Lordre: NATO

Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts

Will "Ukraine fatigue" become Ukraine defeat?

Far from defending its sovereignty and independence, since February 2022, Ukraine has become an empty shell dependent on handouts from Western countries.

Ukrainian government officials receive their salaries from the US government. Under Russian strikes, the country has lost its military industry (once a key strength and source of pride for Ukraine), and is entirely dependent on pleading for US and NATO supplies now.

The war to start all wars

From the above facts, it should be clear by now that the war is not being fought to protect Ukraine's independence and sovereignty. The war is being fought to establish Ukraine's Western alignment and the positioning of Western weapons on its territory. NATO wants Ukraine. The Ukrainian government, for its part, is more and more under the spell of American neoconservatives who see no use for diplomacy in international relations and think the US should rule the world.

Sanctions have failed

Unfortunately for NATO, the biggest part of its strategy has backfired. As of now, international sanctions on Russia have failed. Vladimir Putin's government is going strong, with ample popular support for his military campaign, whereas Western regimes are faltering and unable to find a convenient exit strategy from what is becoming a new long-term foreign policy disaster following their defeat in Afghanistan.

Your sacrifices for Ukraine

It is now clear that Western efforts to help Ukraine are the source of the cost of living crisis, having resulted in higher food and petrol costs. More accurately, this cost of living crisis is directly caused by our sanctions on Russia.

Rather than create a case for removing the sanctions on Russia, ministers (and also the "opposition") are instead trying to justify the cost of living crisis and lecture the public by saying to us that we want to sacrifice our money and welfare willingly for Ukraine (some sort of mind trick?) They are then proceeding to do this for us, without offering us any choice in the matter anyway. We have two major parties in Parliament who both want to do this.

False promises

Politicians have also managed to hoodwink their constituents into thinking this connection between our failing effort to save Ukraine and the agonising cost of living crisis doesn't matter or should be tolerated because there will be ways to mitigate the cost of living crisis. However, nobody actually has a plan to make this work.

Ukraine tires

Boris Johnson recently warned of "Ukraine fatigue", something also predicted at this blog, which deliberately uses the same language used with regard to public frustration with the Covid-19 pandemic and the policies associated with it. This is an appropriate term to use, being the subject of a post already at this blog.

As established earlier, Ukraine depends on us. However, that lifeline keeping Ukraine fighting is a flimsy thread that can suddenly snap once our people here in places like Britain get bored with the repetitive messaging and flag-waving. Increasingly, there is a recognition that time is on Russia's side, producing calls either for the West to escalate aggressively or tell Ukraine to surrender territory before the outcome looks too much like a Russian victory. "Ukraine fatigue" is not just inconvenient to Ukraine, it is fatal.

Ukraine faces South Vietnam's fate

Once the war is too old and intractable for people to be interested in maintaining it in the West, Western support for Ukraine will evaporate as quickly as Western support for South Vietnam or the Ghani regime in Afghanistan did. Both of them were buoyed by similar Western delusions and propaganda claiming they were feisty independent nations, when they were actually cardboard cut-outs sponsored by the US. Any suggestion that the Russians will give up first is absurd, since Ukraine's territory is in their heartland and is their business, on an indefinite basis. The West has once again propped up a regime in a region where it does not have the will to win, and the other side does.

In a way, accusing the other side of weaponising all sorts of things is itself an attempt to weaponise those things. By saying others are weaponising information, for example, as the Guardian does, you are basically turning information sources into targets for military action.

Or, you are telling people to close their ears to other sources and listen instead to you. You are taking the war to the information sphere and telling your audience to fight for you by only listening to you, thereby unnecessarily militarising and weaponising this sphere. You were the one who adopted the idea that making people hold specific beliefs is a military objective you want met, and declared this view publicly. Others may just have welcomed a healthy debate, with every point, from the most banal to the most diabolic, open for consideration. So, who really weaponised something?

Pandemic of censorship

In a 2020 exchange of ideas, the Mont Order information-sharing society agreed that “The way content related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been controlled is a potential gateway to increasingly aggressive censorship by Western governments”. This referred to the handling of medical disinformation, which can indeed be fatal, but later, disputed political information was increasingly being dealt with in the same way.

The Mont Order prediction seemed to come true later, when all dissenting sources on the Ukraine conflict were being treated as enemy operators rather than legitimate participants in a debate. Virtually every statement critical of the West and NATO was also suddenly treated as the statement of none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself. The accepted idea became that everyone must promote a single narrative on any controversial issue, and all dissent must be dealt with like enemy shellfire, and silenced immediately.

Attention given to the idea of Russia spreading propaganda, and a lack of grasp of what propaganda is (other than that it is enemy information and therefore bad), has likely made many people in the West incapable of spotting a lot of very obvious and shoddy propaganda from the West itself. The cliché that the other side only produces propaganda and its claims can all be dismissed (even if true) is a huge accomplishment in propaganda. Inconvenient information is to be dismissed without consideration and even any source dismissed as an enemy agent, regardless of where it is located or its prior reputation. Everything becomes ad hominem attacks and shooting the messenger (in Ukraine itself, that probably is happening literally).

Being right doesn't mean being correct

Control of all publicly-consumed information works well for winning information wars where the goal is to convince the people of something, but it does not create informed experts. It is not hard to guess that Western journalists and politicians are themselves consuming dubious information, confusing a sense of righteousness for accuracy (the word "right" being the same word used to describe things that are morally encouraged or factually correct is a source of confusion, maybe). A rational person, meanwhile, concedes that our own regimes and the small, narrow blob of familiar corporate sponsors in the West could be motivated to spread their own fakes and propaganda.

In some ways, the discouragement of anything contrary to the single supreme narrative on a given controversy makes the West every bit as vulnerable to mindless propaganda as the most totalitarian societies in history. At worst, it means the very foundations of our supposed Western civilisation are just fakes and falsehoods, devoid of substance. We do not enjoy liberty, and lack access to the truth.

Weaponisation of TikTokers and YouTubers

The Biden administration actually intervened to convince TikTok creators to help it convince users of its position on the fighting in Ukraine. To the US government, everything is a weapon, and its foreign policy goals need to be achieved using every ethical and unethical method it can find.

It can seem as if genuine grassroots voices are rising up to support Ukraine's apparently morally just cause on YouTube, unanimously siding with the West and the supposed universal decency it represents when it comes to conflicts. The reality, though, is that even this behaviour is explained more by these people's reliance on a single platform aligned with the West and the sanctions it uses to control content creators. Creators want to stay in good standing with the platform, and this has more to do with what they say than any genuine moral stance on anything.

