ISSUE #121: The Ukraine War has made the world a riskier place.
It seems like we're rushing toward the cliff-edge and nobody cares.
The consensus among the Western policymakers is a prolonged war in Ukraine and intensifying the economic pressure on Moscow so that the weakened Russia agrees to the agreements put forward by Ukraine and the US, which, of course, are going to be in favor of the US.
The warring parties agree that the war can escalate into a much dangerous scenario, but they also say that a world in which WWIII is being witnessed can be avoided. As of now, the chances of the US entering the war to directly fight Russia are low and so are the chances of Russia using nuclear weapons.
But as happened during the WWII, the US can find/create reasons to intervene directly which instead of cooling down the tensions can lead to mass death and suffering we’ve not seen since the WWII. Defeat is unacceptable for either side and it wouldn’t count as an exaggeration to say that one of the sides might do something either out of desperation to win or to prevent the defeat that is gonna threaten us all.
Since the war started, both parties have raised their ultimate goal; the end result they want out of this war.
If you replay the early days of the war in your mind, you’d recognize that the goal of the US and its allies back then was to prevent the victory of Russia. The kind of weapons they were sending back then were defensive in their capability such as the Javeline antitank missile, but that has changed now as the weapons with offensive capabilities like HIMARS are being shipped to Ukraine. For the sake of solidifying my claim, Washington vetoed a plan to transfer Poland’s MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in March claiming that doing so might escalate the war, but in July no such concerns were raised when Slovakia announced that it was considering sending the same planes to Kyiv. This implies that the US’s goal is no longer restrained to prevent the victory of Russia by improving Ukraine’s defensive abilities, but it has shifted to making sure that Ukraine wins.
Russia has done the same. Until the day the invasion took place, Moscow was committed to implementing the Minsk II agreements, which would have ended the civil war wreaking havoc over eastern Ukraine for the past 8 years and also kept the Donbas region as part of Ukraine. But, as the recent referendums have shown, Russia is planning to annex the territories it controls and make them part of the Russian Federation, which was not initially a plan.
You might give different reasons as to why [ the party you support ] did this and try to justify it by blaming the opposition, but what I’m saying is that the war is not what it was during the early days; the aims are higher now, and as a result, the stakes are high for each of them. As the stakes keep getting higher, the chances of a possible peace talk keep getting lower, and the probability of further escalations keeps rising.
Neither Ukraine wants to stay as a neutral country, nor Russia is going to return the territories it has annexed. Many people look at these conflicting interests and conclude that the war has entered/is going to enter a bloody stalemate phase.
But what a lot of people are not projecting their enough attention towards is the glaring catastrophic escalations that are baked into the continuation of this war. Either they are too dumb to know the consequences of what this war is leading to, or they are too smart. So smart that they have figured out how humanity can survive a possible nuclear annihilation.
Each war has three possible routes to escalation:
One or both sides deliberately escalate to win,
One or both sides deliberately escalate to not lose,
One or both sides escalate inadvertently.
Whichever path this war is going to take, each one will lead to either the US’s entry into the war which would mean WWIII or Russia using nuclear weapons.
A world in which two nuclear-armed nations are reminding each other of possessing nuclear weapons is the least safe place at best and the most dangerous place at worst. What makes the world even more risky is that people’s reaction when they are told that NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine may escalate into a nuclear war isn’t “Okay, let’s de-escalate without any further delay.” Instead, more escalations are demanded and appreciated.
You can take a look at the comments under this post which mentioned the use of nuclear weapons. Only after mount loads of propaganda that you believe asking for more escalations is a moderate response to a tweet that is already talking about the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons.
Yes, it’s dangerous when the dominant species of Earth is funding its own extinction, but it’s even more dangerous when the members of that species are aware of it and ignore it.
One may argue that an escalatory spiral leading to a nuclear conflict is possible but it should be of no concern because the chances are low. That’s a valid point because leaders of the warring parties are incentivized to not let that happen. But this line of thinking underestimates the ways a war can escalate. One party may do something that is not so provoking in its eyes, but highly provocative in the eyes of the other party, and thus, use it as a justification to escalate. We just can’t predict what the situation of the war may or may not be in a month from now, and anyone saying with full confidence that he knows the path this war is going to take is lying either because he doesn’t want the US’s policy towards Russia to change or because he is propagandized by those who don’t want the US’s policy towards Russia to change.
As the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz recognized, nationalism encourages modern wars to escalate to their most extreme form, especially when the stakes are high for both sides.
This idea that the war is entering a mere stalemate rather than a phase of catastrophic escalations needs to be stomped out, dissolved in acid, and flushed down the toilet. This dangerous situation that the seven-months long war has raced us into should be enough for the Western population to pressure its leaders to immediately find a way to resolve the conflict because they themselves aren’t going to step back.
A war in which there is an absence of a peaceful diplomatic solution may escalate, but a war in which the negotiations are killed deliberately is destined to escalate.
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