Marcel Proust’s literary masterpiece, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, served as the inspiration for my text, ‘The best army will be the one with the best eyesight’, which is a metaphor for the importance of strategic vision in military planning.
The title of this text is a quotation from Proust’s masterpiece. Of course, I agree with the French writer 100%. The full-scale war in Ukraine, which broke out in the third decade of the 21st century, proves it (I wrote this text on the 16th of November, 2024). Therefore, I am convinced that the most powerful country will be the one that will control space (Earth orbit, to be more precise). I’m surprised at Putin that instead of investing in human potential, in space technology in the broadest sense, in so-called Research and Development (having vast deposits of natural wealth allowing for a lot), he prefers to mindlessly bleed his nation on the fields of Ukraine.
The long-term consequences of these actions are concerning.
Even if Russia conquers Crimea, Donbas, and broadly eastern and southern Ukraine for years to come, in the long run, it will fall into a technological clash and inevitable failure and loss against the US, China, and India. What a stupid, short-sighted person one has to be to invest in more tanks, which are successively destroyed in Ukraine, instead of investing hundreds of billions of euros (earned, among other things, through the sale of natural gas to Germany under Angela Merkel) in human potential and science to dream of, for example, about colonizing the Moon or the planet Mars.
Even if Russia snatches Ukraine’s “hand” (it snatched its hand in 2014), it will not be a world power in the long run (and Putin would probably like it to be). Ukrainian fields will not give Russia as much as Putin would like to get. I do not know what Donald Trump’s plans are for ending the war in Ukraine. The only thing I know is that Russia will be a loser in the long term, and I predict the US will have the best army with the best eyesight.