The sanctioned point of view

If we focus on YouTube's weaponisation, it is not hard to notice that content (even from entertainers) praising Ukraine or NATO in the ongoing conflict in Europe retains its monetisation (ads still play), in addition to which pro-Ukraine ads are allowed all over the site itself, despite this cause being ethically dirty and politically aligned in a violent conflict (revenue is blocked for video content on other conflicts). This tells us two things. First, that YouTube's management are guided by agents of the US government when it comes to foreign policy (certainly, Google is). Second, that the users creating the content had some kind of advance knowledge of the measures in place to reward or punish people depending on what conclusions their videos endorsed regarding the Ukraine conflict. With such factors in force, how likely is a content creator to arrive at balanced conclusions on the war in Ukraine? Basically, they have been given financial incentives to promote a specific view in their videos.

Clearly, the same narrow group of people who have sway over Western regimes and are able to treat politicians to all kinds of carrots and sticks are doing the same with even small content creators online. Consequently, what appears to be mass support popping up for a cause is always more likely to just be financially motivated and originating from a very narrow source.

To display a Ukrainian flag at one's church, or on one's car or social media profile, is not an autonomous action by people. Nobody was really moved by what they saw in Ukraine or in any other foreign conflict, but by sanctions, i.e. a cycle of reward and punishment by the powerful, which is the basis of all Western policy and morality. The resulting activity supporting the state's policies is subtly state-controlled. One way or another, incentives are created by the state and influence operations take place, in an effort to weaponise everything and everyone to sanitise and prop up an otherwise dubious and dirty policy of inflaming a foreign conflict.

Turkey has too many grievances against Washington's foreign policy to just yield to American demands concerning NATO expansion in Scandinavia.

What we will see, as the US tries to overcome resistance from Turkey, is that the initiative to expand NATO does not at all come from Finland or Sweden’s leadership. It comes entirely from the regime in the United States, which always relied on what it calls influence operations and suitcases of cash to achieve its selfish foreign policy objectives.

Pushing NATO to the limit

Turkey essentially demands that its NATO allies stop supporting its foreign and domestic enemies, and is looking to get US sanctions reversed in exchange for its cooperation on NATO expansion. These are reasonable demands of an ally.

However, in the above link, where the demands are listed, American Iraq War lunatic Michael Rubin does an adequate job expressing how NATO heads will probably react to the defiance expressed by a member state. They will argue that Turkey should be expelled from NATO, for which there is no mechanism, and neither is there a mechanism that may override the veto right of Turkey.

Some NATO ideologues will probably say that Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan should be killed, as this reflects the kind of damaged and deranged ideation in American foreign policy now.

A more and more coercive NATO, in which the US government simply compels member states to obey it and serve its narrow foreign policy interests, is a NATO that could fall apart.

Is NATO dead?

The standoff could reveal that, far from being reinvigorated by Russia's actions in Ukraine, NATO is dead.

The lack of a mechanism to remove Turkey from NATO means that the NATO members will have to all become law-breakers and fail to follow their own founding document, if they want to cast Turkey out. If, alternatively, the US decides to place additional sanctions on Turkey, this will likely backfire and result in Turkey using its veto more regularly, as well as even more cooperation by the NATO member with Russia and China, making the alliance an increasingly meaningless dead weight.

What is happening suggests that NATO at least does not function very well for US foreign goals. This only raises the question as to why anyone would want to expand an alliance that is dead and simply retains the bulk of the members from a bygone political constellation in the Cold War. The current standoff makes a much better case for dissolving and replacing NATO than expanding it, even if one holds the aggressive American views that guide foreign policy in the North Atlantic Area now.

NATO and the EU could both be replaced by smaller blocs, with the EU also experiencing a similar impasse with Poland and Hungary and the ideologues similarly threatening expulsion.

Western media sources are trying to rattle Russians into thinking their country’s actions in Ukraine backfired and that they are in greater peril, owing to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

Some fans of Russia see a sudden Russian military offensive on Finland, like the attack deep into Ukraine in February, as a realistic possibility. Finland may well be much more vulnerable than Ukraine, as it has a much smaller military than Ukraine, although it boasts a better history of military success against Russia.

The Kremlin certainly is not happy about Finland joining NATO, saying an unspecified response will follow. Meanwhile, Sweden is a power in the Baltic Sea, but has already cooperated with the NATO powers and labelled Russia as hostile, and should have been expected to join sooner or later.

Russia should expect NATO in Finland

Finland has a small population and military, so the issue is more about NATO deploying to Finland than Finland joining NATO. Russia will have to target US forces in Finland, where it previously had no interest.

One can conclude that, far from being taken by surprise, Russia probably expected NATO to compensate elsewhere for the disappearance of Ukraine’s NATO membership prospects due to the Russian military presence in that country. That compensation is likely to now happen in Scandinavia, unless vetoed by NATO members such as Turkey.

Russians would be wrong to get too flustered about Finland joining NATO. One must remember that Finland was always tacitly aligned with the West. NATO and Finnish troops were likely under the mutual understanding that Finland would let Western forces use or pass through that territory during any conflict with Russia, even during the Cold War height of Finnish neutrality. Also, recall that Finland had no hesitation about even aligning with the Axis in World War Two to strike at Russia.

There is a certain peril to Russia associated with Finland’s entry to NATO, but it is solely a conventional military threat and a missile threat, perhaps mainly a threat that US military air power could be permanently based there. Finland’s population and military are likely to be too small to significantly threaten Russia, so Russian troops will be facing US and other NATO troops across that frontier. However, this is far less of a severe threat than what could arise in the much more populous Ukraine, so any claim that the Kremlin now has a bigger problem on its hands is just false.

Ukraine as NATO's 4GW base

Ukraine is highly populated, capable of enormous manpower. It was a viable springboard for fourth-generation warfare (4GW), which is the only reliable means of destroying targets in a nuclear-armed power's territory without provoking a direct conflict with it. Densely populated areas, zealous paramilitary formations practicing Syria-like hit and run tactics using pickup trucks, and sustained political extremism and grievances, all defined what was happening in Ukraine even before the Russian invasion. The war of 2014 to present created a threat in Ukraine that would have spilled over into Russian territory even if Russia did nothing. Supposing the West also funded mass protests within Russia with the aim of toppling Russian president Vladimir Putin, violence and insecurity could have spread across Russia, joined by people crossing over the border from Ukraine.

