By GILBERTO LOPES*
Europe takes Russia as a threat, without any justification for it, and wants to arm itself for a senseless war, which would be nothing less than a nuclear war.
The German army must be prepared for war with Russia by 2030, its inspector general Carsten Breuer said in an interview published in the conservative newspaper Welt on March 13. By 2029, Russia “would be capable of a large-scale conventional strike, even on NATO territory,” he added.
No one asked Carsten Breuer for more details, despite his controversial statement. As early as October last year, the head of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), Bruno Kahl, had insisted that Russia would be ready to attack NATO countries by the end of this decade. Since 2022, NATO has considered Russia the greatest immediate threat to European security. A Russian victory in the Ukraine conflict “would be a tragedy,” according to the then NATO Secretary General, the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg.
Nor did the European press ask him to elaborate on a statement of this magnitude. For some time now, most of the mainstream European press has been repeating the same story, failing to ask questions of this kind.
“A war in Europe is no longer unthinkable,” said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius when the government was still in the hands of the Social Democrats led by Olaf Sholz. But Boris Pistorius, a warmonger, will remain in charge of the ministry in the new government led by the Christian Socials of Friedrich Merz, who have already proposed supplying Ukraine with Taurus missiles to attack the Crimean bridge.
In November 2023, Boris Pistorius announced the deployment of two tank battalions to Lithuania, while Scholz increased military spending to make Germany the backbone of European defense. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly dismissed the idea that his country intends to attack NATO members. That is “nonsense,” he said, calling a war with NATO nothing short of a nuclear war.
Do the unthinkable
If in Europe there are few voices reflecting on a discourse that has occupied official spaces, the same is not true worldwide. “Is Russia really the main threat to Europe?” asks Singaporean diplomat and academic Kishore Mahbubani, in an article published in February in Foreign Policy.
Europeans, Kishore Mahbubani said, fail to see the glaring contradiction between highlighting Russia’s inability to defeat Ukraine, a country with 38 million people and a GDP of about $189 billion last year, and declaring that Russia is a real threat to Europe, which has 744 million people and a GDP of $27 trillion.
For Kishore Mahbubani, “it is high time for Europe to do the unthinkable.” Brussels “has slavishly followed Washington for too long and forgotten how to advance its own geopolitical interests.”
In his view, the only way to restore Europe’s geopolitical position is to consider three previously unthinkable options. The first is for Europe to announce its willingness to leave NATO. Forced to spend 5% of its GDP on defense, “Europe does not need the United States. In 2024, 5% of the GDP of the EU and the United Kingdom would amount to $1,1 trillion, more than the $824 billion spent on defense by the United States.”
His second proposal is that Europe should work out “a new grand strategic agreement with Russia, in which each side accommodates the other’s fundamental interests.” This is an old option, which seemed possible at a certain point after the Cold War. There was talk of a united Europe, from Lisbon to the Urals, a very different scenario from a Europe in confrontation with Russia, seen as its fundamental threat.
Kishore Mahbubani refers to three prominent European military, diplomatic and political leaders to illustrate his point. If Metternich (the able Austrian chancellor of the first half of the 19th century who orchestrated his country’s resistance to Napoleon), Talleyrand (his French contemporary, a prominent politician who survived several political alternatives during the French Revolution), or General Charles de Gaulle (who led the French resistance to the Nazis and then, by changing his position, paved the way for an end to the colonial war in Algeria) were alive today, he says, they would recommend this strategic agreement with Russia.
This leads him to consider a third option. “Europeans foolishly believed that slavish loyalty to US geopolitical priorities would pay off. Instead, they got a kick in the teeth.” China, he says, can help the European Union deal with “its real long-term geopolitical nightmare: the population explosion in Africa.” In 1950, he recalls, Europe’s population was twice that of Africa. Today, Africa’s population is twice that of Europe, which faces the challenge of migration that sometimes seems uncontrollable.
The Minsk agreements, the geopolitics of peace
None of these suggestions are on today's agenda. In your White Paper, published last month, Europe has renounced any political initiative. It has opted for the strategy of an unimaginable war, unless it is willing to end human life on Earth.
A Europe that seems to have forgotten the consequences of German rearmament in the last century, or the objectives of NATO, defined in 1949 by its first secretary general, the British general of Indian origin Hastings Ismay: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. Objectives from which NATO seems to be further away than ever.
Lasting peace requires a correct understanding of the origins of the problem. This is not an easy task, because any analysis in this case has political implications. In any case, we find the views of two leading American academics useful: economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a renowned international analyst.
Jeffrey D. Sachs recounts a personal experience following the Western-sponsored protests on Maidan Square in 2014 that led to the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych. Elected president of Ukraine in 2010, Yanukovych favored Ukraine's neutrality and opposed NATO expansion. “The new government asked me to go to Kiev. They took me to Maidan and I learned many things firsthand,” Sachs said in an article – The geopolitics of peace – published in Consortiumnews last February.
