By Dan Steinbock                                     

As the endgame looms over the proxy war in Ukraine, the catastrophic costs of the unwarranted conflict continue to soar. There was an alternative future for Ukraine, based on development. But it was purposely denied.

Since the onset of hostilities in Ukraine three years ago, I have argued that, whatever its stated rationales, the war would “penalize severely Ukraine, Russia, the US and the NATO, Europe, developing economies and the global economy.”

The war in Ukraine was not only avoidable but there was an alternative and more peaceful future. It was purposely collapsed because it did not fit the neoconservatives’ plans for Ukraine.

Zelensky’s dream of Ukraine as China’s bridge to Europe          

Even as Ukraine-Russian tensions began to escalate a decade ago, trade ties between Ukraine and China expanded after President Viktor Yanukovych’s state visit to Beijing in 2013. Four years later, Ukraine, now under President Poroshenko, joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And in 2019, China bypassed Russia as Ukraine’s biggest single trading partner.

Together, China, Ukraine’s new economic partner, and Russia, its historical trade partner, absorbed a fourth of Ukraine’s exports. That figure was over six times the share of the US.

In June 2021, China and Ukraine signed a deal to strengthen cooperation in multiple areas, particularly in infrastructure financing and construction. In 2021, overall trade boomed to $19 billion, having soared 80% since 2013. To Ukraine’s President Zelensky, the BRI meant an alternative future that would be more stable and prosperous. And so, in a phone conversation with President Xi Jinping, he called China “Ukraine’s No. 1 trade and economic partner in the world.” expressing hope that Ukraine could become “a bridge to Europe for Chinese business.”

In just a year, major Chinese companies started operations in construction, food and telecoms. New contracts signed by Chinese companies in the Ukrainian engineering market exceeded $2 billion for two consecutive years.

But this was not the future that was planned for Ukraine in the White House.        

Hammering Ukraine into a military-industrial hub              

From 1991 to 2014, the US flooded Ukraine with $4 billion in military assistance , even though it wasn’t a NATO member. By 2021, over $2.7 billion was added to the figure, plus over a billion provided by the NATO Trust Fund.

To Erik Prince, it heralded a great money-making opportunity, Iraq déjà vu. As the founder of the private US military contractor, then known as Blackwater, Prince had long supplied mercenaries to the CIA, Pentagon and State Department for covert operations, including torture and assassinations. In early 2020, Prince outlined a roadmap for the creation of a “vertically integrated aviation defense consortium” that could bring $10 billion in revenues.

Prince desperately needed the Motor Sich factory, which already had a deal with Beijing Skyrizon Aviation. The Chinese company had bought its 41% stake already in 2017. However, Biden’s election win undermined Prince’s plan. Moreover, his Ukrainian partners got under criminal investigation for alleged efforts to sway the 2020 presidential election and the investigation included President Biden’s son and his stakes in Ukraine. Washington blacklisted the Chinese firms involved, then Ukrainian court froze their holdings for reasons of “national security” and Chinese companies and dealmakers were sanctioned.

Nonetheless, the idea of a Ukrainian military-industrial complex remained attractive to the US and Ukraine, where the state-controlled defense sector employed more than 1 million people and had been moving, with rising US influence, toward military procurement since 2014. To the Biden administration, it offered a massive military-logistical hub that could serve both the US and NATO.

Yet, by late fall 2022, even European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen acknowledged Ukraine’s losses in the war with Russia amounted to 100,000 soldiers and 20,000 civilians.

Today, three years later, the total cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine is estimated at $524 billion over the next decade – almost three times Ukraine’s GDP 2024.

The military aid has brought neither peace nor security. But it has prolonged Ukrainians’ suffering. To date, the US alone has provided $67 billion in military assistance since February 2022 and $70 billion in military assistance since 2014. These have been coupled with military assistance via the presidential emergency authority by up to $32 billion from Pentagon’s stockpiles.