The Western strategy of creating security threats on the Russian periphery would eventually create conditions of civil war creeping into Russia like Syria, sufficient to destroy the Russian state but not obvious enough to trigger a retaliatory nuclear strike by Moscow. In fact, NATO would have used its current Ukraine pressure tactics to suppress Russia's ability to confront threats on its own territory at that stage, threatening intervention inside Russia if Putin uses chemical weapons, and all such claims that always arise under the NATO watch. What is being played out in Ukraine now is likely exactly what NATO intended to do inside Russia itself, sooner or later, all to the same applause of those who currently praise Ukraine. Putin's intervention likely pre-empted and forced the confrontation on Ukrainian territory rather than Russian territory, but even now there are Western officials expressing their support for the spill-over of the violence to Russian territory and US officials declaring that the violence is aimed to weaken Russia. If Western statements are not gaffes, then Russia's military action in Ukraine provides increased security for Russian people by keeping the confrontation as far outside Russia's borders and as far from Russian civilians as possible, which was also the Russian defence of their intervention in Syria. Such an action is, by definition, a success for the Russian soldier even if he is killed, if his task is to prevent Russian civilian deaths.

Finland as a quiet front

Finland isn't a place of great tension, extreme nationalism and unrest, like Ukraine. If Finland became a springboard to provoke Russia, it would be only a base for conventional warfare, and an ineffective one. As someone who walked in that part of Finland, I can tell you it is all densely wooded terrain in a sparsely populated wilderness, surely still unsuitable for conventional warfare as it was in the Winter War of 1940. Attacking forces would be constrained by the roads. As such, a war in Finland would be an almost entirely aerial and missile war, monitored by radar and missile troops and provoking mutual destruction if anything happened at all. Western attempts to undermine Russia have been desperately trying to dodge a direct military conflict and find unconventional forms of attack, such as those where local civilian hatreds and provocations can give rise to the murk of civil war, like in Syria from 2011 and Ukraine from 2014. Mere tourism-level numbers of Russians live in Finland compared to more than eight million in Ukraine, so Finland's internal affairs don't concern Russia.

On the Finnish frontier, following the country's accession to NATO, whichever side has aggressive intentions is going to either fail spectacularly to advance, or simply provoke everyone's destruction in a nuclear war, which means there will be no change in the calculus on either the Russian or NATO side. US nuclear missiles placed in Finland are a possibility, which will create an increased threat to the adjacent St Petersburg, but not much more than the existing Baltic NATO countries.

The possibility of US biological warfare facilities at the Russian border exists but does not require Finland's membership of NATO, if there is a determined US plan to introduce diseases into Russia as per Russian suspicions. It is hard to see how gaining a tenuous military hold on some forests in Finland at the expense of Russian soldiers' lives would provide much protection against such a threat, if it exists. A better move by Russia might simply be to create its own retaliatory biowarfare programs, as they developed their nuclear arsenal to counter the US.

Finnish cannon fodder for US wars

Finland reacted in a nervous and short-sighted way by deciding to join NATO and announcing it without debate. Its leaders underestimate the value of neutrality and the costs of NATO membership. They now risk selling their souls to a very dangerous neoconservative devil that still is in power in Washington and still believes the West’s destiny is to invade other continents to spread “democracy” and pacify hostile regimes.

Far from defending against Russian invaders, Finnish membership in NATO will most likely result in more Finnish troops dying in Middle Eastern countries invaded by the US in the future, and being deployed to Asia to confront China. NATO’s mission is being constantly expanded to a greater and more aggressive scope (“Global NATO”, as Liz Truss puts it), so there is no limit to what NATO may try to conquer next, with the increased cannon fodder and confidence it gets from the growing list of member states. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks to occur in Finland, as NATO countries all share the burdens, casualties, and inevitable consequences of the dream of Western conquest.

Pope Francis claimed that NATO "barking" at Russia’s frontier may be responsible for the ongoing war in Ukraine.

This will have led to rage from many, who believe that the only acceptable position on Ukraine is a one-sided condemnation of Russia.

Pope doesn't respect Western foreign policy

Interestingly, the Pope had previously seemed to align with NATO and Ukraine by kissing a Ukrainian flag. In reality, he was just trying to encourage peace, not giving his blessing to Ukraine's savage interethnic conflict of 2014 to present, to which Russia merely introduced itself as an apparently unwelcome belligerent in 2022.

While it may seem obvious that the Catholic Church is a Western organisation with commitments to a Western-led international order, shared by the supporters of NATO, this is not true. Pope Francis is not the Pope of white people, liberals or Westerners, but of the people in the slums of Argentina, whose views he is more likely to be receptive to.

Vatican staying above the fray

The Pope was trying to be neutral and not be seen as a participant in the conflict, as taking a side could undermine his international standing. We should bear in mind that the majority of practicing Catholics reside in the Southern Hemisphere, in developing countries, outside the exclusive zone of NATO political and military propaganda monopoly. For the Pope to align himself with NATO, against the better judgment of many Catholics, would be potentially damaging to the authority and credibility of the Vatican rather than any help to NATO.

At the same time, the Pope does not want to be seen as allying with Russia, since Russian troop presence in Ukraine is unauthorised by the United Nations. Russia violated the letter of the UN Charter by sending troops into Ukraine, albeit only as seriously as Turkey and the US are violating the Charter in Syria and hardly warranting the disproportionate, Russophobic Western response.

The Pope cannot be seen as an aggressive proponent of one side or the other, in a conflict in which Russia may expand with small territorial acquisitions and NATO is fully loyal to the bloody neoconservative dream of a new American century.

Pope Francis is right

The Pope is correct to accuse NATO of provoking the evil it supposedly wants to deliver us from. NATO is desperate to preserve itself as an organisation, therefore encouraging adversaries to be more aggressive so that people will be scared into believing they need NATO. NATO creates disaster by insensitively ignoring the security concerns of other powers, encroaching on them, declaring them ideological enemies, and declaring any subsequent response to be unprovoked and proof that the target began acting strangely.

NATO is worse than a barking dog. It yearns to create the threats it will shield us from. If neoconservative hawks did not have Russian and Chinese villains to talk about, they would only cook up some other villain. They might restart their so-called war on terror, combing the world again for the next imaginary or fantasy threat we can imagine to be menacing the fragile West.

Despite the UK presenting itself as the leading defender of Europe, Britain’s armoured vehicle production and repair is going to increasingly take place in Germany, as is shown by British interest in the “Eurotank” project as the means to get a new Main Battle Tank.

However impressive the Eurotank will be, interdependence with the continent we are meant to defend could be a major weakness. We already rely on the Germans to upgrade our panzers at their workshops, somehow managing to brag about it in the process.

