By Stephen Gowans
May 6, 2024
“French President Emmanuel Macron repeated last week that he doesn’t exclude sending troops to Ukraine, and U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron said Kyiv’s forces will be able to use British long-range weapons to strike targets inside Russia.” This prompted “Russia to hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons.” “Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council said that the comments by Macron and Cameron risked pushing the nuclear-armed world toward a ‘global catastrophe.’”
The words of the French president and UK foreign secretary are madness. These two bedlamites are flirting with an escalation of the Ukraine conflict to World War III. There is no military solution to the struggle over Ukraine, of the United States and its NATO instrument on the one side, and Russia on the other. The only outcomes are (i) a permanent war of attrition, in which the United States fights Russia to the last Ukrainian, an option which has some advantages for the US ruling class, to be sure; it weakens a geopolitical rival, Russia, at no expense in US lives; keeps Europe securely under US control via a beefed-up NATO; and maintains pressure on the Europeans to buy US military equipment to underwrite interoperability with US forces, to the benefit of US arms industry shareholders; (ii) escalation to World War III; so long as the war persists, and so long as lunatics like Macron and Cameron are prepared to risk the existence of humanity by elevating the level of threat to Russia, the total annihilation of humanity in a nuclear show-down between great powers has a probability above zero; (iii) a political solution. Russia is strong enough militarily that its ability to enforce a sphere of influence in parts of Ukraine, if not the outright absorption of a large fraction of the country, is insuperable. There is nothing the United States and its European clients can do to stop it. They can finance an indefinite Ukrainian war against Russia, but the chances that Kyiv is ever going to recover the Ukrainian territory Russia has already ingurgitated appear to be very small. It would seem highly probable that Washington recognizes that the loss of Ukrainian territory to Russia is an irreversible fact, but that this is of little moment, since Washington is willing to settle for an achievable goal, namely, weakening its Russian rival by keeping it bogged down in a Ukrainian quagmire.
The danger, so far as a political solution continues to be eschewed, is that the world will end and humanity with it as foolish and dangerously bold politicians gamble that they can stare down a nuclear-armed opponent and make him yield. Maybe they can, but is it a chance worth taking?
What's Left 