The specter of World War III, that conflict that made Albert Einstein imagine that the Fourth would be fought with sticks and stones, returns to haunt the West 30 years after what appeared to be his final exorcism.
All courtesy of the struggle underlying the war unfolding in Ukraine: the dispute between Moscow and the US/NATO conglomerate, centered on the design of Eastern European security borders. The Kremlin views the eastward expansion of Western structures as unacceptable.
This Tuesday (1st), the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Choigu, put in clear terms about what is the “casus belli” of the attack on Ukraine. “The main thing for us is to protect Russia from the military threat of Western countries, which are using the Ukrainian people in the fight against our country,” he told RIA-Novosti news agency.
The poor people who actually suffer from the insecurity of the Donbass, the alleged “nuclear weapons that Kiev wants” and other topics were left aside.
Putin is an effective manipulator. On the day of the declaration of war, last Thursday (24), he suggested that he would use nuclear weapons if the West interfered in his operation. On Sunday, in the face of a barrage of sanctions, he issued high alert on the Russian strategic forces he had displayed in an exercise a week earlier.
Logic says he’s just making headlines, so to speak, while being beaten up all over the place. And that he talks rudely to his own audience, in addition to scratching the ground if he goes ahead in the resurgence of attacks on his neighbor.
Indeed, there is no shortage of analysts idly speculating whether he would use a low-power tactical atomic bomb in Ukraine (ie, the same as that of Hiroshima or Nagasaki). Logic has not been a good adviser in this crisis, but this seems like too much.
Be that as it may, the topic of World War III came to appear in all press conferences of authorities on the other side with a daunting naturalness.
Anyone who grew up between the 1950s and 1980s knows what it’s like to live with the idea of ​​nuclear annihilation, even if the risk was often exaggerated in favor of ideological clash. Even the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) could result in the obliteration of the Soviets, but not the Americans, who were much stronger at the time, for example.
Since the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ghost has however taken a vacation. No bombs, even though the world’s nuclear arsenal has dropped from 70,000 warheads to around 13,000, 90% in the hands of Moscow and Washington. Unlike Western leaders, however, Putin talks about the specter shamelessly.
That is what it has to do, to ensure that NATO military aid does not become more than images of convoys with ammunition, much to Ukraine’s dismay.
The country, in fact, has insistently requested the direct intervention of the Western military alliance in the conflict. It has received the proper no, precisely because of the fear of an unpredictable confrontation with Russia. On the second (28), it requested the implementation of a no-fly zone over the country.
In addition to the clear admission of loss of control over their country’s skies, Volodymyr Zelensky’s government even played the card of inevitable escalation. “Today it’s Ukraine, tomorrow it’s NATO,” said Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba.
For now, military aid will be that, aid, and restricted. Even the European promise to send fighter jets to Kiev seems a bit delusional, except that Polish pilots take off to deliver on-the-spot MiG-29 models that Ukrainians operate — and risk World War III.
In a related scene in Estonia, the NATO secretary general and the British prime minister were at the multinational military base run by London forces in the tiny former Soviet republic, whose entry into NATO with its Baltic sisters Lithuania and Latvia in 2004 is the biggest call to action. Putin’s geopolitics, then a young first-term president rehearsing good relations with the West.
A British Challenger 2 tank and Estonian CV90 tanks graced the scene, but the authorities were left with flourishes about the Ukrainian resistance and how NATO will always defend itself and unite. Questions about actions against Russia were answered with the usual evasions: the alliance is defensive, we don’t want to fight with the Russians.
It was up to the host, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, to deal with realism. “Even if Ukraine temporarily loses control over its cities, it will be difficult to maintain. [para Putin]”, he stated.
But there are other provocations in the air. Always a separate entity in the NATO structure, self-sufficient France has adopted tougher rhetoric, with its finance minister saying it will “destroy the Russian economy” and fight “a total economic war” against Moscow.
He was admonished by former darling Dmitri Medvedev, who delighted Americans with his liberal look when he pretended to be president under Prime Minister Putin from 2008 to 2012, and who is now ranked No. 2 on the country’s Security Council. “Mice your words, gentlemen! And don’t forget that in human history, economic wars often turn out to be real,” he posted on Twitter.
If the ghost was showing signs of life in the preliminaries of the war, making the nuclear powers sign a promise never to attack with atomic weapons, now he is in the “new normal” that Jens Soltenberg (NATO) talks about day in, day out.