That’s a total of $167 billion – in wasted lives, economic prospects and global prospects.

Economic and human costs of the avoidable war  

After the end of the Cold War, the peaceful rise of Ukraine was the prevailing reality. But as the plans of development and welfare were replaced with those of geopolitics and warfare, Ukrainian GDP has suffered a drastic plunge (see black line in the below figure). Assuming incremental trends in the next half a decade, Ukrainian GDP is anticipated to reach $283 billion in 2030. But if the hostilities of 2022-25 had been avoided, this figure could have been $372 billion (light-blue line). And if all these hostilities since 2014 had been avoided and if Ukraine had been able to continue Zelensky’s infrastructure modernization with Chinese development, Ukraine’s GDP could have soared to $482 billion in 2030.

These missed opportunities reflect a catastrophic collapse of a future that Ukraine could have had, if it had been allowed to build on development and prosperity. Had that peaceful trajectory prevailed, Ukraine’s economy in 2030 would be 70% larger than what it is likely to be.

The demographic collapse is even worse. As the NATO expansion intensified in Eastern Europe and geopolitical tensions substituted for peaceful development, Ukraine’s population has declined from 51 million in 1990 to just 34 million people.

Ukraine has lost over 33% of its population since the end of the Cold War; and 9 million in just three years. Due to migration, the final toll is even worse. Since spring 2022, millions of Ukrainians have fled the country, with nearly 7 million Ukrainian refugees living abroad.

Since the onset of hostilities, total Ukrainian casualties amount to 400,000.

The demise of Ukraine?              

In spring 2022, the West promised Ukraine freedom and democracy, security and prosperity. Today, most freedoms have been compromised under the fog of war. Democratic institutions are overshadowed by external interests and domestic oligarchs. Many national assets have been mortgaged to Western interests for years to come.

Had Ukraine followed the development trajectory, its economy would not be the size of Algeria in 2030. It would be a half-trillion-dollar economy, like Iran or South Africa. Per capita income would be more than 40% higher than today. Economic opportunities might have reversed some of the migration flows back to Ukraine, which would have over 10 million more inhabitants than today.

The proxy war between the US-led West and Russia in Ukraine has proved just as catastrophic as projected in 2022 and thereafter. It has contributed to secular stagnation in the US and particularly in Europe where the misallocation of scarce allocations from welfare to rearmament is compounding a series of cost-of-living crises. Coming at the heel of the global pandemic, the consequent food and energy crises have severely aggravated the challenges of the Global South. And if the war is allowed to fester further, global economic prospects will be penalized even worse. 

What happens in Ukraine will not stay in Ukraine. As long as aggressive geopolitics is favored at the expense of proactive international diplomacy, even promising futures can turn into dark wastelands.

The original commentary was published by China-US Focus on August 28, 2025.

About the Author

Dan Steinbock is an internationally renowned visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/ 

By Dan Steinbock                        

Israel’s Obliteration Doctrine was first tested already two decades ago, without subsequent international intervention. It has precursors, but the total devastation achieved in Gaza is world historical. As a blueprint, it is a prelude to much worse.  

Not so long ago, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “nothing can justify the obliteration of Gaza that has unfolded before the eyes of the world.”       

Just days ago, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a disciple of the late far-right rabbi Meir Kahane notorious for his promotion of racism and ethnic cleansing, visited an Israeli prison where he had a large photo of the obliteration in Gaza hung for Palestinian security prisoners to see. In a video, Ben Gvir points to the obliteration: “This is how it’s supposed to look.”

As I show in my new book The Obliteration Doctrine, the ultimate objective of obliteration is the total destruction of something so that nothing of it remains.

But actually, this hellish nightmare was first tested already two decades ago.

