By LUIS VARESE*

Balance of the war against a Europe submissive to North American interests

“We are playing the background…./ I curse poetry conceived as a cultural lujo by the neutrals” (Paco Ibañez, necessary poetry).

Foolishly, a few months ago, I thought that the pandemic and the natural disasters resulting from the destruction of the ecological balance would allow us to reflect as a collective of humanity and thus seek solidarity actions between humans and human beings and with the Planet, our home. How naive of me not to remember that the greed of big capital has no limits or values, beyond an irrational accumulation.

I still have hope that the animal survival instinct we have as human beings will lead us to find the necessary answers. I hope that the democratic option for socialism leads us to an indispensable rationality and to a fraternal and sisterly relationship with Matter, our Pachamama and between humans and humans. We bet on it and we must go ahead. This provoked and unexpected war is another alarm bell.

Ukraine, the big losers.

First and foremost, in order of priority, the big losers are girls, children, women and men who leave their homes, heading for exile, displacement or, even worse, death in a war they never wanted. In other words, the civilian population has historically been swept away by the vortex of conflict. Nobody wants an occupying army, whatever color it may be.

In second place and following this same order of priorities, the big loser is diplomacy, negotiation, the search for peace through dialogue. Diplomacy was defeated. In this context, in his statements, the Secretary General of the United Nations made a regrettable call to President Putin, in the midst of the offensive and the war had begun, to return the army to Russia and that he end the intervention in Ukraine, instead of calling a ceasefire and sit down at the negotiating table with the UN, Ukraine and the US. That was what the Secretary General was responsible for, mediating and not blaming one of the parties to the conflict, which limits negotiation.

Thirdly, the defeat of the President of the United States, who with his erratic international policy, which opens up on several simultaneous fronts around the world (China, Middle East, Iran, Latin America, Russia) is incapable of giving a different answer of the military threat. The United States completely renounces diplomacy and deals only with 'carrots and sticks', as it has always done in their relations. The arrogance of its ambassadors continues with Donald Trump's rude and unhappy line, deepening the inhumane, genocidal and perfidious blockade of Cuba. This policy generates rejection even among US-related governments. Biden's political and diplomatic defeat has an aggravation for the planet, as it will probably place in the hands of Donald Trump's Apocalyptic Beast, the electoral triumph of the next elections.

Fourthly, the European Union and its policy of submission to US interests has removed any initiative of its own, and its role as an axis of balance, in defense of western democracy, has been totally lost. This has been happening from the alignment in defense of the puppet Juan Guidó in Venezuela or the policy against Nicaragua and Cuba. The EU is represented by mediocre leaders who do not measure up to the historic moment.

With the departure of Angela Merkel, there is not a single leader with the stature of a statesman. Spaniard Pedro Sánchez called on Putin to withdraw troops from Ukraine, in an unrealistic and absurd, pathetic flag salute. Borell, the Almagro of the European Union, does nothing but make ridiculous this global dimension of geopolitical rearrangement. NATO, formed by several EU armies, plays no other role than the armed arm of US foreign policy in a hypothetical confrontation with Russia, in the outdated concept of the “cold war”, belonging to the existing bipolarity in times of Soviet Union.

Ukraine is the battlefield, and from any point of view, the sacrificed are its people, except in the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, which have already paid with thirteen thousand deaths for being Russian speakers and intending to exercise an autonomy that was agreed in 2014.

the likely outcome

“We know how every war starts, but we don't know how and when it ends”, a cliché and repeated phrase, but nevertheless, we are already seeing the possibilities of starting negotiations.

The conditions: Ukraine will not be part of NATO, it will denuclearize, the republics of Donetsky and Lugansk in Donbass will be recognized, Crimea will remain part of Russia, those responsible for the killings and bombings that produced 13 thousand dead since 2014 in Donbass. Finally, Russia will have to withdraw from the territory of Ukraine.

It is with this negotiating structure that the government of Ukraine must sit at the table. Most likely, the issue of elections will arise with the proposal of a government that reconciles the historic relations between the peoples that inhabit Ukraine with Russia.

There are, on the other hand, the US and EU sanctions against Russia. President Vladimir Putin, who has shown himself to be a political and military strategist (whether we like it or not) foresees a stage of responses to these sanctions, opening up to other markets and generating conditions that do not substantially affect the living conditions of the Russian people .

Final considerations

The great absence, until now, in the geopolitical analysis, are the intercapitalist contradictions. We have not been able to orient ourselves to where we are going in resolving these contradictions, other than to say that the crisis of the US, as the hegemonic imperial head, appears to be coming to an end. China and Russia, momentarily allied, can play a moderating role in the end of the 'dollar empire', protecting their national interests and those of their own capitalists, of course. The European Union seems to walk with no other guide than following the US defeat, although the particular interests of its owners lead them, at some point, to distance themselves from the losers.

War generates profits and the first beneficiaries are, naturally, the arms manufacturers and the great owners of natural resources. But it is still too early to have an answer on how far this geopolitical rearrangement will go.

For Our America, we must fight to reconquer or conquer the popular and democratic spaces in Brazil and Colombia, in their next electoral processes. Rebuild regional negotiation spaces, such as CELAC and UNASUR, and advance and consolidate Latin America as a space of Peace. Here there are leaders with world-class statesmanship and proposals for the group. Only united and within the framework of multilateralism will we be able to make ourselves heard and preserve our voice as an option in defense of the Planet and Humanity.

War, once again provoked by the worst ambitions and imperial greed, destroys defenseless human beings, generates refugees and displaced people and enriches only the powerful, who are never on the battlefield. Even if Russia had no other choice, let us remember that nobody likes to have an occupying army at home and that the dead are buried by the people. A prompt ceasefire and an immediate end to hostilities are expected, although the vocation of the USA and NATO has always been to generate and maintain these conflicts, let us remember Libya, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, to ​​name the most recent , and at the moment they do not stop delivering weapons to the Ukrainian army.

If there is a vocation for peace, it is necessary to negotiate, and that means sitting down at the table and giving in what must be granted, avoiding taking the conflict beyond what is permissible, for the survival of humanity.

* Luis Varese is a journalist and anthropologist.