We also aim to replace our Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) with Franco-German wheeled designs, rather than choosing to continue the history of unique and iconic British armoured vehicle designs. Bear in mind that the French and Germans were historic enemies of Britain, at different eras, and the current state of affairs is tantamount to British troops dressing in enemy uniforms.

Europe is no haven

From a historically savvy perspective, Britain growing reliant on German help with armoured vehicles is similar to defeat and demilitarisation at German hands, since no wise British leadership would ever have allowed the Germans or French to seize British military production capabilities and take them to their countries. Especially in a place as historically volatile as Europe, which is already undergoing significant disruption due to the Ukrainian conflict and could face an increasingly violent and destabilised future, which is historically normal for the Continent.

Europe, and Germany particularly, also have a strong historical tendency to instability and conflict that goes all the way back to the Thirty Years' War and perhaps earlier. European integration has been a fact for so little time that to think it is permanent is premature and immature. The advantage of Great Britain has always been its isolation from the contagion of European conflict, by the sea.

Even assuming the UK never returns to an era of tension with the Germans or French, it is still a fact that having our military production and repair facilities be in Germany potentially magnifies security and strategic problems, from espionage to the possibility of Germany itself being simply misgoverned and overrun with conflicts or political intrigue in the future. If things get bad in Europe, they could unnecessarily imperil British national security if we are reliant on sites there for defence production and repair.

UK arms production and repair capability being located in a non-nuclear country such as Germany is also problematic because it creates the possibility that our war production could be wiped out, without being protected by our nuclear deterrent. NATO does not necessarily protect Germany from all conflict scenarios, including nuclear ones, with the reliability that the British nuclear deterrent has.

The hollowness of Brexit

Britain’s disinterest in being an independent arms producer, and increased interest in partnering with the French and Germans instead, makes Brexit less significant, nay meaningless, in terms of turning the country into an independent strategic player. Moreover, it reveals that those in business and government who decide our priorities are merely resentful about the departure from the EU and want to do everything to offset any impact on our trajectory as a country.

British government and corporate elites have no real thought for national security. They don’t see our island as anything more than a shabby council estate that is to be left behind, to pursue their interests via the United States and the European Union or via supranational organisations like NATO. This may suit them, but it does not suit future generations who will emerge in a country that has no brand, no pride, and no security, being little more than a dump for foreign powers.

Hysterical responses to the Solomon Islands signing a security agreement with China reveal hypocrisy over the Ukraine crisis of 2014 and subsequent conflict of 2022.

NATO’s Secretary General stated that the defining struggle in the world has become one of big powers forcing smaller powers to serve their interests, or letting them choose their own path, arguing that the Western alliance group is firmly in favour of free choice.

The argument was clear: Russia was behaving very irregularly and violating national sovereignty, by expecting to have any say on hostile troop deployments into countries adjacent to it.

Nothing At All Treaty Organisation

Unfortunately for NATO, such firm principles for which the world's most powerful military alliance stood were inadvertently denounced and shown to be utter nonsense by NATO countries. As soon as the Solomon Islands chose to align with China on its own free will, the US issued warnings of unspecified consequences. Therefore, it became suddenly unacceptable for nations to align in any way against others.

The hypocrisy on display now proves that the attempt of NATO governments to stand and fight for any set of principles at all could not last much more than a couple of months. This powerful alliance is proved to not stand for anything, much as the US’s own ideology is confused and America immediately steps on its own commitments like rakes, as soon as it tries to lay them down.

Menaces to democracy

The Solomon Islands may have chosen to side with China entirely of its own free will. Ukraine, in contrast, only sought alignment with NATO and the EU after extensive interference in its internal affairs and a violent takeover supervised by Western officials in 2014.

The Solomon Islands is now to be portrayed as some sort of threat to democracy, merely by the fact it is inconvenient to the West (i.e. "democracy"). In reality, the country is a democracy threatened by coercive Western powers that clearly have no interest in the wishes of the people.

One would be wise to expect fake mass protests sponsored and led from US diplomatic buildings in the Solomon Islands, covered by all the cable news channels and praised by them. In addition, expect any scale of bribery and attempts to subvert the wishes of the people of that land, perhaps in the months or even weeks to come.

"Democracy" is meant to refer to a political system that derives legitimacy from the people, but the word usually gets used when talking of foreign conflicts. Those who talk of it will say the Western countries have a unique ethnicity, which makes them better than others.

Despite Ukraine's government banning all opposition, we are being told that Ukraine is a bastion in the fight for "democracy". As usual, Western countries teaming up to fight someone is usually the main reason to talk of "democracy", even if this is not applicable to the situation all. Someone looking for images of "democracy" won't find it hard to stumble upon scenes of explosions and dead bodies.

In the end, those who meet adoring crowds or talk of any need to serve the people are more likely to be labelled as dictators than democrats. The anonymous members of the American military and intelligence junta are presented as the men of democracy, regardless of whether they are elected or have anything to do with any democratic process at all.

Zones of freedom

The word "freedom" was used in artful equivocation by politicians such as George W. Bush during his invasion of Iraq in 2003. The conquered "zone of freedom" in fact meant an area free to be plundered and preyed on by American corporations, in keeping with the vaunted "free market" so loved by Americans. To the average listener, though, it may have suggested that the country would be freed from torture and oppression, when in fact the United States brought both to the Iraqi people. The term "zone of freedom" was also used for NATO expansion, which precipitated the current conflict in Ukraine.

The "democratic peace" theory died in Iraq in 2003, too, although its well-wishers continued to refuse to write its obituary and are now busy with Ukraine. When democracies were the ones attacking the others, and they were doing so for the very reason of their arrogant belief in their political system, it was clear that associating the democratic system with the establishment of peace was a mistake.

Democracy as a call to violence

"Democracy" is invoked almost always for the express purpose of rallying people to war, not peace. It is used to conjure up images of soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy, which, however heroic, is no image of peace. Those who plead for bringing what they call "democracy" to other lands are the most depraved warmongers of our time, even if they can successfully point to the atrocities of others.

The next time you hear a speech about "democracy", try to locate anything in the speech that offers any substantive commentary on the merits of a system of government by the people. Try to listen out for praise of the people and their wisdom, since they are meant to be the masters in the democratic system. You can almost certainly guarantee that such content will be absent, yet the word "democracy" shall keep appearing, because "democracy" is here being used only in the manner of a stupid idol with no useful properties. It is a mere word, brought forth to persuade and bring comfort to people who like to hear it.