NATO enlargement began in 1999 with the entry of three countries: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. In the next round, in 2004, seven more countries joined: the three Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Slovakia. Washington's idea was for Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia to join NATO. This would neutralize Russia by controlling its access to the Black Sea, making it little more than a local power.
Jeffrey D. Sachs points out that Russia had no territorial claims before the 2014 coup in Ukraine. After Yanukovych was overthrown, Moscow responded quickly by retaking Crimea and preventing its naval base in Sevastopol from falling into NATO hands, something unacceptable to the Russians.
For Vladimir Putin, with the removal of Yanukovych, “the time had come to act against Ukraine and the West.” Putin acted to dissuade the new government in Kiev from aligning itself with the West against Moscow, providing advisers, weapons and diplomatic support to Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Political autonomy for Donetsk and Lugansk was being negotiated, amid a virtual civil war that, by May 2015, had already left around XNUMX dead.
This was followed by the failed Minsk negotiations in 2014 and 2015, which sought to establish a special status for these republics. Subsequent statements by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, along with French President François Hollande, was supposed to be one of the guarantors of the agreements, revealed that the negotiations were never intended to be fulfilled. The aim was to buy time to strengthen Ukraine militarily.
Tensions continued to rise. On December 15, 2021, Vladimir Putin presented his latest proposals, says Jeffrey D. Sachs: a draft agreement with the United States and Europe. Russia’s goal, he claimed, was to keep the United States away from its border. He received no response. After that, Sachs added, “I had an hour-long phone call with the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, begging him, ‘Jake, avoid war.’ Jake Sullivan told him to rest assured that there would be no war. Less than two months later, it became clear that the assurances given to Jeffrey D. Sachs by Jake Sullivan were unfounded.
A tragic mistake
The article by John Mearsheimer to which we refer was published in August 2014. Six months after the overthrow of Yanukovych and five months after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
According to the prevailing view in the West, John Mearsheimer said, “the Ukrainian crisis can be attributed almost exclusively to Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, so the argument goes, annexed Crimea because of his long-standing desire to revive the Soviet empire.” “But this version is wrong,” he said. “The United States and its European allies share the lion’s share of the responsibility for the crisis. The root of the problem is NATO expansion.” They tried, despite Russian warnings about the dangers of such a path. A view shared by Sachs.
John Mearsheimer refers to statements made by a former prominent American diplomat, George Kennan, on the subject. In an interview published in 1998, shortly after the US Senate approved the first round of NATO enlargement, George Kennan said: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and that will affect their policies. I think that is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for it.”
His voice is now a little fragile, Thomas Friedman would say, in a column in New York Times in May 1998, about George Kennan. “But his mind, even at 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I called him to get his reaction to the Senate ratification of NATO enlargement, I was not surprised that the architect of the successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the XNUMXth century had an answer prepared.” “I think this is the beginning of a new cold war,” George Kennan said from his home in Princeton.
US-Russia relations, a long history
In April 1951, in the midst of the Cold War, George Kennan wrote in Foreign Affairs about the future of U.S.-Russian relations. He speculated about the kind of partnership that might develop. It was not just about the changes that should occur in Russia, but also about the behavior of the United States. We can demand that the grotesque system known as the Iron Curtain be lifted, he said, “and that the Russian people, who have so much to give and so much to receive as a mature member of the world community, stop being insulted by a policy that treats them like children, too immature to have normal contact with the adult world.”
George Kennan never stopped analyzing these relations, nor the international scenario. His work seems to me particularly relevant for analyzing, thinking about alternatives, and seeking political solutions to the conflict between the West and Russia today.
There is little risk in saying that no American diplomat (and probably no academic or politician either) has thought as deeply about relations between the two countries over nearly 60 years. Nor has anyone had the knowledge and passion that George Kennan, a Russian-speaking man who lived in Russia and who admired the Russian people as passionately as he condemned Stalin's rule, had on the subject.
The same man who wrote one of the most influential international politics articles of his time. The article – “The sources of soviet conduct” – signed anonymously as “X”, appeared in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. It was the basis of the policy of containment, one of the pillars of the Cold War. After 40 years, in 1987, in the spring issue of the same magazine, Kennan returned to analyze the nature of these relations in an article entitled “Containment then and now".
"Then"(In 1947), the Soviet Union, exhausted after a war that had cost it some 20 million dead, was not a military threat, but a political threat. That was George Kennan's view."Now” (40 years later, in 1987), the situation, from his point of view, was exactly the opposite. Moscow was no longer an ideological or political threat. Instead, the military aspect was now of “primary importance.”
