Cold War Reloaded - Der neue Ost-West Konflikt

Jaja. Der freie Markt. So wichtig für die westlichen Werte.

First artillery, then tanks, then warplanes, then what?

The US slow climb up the escalatory ladder in Ukraine appears to be moving a bit faster — without a lot of talk about consequences.

Zitat von Anatol Lieven - Responsible Statecraft (26.01.23)

[...] There are a couple of curious features about this progressive escalation of Western military aid to Ukraine; ironic in one case, extremely dangerous in the other. The first is that when Russia invaded almost a year ago, and most NATO military analysts predicted a sweeping Russian victory, there was no official talk of heavy weapons for Ukraine — and indeed, the Ukrainian forces stopped and turned back the Russian advance with a combination of their own courage and grit with light Western infantry weapons: Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

The further the Russians have been pushed back, and the more deeply they have become bogged down in the east and south, the more Western weapons supplies have grown — in the name of defending Ukraine and preventing any future Russian threat to NATO. A more cynical view would be that when Russia really did seem threatening, the West was too scared to risk war with Russia by sending such weapons; and that the escalation has grown not with the Russian threat, but precisely with growing Russian weakness, a belief that Russia can be not only halted but crushingly defeated, and a growing confidence that Russian talk of red lines and escalation are empty bluff.

This is the second irony, and it is a potentially catastrophic one. By repeatedly escalating their own weapons supplies in order to defeat Russia’s conventional forces, while suggesting that Russian threats of escalating in turn by unconventional means are empty, the West is openly challenging Russia to make good on its threats.

This does not mean that the Kremlin would suddenly resort to nuclear weapons. If it did,God forbid, this would come only after several radical turns in the cycle of escalation. Other Russian responses are however not only possible but becoming increasingly likely: for example, attacks on U.S. satellites whose intelligence has done so much to help the Ukrainian armed forces; or on Western communications infrastructure; or on NATO embassies in Kyiv.

The advantage of such a strategy from Moscow’s point of view would be that it would not be a direct attack on NATO territory, and so would not automatically trigger a NATO military response. It would nonetheless bring NATO and Russia much closer to the direct conflict that President Biden has always said that he is determined to avoid.

Top Russian officials and commentators have said recently that Russia is now in effect at war not with Ukraine but with NATO; and a great many ordinary Russians appear to believe this — not surprisingly, since German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has just said the same. Leading commentators (including at the U.S. Helsinki Commission) and East European governments, have declared openly that complete Russian defeat in Ukraine should be sought in order to bring down the Putin regime. Some have called for this in turn to lead to the “decolonization” of Russia, code for the break-up of the Russian Federation and the destruction of the Russian state.

Given that these advocates of Western assistance for complete Russian defeat also portray Putin as a dictator determined to maintain his own hold on power irrespective of the costs to Russia and the world; and portray Russian nationalism as intrinsically and irredeemably tied to imperialism and military aggression, it is very hard to see why they also believe that faced with the threat of complete defeat, the Russian government would not in fact escalate by some form of attack on NATO. [...]

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Responsible Statecraft hat am selben Tag noch einen weiteren Artikel des selben Autors dazu veröffentlicht:

Concerning the arguments for ‘total defeat’ of Russia

They fall apart at the slightest examination, but are dominating the Ukraine discussion nonetheless. Let’s take them on, point for point.

Zitat von Anatol Lieven - Responsible Statecraft (26.01.23)

[...] Zealous advocates of Western support for the total defeat of Russia in Ukraine — including, if necessary, direct Western intervention and NATO-Russia war — base their case on a disparate set of arguments, almost every one of which turns out on examination to be either exaggerated or wholly mistaken.

The most extreme is that the defense of “civilization” demands the complete defeat of Russia, ideally leading in turn to Nuremberg-style trials of the top officials of the Russian government and (for some commentators) the break-up of the Russian Federation itself. This call is linked to the allegation that the Russian invasion has been not merely brutal, but has amounted to “genocide.”

This charge forms — at least subliminally — a serious intellectual and moral barrier to any eventual peace settlement. For the implied association of the Russian regime with Nazism suggests not just that no compromise with this regime is morally possible, but that morality and peace demand that the regime — and the state system over which it presides — be totally destroyed.

If one were to accept and follow through on this analogy, it would also lead to the conclusion that to defeat such evil, almost any means and any alliances are legitimate. For after all, the Nazis were not defeated by limited and humane war. They were defeated in total war by the Red Army, which (together with Polish and Czech militias) killed hundreds of thousands of eastern German civilians, and ethnically cleansed more than a million more — and with the help of a British and American bombing campaign that deliberately killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians and destroyed their cities.

We should recall the words of C. Vann Woodward in opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam:

“The irony of the moralistic approach, when exploited by [American] nationalism, is that the high motive to end injustice and immorality actually results in making war more amoral and horrible than ever and in shattering the foundations of the political and moral order upon which peace has to be built.”

Above all, any reputable historian should be able to recognize that even an extremely brutal military campaign in which numerous civilians are killed is not the same as the Nazi Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. If it were, then every Western state that has waged a major war over the past century would have been guilty of this — a judgment which would make the term “genocide” meaningless and incidentally insult the victims of the true genocides.

The Putin regime has sought hegemony over Ukraine and has suggested that Russians and Ukrainians are to some extent “one people” (of course, with the Russians as “elder brothers”), but while quite illegitimate, that is almost the direct opposite of the exterminatory ideology of the Nazis or the Hutu genocidaires, who most certainly did not portray Germans and Jews, or Hutus and Tutsis, as “one people.”

Advocates of the total defeat of Russia who think of themselves as “internationalists” should also ask themselves why attitudes to these questions are so very different elsewhere in the world — even among progressive intellectuals and journalists in democracies like India and South Africa. The answer of course is that while they condemn the Russian invasion, people in these countries see far less difference between Russian behavior, and Russian imperialism, and that of some Western countries, including in the recent past.

A further argument is that the total defeat of Russia is necessary because, if not, Russia will either attack Ukraine again in the future, or be emboldened to invade NATO, or both. The first suggestion is illogical; the second — for the foreseeable future at least — verges on the fantastical. By far the most likely cause of a permanent Russian desire for a war of revenge would be the same disastrous obsession that centered French diplomatic and military strategy from 1871 to 1918 on the goal of recovering Alsace-Lorraine. [...]

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Bei Frau Weisband zeigt sich so etwas wie der Schimmer einer Erkenntnis:

Jetzt muss ihr nur noch einer erklären, warum das so ist.

Professor Carlo hat das gestern Abend sogar irgendwie versucht, als er mal wieder mit Frau Weisband zusammen geladen war, um Janine Wissler nieder zu schwätzen, aber er ist natürlich wie immer daran gecheitert, dass sein einziges - nach seiner logik - halbwegs plausibles Argument für die Verlängerung des Krieges in der Behauptung besteht, die russische Besatzung sei für die Bevölkerung noch schlimmer, als permanente Todesangst und komplett zerstörte Dörfer und Städte unter gegenseitigem Granaten- und Raketenhagel.

...and just in case Mr. Prime Minister is worried about british industrial capacity, maybe he would like to take a look at what the american defense industry has to offer.

Das liest sich überhaupt nicht größenwahnsinnig.