Our countries in the West use "democracy" as false rhetoric. In practice, our governments subvert truly democratic causes and demands in favour of monopolistic power and deception. The "democratic peace" we seek is consequently false, and will never be realised. The West attacks the regimes it dislikes. Its so-called theory confuses a cloud of locusts with a rainbow of peace.

The recent mistaken launch of a missile from India into Pakistan could have had disastrous consequences, and so could a misunderstanding over Ukraine.

The longer the fighting goes on in Ukraine, the more likely it is that an incident will cause a direct exchange of fire between Russia and NATO. Ukraine and NATO's triumphalism, with additional calls mounting in the West for some sort of regime change in Moscow itself, is the reason there can be no reconciliation at the moment and the main reason people are dying.

NATO should offer something to de-escalate

NATO's perception that only the Ukrainians are in trouble, and that it can just support them as a kind of proxy, is false. NATO is too close to wage a proxy war there, and faces too much risk to itself. The longer this goes on, the more likely it is that NATO will be dragged in against its own judgment.

The demands of the Russians have not changed (they just want neutral territories on their borders, not NATO-aligned countries bristling with nuclear missiles), so the choice to use force is no more than the extension of their attempts to come to an understanding with what they see as a deaf and inflexible partner. If diplomacy begins to yield results that are more promising for Russia's security than Ukraine's ongoing loss of military capability and territory, the Russians are likely to eagerly suspend combat operations. This puts the burden squarely on the side of NATO to avoid escalation and just make enough concessions that would allow the conflict to freeze along a new contact line, but they seem to be incapable of this, blinded by a belief that Russia can be thoroughly defeated in Ukraine.

Rather than de-escalation, we see increasing calls for NATO involvement in the conflict in Ukraine. With a drone wandering over the border into the NATO zone from Ukraine, and the possibility of projectiles eventually landing inside NATO territory, like the mistaken launch from India into Pakistan, there is a serious risk of escalation.

An escalation would be more inconvenient to NATO than Russia, which is why their top leadership has been quite sure of the need to stay out. Politicians without any responsibility for the NATO response are making unwise and bullish suggestions about some moral duty to attack Russian troops, likely just to improve their standing with belligerent and jingoistic voters. Anyone whose words carry weight, and could actually result in NATO aircraft taking off to attack Russia, is quiet.

The war should be frozen

NATO enjoys significantly more security than Russia, with substantial buffer states in Eastern Europe that can, I am sorry to say, be sacrificed to protect the core NATO countries like France and Germany without turning the conflict nuclear. Russia, by comparison, has its back to the wall. If events reach a point at which nuclear weapons are exploding in Ukraine, this will present an existential threat to Russia that can only be matched by it launching nuclear strikes as far as Germany to push the threat away. The use of any NATO weaponry to target Russian territory will prompt Russian attacks on the US homeland and cause global nuclear war.

Despite attempts to portray Russia as the side that has engaged in reckless expansion, Russia's back is to the wall. NATO was safe throughout the entire Cold War, when the Russians were in the middle of Germany, and that was considered to be a nicely balanced situation. It seems that now, we are so expectant of total domination and so convinced of the idea that we "won" the Cold War, that we can't allow the Russians any kind of buffer and we have to have NATO troops parading in Moscow.

Unlike between India and Pakistan, there are real heated statements and even deranged and murderous calls appearing right now in relation to the standoff between NATO and Russia. A misread missile launch at this time could lead to nuclear bombardment, recreating the grotesque atomic horror of Hiroshima on a vastly larger scale.

The two sides should pursue every effort to freeze the conflict immediately, no matter how dissatisfying this may be to them, and go no further.

Former Bolivian president Evo Morales described NATO as something that should be eliminated, linking the alliance to imperialistic wars and the plundering of natural resources.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is popular, out of habit, among the more cohesive mass of simpletons whose votes settle the outcomes of elections in countries such as my own Great Britain. However, in fact, the US-led bloc is detrimental to the national interests of any country whose obligations lie elsewhere abroad and not in propping up America-centric strategies.

The Bushism and Neoconservatism of NATO

An increasingly immature and intellectually bankrupt attitude is guiding Western foreign policy, with leaders seemingly less and less familiar with the normal behaviour expected in diplomacy. There seems to be absolutely no appreciation of the complexity of other countries' foreign policy, as Western governments think in black and white terms. You are with them, or you are against them.

You are either supporting democracy, in which case you support all countries joining NATO or being forced to comply with the US government's policies (what Pakistan's Imran Khan called being their slaves), or you are siding with the dictators and the terrorists. One must collude with and enchain their nation to the American master, or they are to be condemned and their legitimacy somehow questioned.

The reign of the neoconservatives, who gave rise to George W. Bush's maxim, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists", overrides all Western foreign policy thought, rather than being rejected as it should have been when it led to the terrorist blowback problems in Afghanistan and Iraq. The NATO powers are increasingly obsessed by the idea that everyone must join them, and that there can be no neutrality anymore. Even Switzerland seems to have somehow been pressured into aborting its neutral status.

What is happening now poses an existential threat to the Global South. The US will demand that they all join NATO, whether officially or unofficially, aligning with the West. Those who do not ally with them will be deemed to be authoritarian despots - a qualification that is met solely if you do not support American military deployment on your territory.

The NATO of the South

The 120 countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) are all perpetual candidates for violent regime-change and chaos, as the US supported in Ukraine in 2014 in an action that ultimately led to the current conflict underway in that country. What the assassinated former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi called a "NATO of the South" was and is a necessity, because the non-aligned countries remain the most vulnerable to wars of aggression and regime-change attempts by the West.

Both Muammar Gaddafi and Hugo Chavez, the latter also being an advocate of South-South cooperation and mutual defence, perished under conditions that suggest the United States gave the orders for their deaths. If true, it is because, even without Russia and China, a cooperative Global South represents a potentially insurmountable military obstacle to the Western imperialism and parasitism against the sovereign natural resources of the colonised nations.

Yes, without being able to, metaphorically, suck the blood of the people of the Global South, the Global North and NATO are deprived of the raw materials that provide for their supreme military strength. They cannot have these countries outside their control and, in future, even nonalignment and pacifism in the oppressed South will be increasingly seen by NATO as hostile as the Western powers seek to enslave them as servants.

Pacifism is not the way. A good course for non-aligned countries is to build an intimidating network of defences to repel NATO attack, develop economic self-sufficiency to resist sanctions, and nationalise so as to return control of natural resources to the people.