The test laboratory of Dahiya, Beirut              

The pioneering Obliteration Doctrine was first outlined in 2005 by Gadi Eizenkot, former chief of General Staff. Interestingly, he is no extremist. Subsequently an influential Israeli military leader and politician, Eisenkot supports Israeli democracy and a two-state solution. But as a military strategist, he opened the Pandora’s Box that both Israel’s right-wing Likud and Messianic far-right would subsequently embrace – and he resigned from Netanyahu’s war cabinet only after its darkest destruction.

Two decades ago, Eisenkot’s strategy was based on the idea that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) would have to severely damage Dahiya to create effective deterrence against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. His predecessor had been compelled to quit for having been “too cautious.” The assumption was that the deployment of disproportionate power would end Hezbollah for good, or at least for a sustained period.

When the IDF embraced the nascent Obliteration Doctrine, the Cold War was history and ad hoc international criminal tribunals had been set up. The Genocide Convention was in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN even had its special adviser with a mandate for warning the UN on the Prevention of Genocide. So, ostensibly, things were in place to deal with a military doctrine that explicitly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Yet, when Eisenkot stated in public that Israel would embrace a new military doctrine—that of extreme disproportion which virtually ensured genocidal atrocities—there was no consequential international outcry, not to speak of intervention. It was this silence that made a war of total obliteration a matter of time rather than a matter of principle.

Civilian devastation as strategic objective    

Armed with the Obliteration Doctrine, the IDF deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure to wreak massive suffering on the civilian population, presumably seeking to establish an effective deterrence. Following the 2006 Lebanese War, the doctrine was deployed again in the 2008–2009 Gaza War, which caused the deaths of 1,200–1,400 Palestinians. Over 46,000 homes were destroyed, making more than 100,000 people homeless. As Eisenkot saw it:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which shots will be fired in the direction of Israel. We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction.

After these efforts, the Obliteration Doctrine was effectively in place. Civilian devastation was no longer unfortunate collateral damage, but the very focus of a new military doctrine. So, 17 years before October 7, 2023, there was a broad public consensus among both the Israeli military and political elites that “in the next war the IDF would deploy disproportionate force” and feature heavy firepower and “immense destruction.”

Oddly enough, the very public launch of and debate on what was then described as the Dahiya strategy attracted little attention from international bodies and authorities ostensibly dedicated to genocide prevention.

“Exterminate all the brutes!”                 

Nonetheless, after just one month of the Gaza War, Eisenkot charged the Netanyahu cabinet for “near-criminal behavior” as the PM tried to hide protocols, leak lies to media and sway war goals to appease the Messianic far-right. With advancing obliteration, Eisenkot had lost his own son and two nephews in a war he now opposed. Yet, the doctrine that was foundational to the Obliteration Doctrine was to a great extent his handiwork.

In November 2023, Major General (Res.) Giora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security Council, took the doctrine even further, arguing as the Messianic far-right had done since the days of rabbi Meir Kahane and the ultra-nationalist rabbis in the 1970s, that since most Gazans support Hamas, all Gaza women are the mothers, sisters, and spouses of Hamas murderers. So, Israel was not only entitled but morally obligated to ignore their pain.

In this view, collective punishment was not a violation of international law or a perverse moral code. Somewhat like Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness (1899), Eiland seemed to concur: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

It was the ultimate ethical dictum of inhumanity. Just as the Nazis evoked collective punishment against Jews, Poles, Communists and gypsies in the 1940s, Eiland seized on it to suggest that what the military might not achieve, biowarfare could: “Epidemics in the South [of Gaza] will bring victory closer and will decrease casualties among IDF soldiers.”

These arguments unleashed a broad Israeli and international condemnation, but they were aligned with the strategic objectives of the Obliteration Doctrine.

Origins of the Obliteration Doctrine    

In historical view, the kind of obliteration seen in Gaza in 2023–2025 is reminiscent of scorched-earth policy, a longstanding military strategy of destroying everything that allows an enemy military force to fight a war, including the critical infrastructure, military and state institutions, buildings, crops, livestock, security and so on. 20^th century examples feature the American Civil War and American Indian Wars, and Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union.

