementer. He’s just a fixer. The Supreme Leader controls everything [there]. However, as you pointed out, Ibrahim Raisi, who died, was only 63. And the Ayatollah Khamenei, who’s only the second Ayatollah that they’ve had since 1979—he’s 85. And his health isn’t perfect.

And it was mooted that Raisi might replace Khamenei because although he is political figure now, he was a mid-level cleric beforehand. And he’s been involved in theological politics, as well as putting down dissenters in the Iran/Iraq war, so right in the late 80s, to then repressing the current protests, the Mahsa Amini, which are the anti-hijab protests where the Iranian Kurdish woman was beat to death last year. He was a hardliner in repressing those protests. He's also been instrumental in funding and arming Iranian proxies throughout the region like Hezbollah, the Houthis, the various Shia militias in Iraq. So he’s a hardliner thug implementer.

But like when Qasem Soleimani was killed during the Trump presidency, that didn’t change anything. He was one of the most important commanders, but he wasn’t at the top of the political system. He was just an implementer. So Raisi is gone, but because of the dominance that the hardliners or conservatives have, in Iran right now, they’ve very much repressed all of the recent protests, [so] they’ll just put in another hardliner. Might he be a slightly worse implementer? Yes. Does that make a huge difference? No. Is there a small, small, small chance that with this funeral just starting today and other things going on that this provides a slight window for a popular uprising? Yes, but please, this is like a one or two percent chance…..They’re going to do whatever to maintain the regime. So in short, I think plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Pack added: “But the one thing I wanted to say when I heard that Raisi died was, ‘Sorry, the fog made you crash into the mountain with your broken 1970s helicopter. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.’”

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At this point, Putin’s war aims in Ukraine are Grozny Rules. He just wants to reduce it all to rubble and spread as much misery as possible.

Russia cut its teeth on its current warfare philosophy in Chechnya, and specifically its capital, Grozny, on which it went scorched earth to pound the Chechens into submission. This, Pack fears, is what’s coming for the rest of the war in Ukraine. He sees three possible objectives for Russia’s attacks on Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine:

A: They’re trying to take territory. Do you know what I mean? It’s a regular offensive, and Ukraine’s been on the back foot, and they’re trying to take Kharkiv. I think that that’s the least likely.

B: This is a feint…because they’re never going to take Kharkiv. It’s Ukraine’s second largest city. It has a million and a half people. And even the Russian speakers there are firmly pro-Ukrainian now because of all they’ve been through. They’re not taking Kharkiv. So this is a feint to draw some elite Ukrainian units from the Eastern Donbas region or the Southern Kherson regions to the north to defend Kharkiv, and then Russia will go for what they actually want to, which is to increase their land gains in Donbas or in the south. That’s possible.

I think unfortunately that the third option is the most likely, and this is what we would call Grozny rules, which is that they’re not trying to accomplish anything. They just want to make the life for civilians absolutely horrible and to shell the city into oblivion. What I called my pod this week is, “Is Kharkiv the new Mariupol?” Because Mariupol was an important Southern Ukrainian city…lots of people in the middle class and, you know, a regular European beautiful city. [Russia] just destroyed it. Do you know what I mean? They turned it into a Aleppo. I mean, all the apartment buildings are completely leveled. You couldn’t really tell the difference between Mariupol and Gaza.

The point of this, insofar as there is one, is to “use their superiority in artillery shells to just destroy civilians and ruin the infrastructure. They know that they can’t like win the war. They’re not going to break through.”

This makes Biden’s decision yesterday to allow Ukraine to attack Russia in Russian territory all the more important.

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A victory for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party in Britain’s elections is good news for President Biden.

Pack theorizes that the elections in Britain, Ireland, Italy, and Israel impact the elections in the United States: in Ireland, Italy, and Israel, because of the preponderance of Irish, Italian, and Jewish people living in the U.S., and Britain because it’s the most similar.

“Development in those countries are frequently leading indicators of what will happen in the United States,” he tells me. “How can I prove this? When neo-populists do well in Italy or Israel or Britain, it exerts a cosmic pull on the U.S., and it affects donor patterns. When certain kinds of campaign strategies work in Israel or Italy or Ireland or the U.K., they are then tried in the U.S.”

He continues:

For example, when a Likud party leader comes into power in Israel, he pulls U.S. Jewish donor money to the right. I mean, this relationship is extremely well established. Sheldon Adelson, who was an important funder for Trump before he died, he only could exist the way that he did because of Netanyahu winning those elections. [Bibi] created Sheldon Adelson.

In the U.K. context, it works also in the big media. It was that Brexit happened on June 23/24, 2016 that allowed Trump to happen. Nigel Farage could come over to the States and say, “We’re going to take back control. You, the little man, you have been spoken down to by these elites. We are going to have Independence Day.” And, you know, he goes to Missouri with his posh accent and his, you know, pink shirt and checkers and tweed. And for some reason—it makes no sense because what does a guy in Missouri have in common with Nigel Farage? But it exerts a cosmic pull.

We found out during our discussion that Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, called for elections. Labour is expected to win in a rout. Pack explained why this is a good thing for Biden:

[if the elections] had happened concurrently, it would be bad for both the U.S and the U.K., to my mind, because Sunak is not Trump. Sunak is a normal conservative, a kind of Nikki Haley-style person. . .He would have been tarred and feathered as being like Trump, and Biden’s weaknesses would have been projected onto Starmer.

But if it happens beforehand and Starmer cleans up the momentum that he has generated in the Anglosphere and the BBC and CNN coverage, and then the [U.S.] donors [get] energized and [see] what works and what doesn’t. Like for example, it's turning out that being very pro-migration is not working here in the U.K. And that the left needs to say, “We’re actually going to be hard on migration because people are afraid of standard of living being hurt by too many migrants. And then that’s something that Biden will need to titrate. He can watch, you know, being hard on the border in Mexico because he’s going to see that similar things work for centrist labor here [in Britain]. And then, you know, for example, some policies vis-a-vis inflation, which has done worse here in the U.K., he’s going to say, “Aha, I need to do this, this is really resonating.”

Because although there are some differences—and this is what allows Trump to be doing much better in the U.S. than the neo-populists are right now in the U.K.—but certain issues like migration and inflation and other things about like tariffs, they play really, really similarly [in both countries].

In short, Britain is a sort of bellwether for America. And Keir Starmer, as Pack points out, is basically a younger, British version of Joe Biden. “If Starmer can show the way,” Pack says, “I think that that can really help Biden target himself.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S7 E15: Grozny Rules: The Global Disorder Endures (with Jason Pack)

Jason Pack talks to Greg Olear about the death of Raisi in Iran, the situation in Ukraine, Biden’s policy in Gaza, and why a Labor victory in the UK elections would be good for Joe Biden.

Listen to the DISORDER podcast:
https://linktr.ee/disorderpod

More about Jason:
https://www.jasonpack.org/

For more on Jason's mystical grand unified theory of how Irish, Italian, Israeli, and British elections affect US elections, that theory STARTS AT 39:20 here.

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Photo credit: Kamran Gholami. Iran’s Milad Tower, seen from helipad.