Russia's military campaign in Ukraine, launched last month, could be the beginning of a long and bloody war. Being already seen as such, it has likely alienated many individuals in the West who formerly sided with Russia against a morally dubious Western foreign policy establishment.

One of the places where those opponents of the West's moral skeleton liked to gather, following the 2003 Iraq War which largely discredited the West as a positive moral agent in the world, was the now heavily censored and cyber-attacked RT (formerly Russia Today). There, such individuals appeared as viewers, journalists, and guests for many years to express their anti-war views.

The doves fly

For anyone watching RT during the opening of Russia's offensive into Ukraine in February 2022, it would be impossible not to notice the great unease of the English-speaking anchors during this Russian government-funded news network's live broadcasts. It is likely that such individuals were recruited in the first place because of their unease with Western foreign policy, which made them more likely to sympathise with and be willing to present Russia's position to English-speakers for many years. Russia's sudden decision to employ force will have changed everything, leaving many of them shaken and confused. Why did Russia apparently choose to rain its own bombs on a country, rather than foiling America's dubious schemes and rejecting its excuses, as had been the case in Syria? That will be burdening their consciences.

Many disbelieved that Russia was planning a major military escalation in Ukraine, holding the Kremlin's promises to the world as true. Those who had supported the Russian media against Western military actions, out of a principled rejection of military intervention everywhere, will find it difficult to maintain that support (see Max Keiser, formerly of the Keiser Report, as an example).

Did Russia make the right choice?

It may be that the Kremlin made a strategic mistake by trying to dominate Ukraine militarily (I concurred with the British government about this in January). We live in an era of failed foreign interventions by even the most technologically sophisticated countries, which is why many will anticipate a slow Russian defeat and withdrawal from Ukraine. Ukrainians are not incompetent or cowardly, having made up a significant portion of the most competent and brave soldiers of the former USSR, so it would be wrong for Russia to think they are easily cast aside.

On the other hand, the Kremlin may have not made a mistake in Ukraine at all. The twin objectives of "demilitarisation" and "denazification" may be impossible to achieve if pursued to total completion all across Ukraine (a scenario vulnerable to "mission creep"), but they can easily be accomplished to a point that Moscow no longer needs to worry. A battered Ukrainian military, pushed back to the west of Ukraine, left with no threatening hardware, can be guaranteed by Russia's brutal and overwhelming firepower. A number of Ukrainian radicals can be assassinated or captured to showcase "denazification". Following such steps, Russia could withdraw. They could also almost certainly defend a number of seized Ukrainian cities indefinitely and annex them formally or informally, managing over time to convince their largely Russian-friendly populations to welcome the change.

Whatever the case, Russia's leadership must have known they would lose much support in the West. The only conclusion can be that, faced with NATO expansion into Ukraine, Russian leaders felt that the problem was so severe and so strategically dangerous that it was worth huge sacrifices to overcome it. It was worth losing any remaining soft power Russia had in the West, in favour of applying hard power in Russia's near abroad. NATO was being intransigent, refusing to rule out nuclear missiles being placed in Ukraine to target Moscow, declaring Russia as its enemy and Ukraine as its frontline partner against Russia.

Anti-war? You are outgunned

Considering the obstruction faced by anyone sympathetic to Russian worries or just simply critical of Western policy in Western societies, it is not surprising that Russia would decide to throw them under the bus. They were never likely to accomplish any significant influence or power anyway. Russia's might still ultimately lies in its unrivalled missile power and vast force of armoured vehicles on its territory, so they decided to exert this power rather than something more subtle.

Those who based their interpretation of world events solely on morality, and were led to side with Russia or China for that reason and reject the interventionist US and NATO, were doomed to be disappointed. International relations is not a moral affair, unfortunately. There are no values, only interests. Sooner or later, any national government will assert its interests in the most brutal way, reminding us all of what a state really is.

Russia is neither good nor bad, and that's what is so shocking to those who used morality to guide their interpretation of international events. Likewise, the United States is neither good nor bad, although the case can certainly be made that it is incompetent and confused, and that has always been the chief complaint that seems to have the most merit.

People who are anti-war ultimately get pushed aside by those favouring force, if we are in a situation where force can work. This is because being anti-war is solely a personal philosophy, not an expression of anything necessarily aligned with the national interest. As long as there are national interests and diplomatic quarrels, force will be part of the spectrum, the continuation of politics by the steel gauntlet of those who have might, if mere talk failed.

Keir Starmer's punitive action against Young Labour for their opposition to NATO is an expression of the fear that this old Cold War military behemoth is steadily losing favour with the youth, and is doomed to the dustbin.

Bear in mind that this controversy arose while Russia carried out a military attack inside Ukraine, causing alarm among European governments.

Yes, despite Russia's actions, the view of those who believe NATO is detrimental to our security remained. And, in fact, many hold NATO to blame for all that has gone wrong in Ukraine.

Yes, NATO is the problem

Young Labour expressed the view that NATO has been involved in aggression, which likely refers to unilateral military intervention in the former Yugoslavia in 1999 as well as Libya in 2011. They threw their support behind the Stop the War Coalition, hoping for cooler heads and a more conciliatory approach to Russia.

Criticism of NATO is equally valid when it comes to the current Ukraine crisis, because NATO was trying to arm Ukraine against Russia - a move clearly in NATO's own strategic interest rather than the interest of the Ukrainian people.

Prior to Russia's attack, Ukraine's central government was involved in territorial disputes with Russia and an internal conflict with Russian-speaking rebels. The regime had increasingly presented anti-Russian sentiment as the core ideology and destiny of the country, and had made a threat to develop nuclear weapons.

Sanctions on you, too

The leadership of the Labour Party stepped in with sanctions-like measures against Young Labour by cutting off their funding, as if Young Labour was some organ of the Russian military. Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy actually accused Young Labour members of being lowbrow, referring them as "just out of university" and having that "knee jerk" anti-hegemony view held by such academics as Noam Chomsky. Yes, how immature.

If we go by what Lammy or Starmer say, it takes a special understanding, a high intellectual level, or perhaps impeccable moral judgment, to hold the Atlanticist view of NATO as the world's primary force for good. That, despite the fact it is also a view held by people who have only watched a few Hollywood movies or read some comic books rather than properly studied.

Of course, the only valid justification for Starmer's course of action is to preserve Labour's electability. The youth may have turned their backs on the neoconservative-encouraged Western militarism and moral certitude on every conflict, and this NATO-worship may eventually go in the dustbin, but it still has significant sway on normal voters in the UK. That, at least, has to be respected and taken into account by those seeking to win elections.