But he clarified: “When I say that this military factor is now of primary importance, it is not because I see the Soviet Union threatening the United States or its allies with armed force. It is quite clear to me that the Soviet leadership does not want a war with us and does not plan to start one. In particular, I have never believed that it was in their interest to invade Western Europe militarily.” In fact, what “needs to be contained, in my opinion, is not so much the Soviet Union as the arms race itself.”
Already at that time, he was discussing Russia’s relations with its ethnically non-Russian neighbors, with whom it maintained close economic ties. Among them were the Baltic countries, which today are particularly Russophobic. “We all agree that the Baltic countries must never again be forced, against the most intimate feelings of their people, to enter into any relations with the Russian state. But they themselves would be foolish to refuse cooperation agreements with a tolerant and non-imperialist Russia, which really wanted to overcome the unhappy memories of the past,” George Kennan stated.
The place where the border passes
Ukraine deserves “full recognition for the genius and peculiar abilities of its people.” But Ukraine, he added in 1951, “is economically as much a part of Russia as Pennsylvania is of the United States.” He asked: “Who can say what the final status of Ukraine should be if it does not know the character of Russia, to which it will have to adapt itself?”
“There are more important things than where the border passes,” he added, “and the first of these is that on both sides there must be tolerance and maturity, humility in the face of the sufferings of the past and the problems of the future.” “None of the important problems of the future, for any of the peoples of Europe, will be solved entirely, or even mainly, within the national borders of the country.”
Hatred of Russian
George Kennan died in March 2005, at the age of 101. He did not see the outcome of a problem that he had been aware of for 75 years and that is now unfolding before our eyes. For Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, “it is unacceptable to speak to Russia in a language of superiority, as the European Union is trying to do, referring to the aspiration of several European countries to send their troops to Ukraine.” Earlier, in another interview, he had already pointed out that “Russia is not fighting for territory. We are fighting for the rights of the people who live in these territories.”
Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in March 2014, a month after the overthrow of the Ukrainian government and the Maidan protests. And after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it did the same with the border provinces with a majority Russian population of Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk and Luhansk, which have been the scene of armed conflicts with the Kiev authorities since 2014.
“When Volodymyr Zelensky claims the former borders of Ukraine, does that imply that he intends to expel the population of Russian origin from there?” Lavrov asked in an interview published on April 14 in the Russian daily Kommersant. “Do they intend to restore the old Nazi norms there, forcing them to forget their language, culture and history and everything that Russia did in these territories?” From a legal point of view, according to the current Ukrainian laws, adopted before the Russian military operation, “everything Russian is canceled” in Ukraine, he added.
Volodymyr Zelensky said in a recent interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, that their fight is motivated by hatred of the Russians. Thus, no agreement seems possible to resolve the conflict until the military scenario is clarified; until one of the opposing forces establishes a superiority that forces the enemy to give up its claims.
This is not yet the case, and the failure of the US initiative to achieve a ceasefire and a negotiated solution demonstrates this. Instead, what we are seeing is a renewed effort by the European Union (now in the hands of the most belligerent Russophobic forces, such as France and Britain) to coordinate increasing economic and military support for Kiev.
Attention is now turning to Germany, where a new, even more right-wing government led by Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz is expected to take office on May 6. Friedrich Merz has expressed his desire to supply Kiev with Taurus missiles with a range of 500 km, capable of hitting targets deep inside Russian territory. His predecessor, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, never wanted to deliver these missiles, which are to be operated by German soldiers, knowing the consequences that this could have. “I assume that we do not want an escalation of the conflict, nor do we want to be part of this war,” said Matthias Miersch, the Social Democrat leader who will now be a junior partner in the government.
For Friedrich Merz, however, Germany must “once again assume its responsibility in Europe and the world.” Again? “What historical period is Merz referring to?” asked Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
Friedrich Merz’s idea is for Ukraine to take the initiative on the battlefield, rather than remain on the defensive. One target that Kiev considers to be of the greatest political importance would be the Kerch Bridge, which connects the Crimean peninsula to Russian territory. “The leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom, with their openly bellicose slogans and threats to Russia, want to cling to power,” Lavrov said. If this coalition of the willing is led by a sane leader, “they should understand that this is not the way to talk to Russia.”
Otherwise, they will remain on a war footing without any ambiguity. That is their choice.” “Since the firing of these missiles is impossible without the direct assistance of the German military, an attack on any Russian facility or critical transport infrastructure will be considered as direct participation in military operations,” Maria Zakharova said. Germany is once again a danger to the world, she warned.
*Gilberto Lopes is a journalist, PhD in Society and Cultural Studies from the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). Author, among other books, of The end of democracy: a dialogue between Tocqueville and Marx (Dialectic Publisher) [https://amzn.to/3YcRv8E]
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
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