‘For as long as it takes’: NATO’s War on Russia

by SIMON ELMER Thursday, 28th March 2024  ukcolumn

‘The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.’

— Emmanuel Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, 1984

When the governing executives of the United Kingdom, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States of America unanimously state, as they did on the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine this February, that they stand with Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’, they are making a commitment to continuing the proxy war the West has been waging against Russia since it overthrew the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine in February 2014. But a commitment of what?

In terms of its military, NATO is stronger than Russia alone, so ‘as long as it takes’ could, in a purely military sense, mean the defeat of Russia on the battlefield, or until Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, is overthrown by a political coup and a puppet government — presumably handpicked by the US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland — is set up in the Kremlin to match the one she picked in Kiev. However, there are some major problems with this scenario.

First, the size of the military forces involved would mean a war in Europe that would devastate the economies of the European Union and Russia. This would benefit the USA, as it did in World War Two, but leave Europe even more subject to the US than it has been since the latter blew up the Nord Stream gas lines in September 2022 and increased Europe’s dependence on US natural gas, with imports having nearly tripled since 2021.

Second, NATO is used to waging wars against small countries with weak armies that are quickly defeated. Not since Vietnam for the USA — and not since the Second World War for European countries — have Western states been willing to engage in wars that would incur the kinds of casualties a war with Russia would inevitably bring. With Ukraine running out of conscripts to pull off the streets of Kiev, and the average age of a soldier now estimated at 43, who will fight and die against Russia — which, in contrast, is accustomed to far higher casualties, in Afghanistan, Chechnya and now the Ukraine.

Third, among countries that conduct such polls, Putin is the most popular leader in the world, with a current approval rating of 85 per cent among the Russian people. Hoping for a political coup to overthrow Putin is as chimerical and disingenuous as saying that Gazans should overthrow Hamas if they want the genocide being committed against them by the State of Israel to stop; and like that condition, it is a transparent excuse to wage a war of annihilation against the Russian people long prepared by their ongoing dehumanisation by Western propaganda.

Fourth, neither Putin nor, I suspect, the Russian people will tolerate conquest by NATO. Their grandparents’ generation lost around 27 million people from the Soviet Union defeating the Third Reich, and if necessary they’ll do the same defeating the return of fascism to the political economy of Europe hiding behind the neo-Nazi Ukraine. Neither the US nor the EU can draw on anything like that collective will.

Fifth, even if NATO were on the verge of defeating Russia, Putin and his ministers have made it clear that they will use Russia’s vast stockpile of nuclear weapons, the largest in the world, to defend itself. Indeed, Russia’s Security Council Deputy Chairman, Dmitry Medvedev, has said that an invasion of the Crimea would be met with such a response. And as Putin has also made clear to NATO, such a response would trigger a nuclear holocaust that would destroy much of the world. Indeed, it was the prohibition on such an eventuality that justified the arms race in nuclear weapons, which NATO appears to have forgotten.

Sixth, it is inconceivable that China, the third strongest military in the world and the largest economy by Purchasing Power Parity and percentage of global GDP, and which last year very publicly signed a number of bilateral economic, political and security agreements with Russia, would stand by and watch Russia be destroyed by a coalition led by the USA, whose equally public aggression towards China is second only to its aggression towards Russia. Should NATO be foolish enough to start a war with both, which would inevitably draw in the growing number and strength of BRICS nations, we really would be in a Third World War, and the future of humankind in serious doubt.

Seventh, even if it could somehow be brought about without mutual destruction or nuclear holocaust, what would a world with a ‘defeated’ Russia look like? Outside its subservient allies in the West, does the USA really expect the rest of the world to permit it to run a country the size of Russia, to turn it into another Iraq or Libya or Ukraine and plunder its resources?

Finally, if ‘for as long as it takes’ refers to the European Commission’s declared goal of assimilating the Ukraine into the European Union — the failure to comply with which was the trigger for overthrowing the government of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 — there are problems with that scenario too. Putin has repeatedly said that Russia has no objection to the Ukraine joining the European Union; but as he made clear in his recent interview with the US journalist, Tucker Carlson, that doesn’t extend to the Ukraine joining NATO.

Ukrainian choices

We might respond by asking what a sovereign state’s choice of either economic or military alliances have to do with Russia, the answer to which might include the following.

First of all, the government of the Ukraine that was elected in 2010 made that choice, which was to refuse to join the EU and maintain its trade links with Russia. To describe the subsequent governments of the Ukraine as ‘sovereign’ is not accurate by any definition of the word.

The so-called ‘Maidan revolution’ of February 2014 — which was most likely as engineered by the CIA as the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014, the Arab Spring of 2011–12, the 5 October Revolution in Yugoslavia in 2000, and the other ‘colour revolutions’ in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Moldova and the Ukraine itself that followed the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991 — has resulted not in greater national sovereignty but in the subjection of the Ukraine to the Washington Consensus, ten principles of neoliberalisation enforced by the US Treasury, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as a condition of receiving loans and investment. These conditions include removing import tariffs, cutting corporate taxes, revoking employment laws, deregulating industries, privatising state-owned companies, assets and banks, and, of course, cutting Ukraine’s economic ties with Russia, its largest trading partner. Continues….