Russia's offensive all across Ukraine, in response to eight years of localised conflict in the Donbass region bordering Russia, is portrayed by the US and its Western allies as suddenly imperilling a previously reliable "international system".

If the thesis that Russia broke the international system is correct, it would mean other countries may engage in some sort of invasion next time, feeling there are no consequences.

Eight years of Western omissions and callousness on Donbass

Russia explained its actions as an attempt to force an end to eight years of conflict in the Donbass region of Ukraine, bordering Russia. They don't see their actions as the start of a war, but the closing stage of a war between large Ukraine and tiny Donbass. In the latest round of escalation in the region, they say, Ukrainian shells prompted mass evacuations onto Russian territory, and explosions reached Russian territory as the conflict inevitably spilled over their border. The Russians profess a desire to defeat and capture Ukrainian commanders and politicians, with an aim to prosecute them for war crimes over the course of eight years.

The Western perspective is, predictably, more simplistic. They say Russian President Vladimir Putin is personally driven by a desire to restore the Soviet Union, based on selective quotations, and is simply invading Ukraine to accomplish this. They omit all kinds of details. There is no word from them on the suffering of the Donbass region, or they dismiss the entire eight-year conflict there and huge death toll among ethnic Russian residents as Russia's own fault for sympathising with rebels at its border.

Russia's view of the intervention as legal

From the Russian perspective, they are not violating international law but are defending small countries they hastily recognised and signed defence pacts with in the Donbass region - the Lugansk People's Republic and Donetsk People's Republic. The Russians cite the UN Charter, which states that countries are entitled to self-defence and collective defence when attacked from outside. This is dubious, because the LPR and DPR are not member states of the UN, so they are not protected under the Charter. The Charter does seem to allow countries the right to collective defence of allies, though, so Russia likely is referring to this wording to justify its actions.

Could Russia be acting like America?

What we are witnessing is the Russian Federation's own version of NATO's Yugoslav intervention in 1999 and its ultimate revenge for those NATO actions against its Serbian allies. While I don't know enough to comment on military minutiae, it is similar to Yugoslavia: unilateral independence for breakaway territories, a huge campaign targeting the military of the alleged offending regime with the aim to disarm its forces, and an effort to apprehend and prosecute suspected war criminals.

The biggest violator of international law?

Back to the specific issue at hand: the US accusing Russia of being the ones who destroyed the international system and undermined international law.

US and Western bombings of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and other countries were major violations of international law, and the US got away without the level of censure Russia is receiving from US allies. Russia cannot be accused of stepping out line, if there is no line. Others were already badly out of line, so staying in line would be suicide for the Russians, especially as these violators venture ever closer to the Russian border. Turkey has a worse record than Russia for breaking international law, entering into the Syrian Civil War and also establishing military positions in Iraq. Its violations are basically identical to Russia's under international law, as are America's.

Russia's rejection of US censure over its intervention by pointing to US violations of international law may be dismissed as "whataboutism", but it is not. Whataboutism is invalid if is merely a sort of insult, and not part of a logical syllogism. In this case, there is a logical syllogism that justifies Russia's temporary dismissal of international law:

Premise 1: The international system depends on people following it (this fits with the US's own statements about Russia threatening the system by not following it), Premise 2: the US and its allies didn't follow international law, Conclusion: the US destroyed the international system

Russia's use of force is the direct result of the US dismissing international law during its own campaigns of conquest and encroachment, forcing others to dismiss it too if their interests are at risk.

Countries are being compelled to use force because since the end of the 1990s, the sole superpower, the US, imposed the law of the jungle (or the state of nature, according to Hobbes) on them with its own capriciousness. "Might makes right" is the idea they propagated, not democracy or the rule of law. If American forces could blow things up and kill people, they were allowed to.

International law has been destroyed by repeat violators, before. When the Axis powers refused to follow international law prior to the Second World War, the Allies were forced to disregard it as well, and invaded a number of countries without sanction under international law as they sought to defend themselves. Russian actions, if examined in isolation, violate international law, but they are a response to continuous violations by the US, who were increasingly interested in training and arming Ukraine on Russia's border.

Note that the sudden appeals to international law by Western countries mark a departure from previous rhetoric on the "rules-based order" - a term specifically devised to avoid following international law. The US has suddenly found itself on the right side of international law in this one case, but their original contributions to this crisis and many other crises consisted of their own violations of international law. The US and its allies have an arsenal of excuses that allow them to invade anyone or do anything they want (human rights, democracy, humanitarianism, doing the right thing etc.). As such, the Americans and their allies weakened the international system and they are at fault for it breaking down and the primacy of force returning as the way to solve major international disputes, which is likely to be seen a lot more in future.

Ukraine crisis was started by US illegal actions in 2014

What is an even better point is that the "democratic" Ukrainian government post-2014 is itself the result of a US violation of international law. In 2014, the United States interfered and directly assisted a coup in Ukraine's capital, Kiev, to steer the country away from Russia regardless of how the population felt. A large following of demonstrators effectively occupied and seized power in the capital, strong-arming the entire nation into following their narrow vision, which aligned just exactly with the US State Department.

Russia could argue that it is unilaterally enforcing international law by removing an illegitimate US-installed government, although this is a bad way to conduct oneself. The reality is that, sometimes, new regimes come to power by force (e.g. Iran's government in 1979 or Yemen's Houthi-dominated government in 2014) and nothing can or should be done.

As far as Russia is concerned, the US has already destroyed the international system as a result of its own interventions in other countries, which violated international law. Russia is still prepared to follow international law in most cases, frequently appealing to it as a series of absolutes from which one can't deviate and aligning with China on this. However, it now seems Russia is prepared to make exceptions to international law when US violations result in escalating violence on an area bordering with Russia.

Russia has defied Europe on a scale never before seen since the days of Josef Stalin. We are, without question, now moving into a new Cold War. How does Russia justify what the EU has described as "barbaric"?

Russia's national security leadership may have valid reasons to stage a premeditated intervention in Ukraine, but the action is legally dubious, if this means anything anymore. Russian leaders likely foresaw an increasingly heavily-equipped Ukrainian irregular faction such as the neofascist Azov Battalion (Western journalists reject their reported existence as disinformation despite it being a fact), and feared that they may infiltrate Russian territory in future years with their increasing stockpile of NATO-supplied weaponry. Russia chose to nip this threat in the bud with a huge military operation and fully secure its Western frontier against NATO, whose leaders were already labelling Russia as their adversary to be confronted, years before the Russian intervention.