Yet, the Obliteration Doctrine goes further insofar as it aims at either devastating the entire infrastructure of the target population or destroying it, to achieve “voluntary” mass displacement, dispossession and ultimately extermination.

Another historical component of the Obliteration Doctrine is collective punishment, which violates the principle of individual responsibility since it targets individuals who are not responsible for the perpetrated acts. By the same token, it undermines modern legal systems, which restrict criminal liability to individuals. Yet, it has been widely deployed throughout history, particularly in postwar anti-colonial liberation struggles.

The third historical element of the Obliteration Doctrine is civilian victimization, or the purposeful use of violence against non-combatants in a conflict. It has featured lethal force, including killings, and non-lethal forms of violence, such as forced expulsion, torture, and rape, as evidenced by the US Strategic Hamlet program during the Vietnam War.

The deployment of scorched-earth policy against non-combatants is banned under the 1977 Geneva Conventions. Collective punishment is prohibited in both international and non-international armed conflicts. Civilian victimization is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

Yet, thanks to support by Washington and inactivity by Brussels, Israel has been able to ignore all these prohibitions.

Massive indiscriminate area bombardment              

Since the postwar era, obliteration has also been accompanied by largely indiscriminate, massive area bombardment. In Gaza, one of the most densely inhabited areas in the world, it set a historical precedent. Since October 7, 2023, the US spent at least $22.8 billion on military aid to Israel and related US operations in the region.

Based on its historical precursors, massive bombardment and the deployment of artificial intelligence to maximize death and devastation, the result was the Obliteration Doctrine. By late April 2024, after barely half a year of hostilities, Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs over Gaza, surpassing the World War II bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined.

The scale of destruction in Gaza has been viable only with the incessant flow of US weapons, guaranteed by U.S. military aid and funding to finance it. This aid is a result of half a century of bilateral military cooperation in the dark shadows of history, starting with Israel’s military ties with apartheid South Africa and participation in the US “Dirty Wars” in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and even Asia since the 1970s and ’80s.

The targets in Gaza are typical of the kind of mass atrocities and infrastructural devastation that is covered by the Genocide Convention. Worse, by most accounts, more than two-thirds of the perished in Gaza are women, children and elderly – and the final figure is likely to prove significantly higher.

Erasing Gaza, expunging nations        

As I demonstrate in The Obliteration Doctrine, the eradication of Gaza has been predicated on a deliberately targeted campaign with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians and the Palestinian people as a national, ethnical, and religious group. This purposeful obliteration ranges from physical devastation of critical infrastructure, urban hubs and settlements, public buildings and hospitals, to both combatants and non-combatants and the entire ecology of the environment, with Gaza devastated and uninhabitable and over 62,000 Palestinians killed and almost 160,000 injured.

Another aspect of the goal of obliteration suggests a more figurative eradication: removing something from memory. Hence, the Israeli obliteration of Palestinian museums, libraries, institutions of learning, arts and culture; or what Raphael Lemkin used to call “cultural genocide.” Out of sight, out of mind, gone forever.

Third, the Obliteration Doctrine has gone hand in hand with the concerted effort to curtail, reverse or undo future development, and thus entirely undermine all economic progress. The net impact has affinities with de-development and undevelopment, as evidenced by the plummeting of Gaza’s GDP by more than 80 percent already in mid-2024.

In the big picture, the obliteration of Gaza and the efforts to eradicate and cleanse its Palestinian residents in real time with “the whole world watching,” reflects the West’s long and dark track-record of neo-colonial mass civilian destruction.

But what has happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. Left unrestrained, the Obliteration Doctrine is likely to serve as a prelude to new and far more destructive genocidal atrocities in the future.

A version of the commentary was published by TRT World on August 26, 2025. It features some excerpts from Dr. Dan Steinbock’s The Obliteration Doctrine.

About the Author

The author of The Fall of Israel (2024) and The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), Dr Dan Steinbock, a renowned visionary of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/