Inaction or vacillation on Russia's part could have been disastrous. NATO weapons were being sent to Ukraine's anti-Russian regime in increasing quantities, curtailing the potential success of Russian military action. With groups like Azov not necessarily following government orders, and accumulating sophisticated equipment and training, it would have been plausible for such people to launch opportunistic terrorist attacks in Russia. We could have seen an unconventional military campaign coordinated secretly by NATO on Russian territory using these irregulars (in concert with foreign-organised protests against the Russian government), to bypass a nuclear standoff while destroying Russia. It is fortunate for Russia that the conflict is taking place inside Ukraine, instead, and that this army of irregulars is being killed off prematurely inside Ukraine.

Ending Nazism again

It is a shame that a lot of anti-Nazis in the West did not notice the return of literal, gun-toting Nazism to Ukraine, with its thousands of armed stormtroopers, and have failed to appreciate Russia destroying Nazism for the second time. Instead, we see convoluted and cerebral claims that Russia is instead somehow analogous to Nazi Germany itself, based on the mere fact that Russia has soldiers and is sending them into combat against those people.

The Ukrainian government is not neo-Nazi, but it wilfully presides over territory filled with them and their weapons, and that makes Ukraine Russia's business.

To Russians: I assure you that some of us in Britain have not been brainwashed by false captions and lies from our government, but we instead still believe in the alliance of 1941-45. We appreciate Russia saving Europe from this Nazi scourge for the second time, and hope for their crushing and prompt defeat.

Russia's lesser evil

The haste with which everything happened, event after event, suggests that Russia had all of it planned or at least was creating contingencies with great enthusiasm (the law of the instrument), and that the recognition of the republics (DPR and LPR) as states is itself just part of a military strategy. The side that has been caught unprepared is Ukraine, which evidently just expected the eight-year war in Donbass to continue its slow creep even despite Western warnings that Russia would attack.

The West made the situation very bad for Ukraine. They seemed to be idiotic in their handling of intelligence by telegraphing their own actions in the press (timelines of equipping Ukraine, types and quantities of missiles, and the fact they were espying the Russian military build-up) to Russia, meanwhile failing to convince Ukraine of the imminent attack it foresaw. These idiots telegraphed how they expected Russia to attack, likely allowing it to adjust its attack plan. Many disbelieved the West, myself included, seeing all kinds of holes in what they were saying, because of their thorough record of lying while quoting intelligence officers, such as in the 2003 Iraq War. It is likely that the only beneficiary of the hysterical coverage was, in the end, the Russian military.

The main moral difference between Russia's intervention and the US and NATO interventions in various countries is that this conflict zone was close to Russia, and many of those suffering in the crisis area were Russian civilians, whether holding Russian citizenship or not. If the US or UK were in a similar position to Russia's position with Donbass, military intervention against the neighbouring country would be treated as righteous. The normal anti-war criticisms, decrying the government for bombing distant countries to capture oil and failing to bring stability, would be muted because the target country is not distant and the goal is clearly not oil. In addition, Ukraine was already highly unstable due to the US action supporting a violent takeover in 2014.

Arming freedom fighters in Ukraine

NATO's policy toward the crisis in Ukraine is erratic and reactive, and Russia has taken the initiative. The most popular view among Western leaders now seems to be to equip the Ukrainians with weapons, similarly to the effort to arm militants in Syria against Bashar al-Assad, which was essentially a failure and is probably less viable in Ukraine. Comparisons are made to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which the US reacted to by arming militants with Stinger missiles over a long period of time. It is doubtful that this comparison holds. The Russian military is not the Soviet military, being now highly specialised in countering insurgents in Syria. Russia likely has no fear of NATO-equipped militants, because it is already facing them in Syria and expects to face them in any case, whether in the Caucasus or elsewhere. From Russia's point of view, defeating such militants is to be pursued eagerly rather than avoiding them.

What is happening in Ukraine is a conventional war that will likely succeed in subjugating the country, if Russia wants to do that. If NATO wanted to preserve a place for Western influence in Ukraine, it would need to send tanks across the border into the western regions of the country immediately, to provide safe haven for those afraid of pro-Russian reprisals in the aftermath of this conflict. However, most likely, they will instead cling to neoconservative fantasies about aiding freedom fighters and repeating the 1980s struggle in Europe.

In a European country, a forced and inapplicable strategy of armed civilian resistance will only claim civilian lives and alienate people. Ukraine is not tribal. Treating it like Afghanistan will only amount to terrorism, prolonging suffering and death among those who want a decent life, ultimately turning the peaceful population against those staging attacks, in revulsion. Afghans are used to war and hardship, but the more important observation is that they have no choice. Even if we literally transferred all the Taliban to Ukraine, they would flee into the EU rather than wage a brutal insurgency. People's predicament in Afghanistan is due to geographic and cultural isolation, and this doesn't apply in Ukraine. Ukrainians won't resist like the Afghans, even under an occupation. Europeans will welcome refugees with open arms, and they won't volunteer to go back and shoot up their own villages or stage car bombings outside schools.

I believe that if the Afghan resistance model failed in Syria, it has no hope of success in Ukraine. However, if it does succeed, that insurgency will spread all over Europe, with car bombs and assassinations becoming a normal form of politics in European capitals, just as the Afghan wars resulted in such regional instability and terror.

The sum of NATO's arrogance and incompetence

What we have is the combined problem of a West that is too arrogant to follow international law consistently, and now this same West is weak and facing defeat in all its foreign policy gambits. To actually be the guarantor of international peace and security, a country has to both follow its own rules and display some success. The US has failed on both counts, spreading misery and violating international law for decades (my own main reason for distrust of the United States foreign policy), and now becoming craven and trying to use third countries to fight dubious battles, now goading pro-Western Ukrainians to get themselves killed.

Comprised mainly of two parts, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, Bosnia is an irregularity on the map of Europe.

The beautiful Balkan region has long been unstable, with Sarajevo being the flashpoint where the First World War began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and with attempts to create multi-ethnic states consistently ending in failure there. With the massacres of the Bosnian Genocide, it is a land filled with grudges.

A history of disintegration

The "clash of civilisations" theory of Samuel P. Huntington would hold that the former Yugoslavia is always potentially conflict-ridden because it has seen the competing presence of Catholic, Islamic and Greek Orthodox civilisation. The theory may be too simplistic, but the region is indeed a hotspot of historical grievances.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire failed, Yugoslavia failed, and what exists there now has no particular guarantee against failing again. As geopolitical tensions rise, especially between NATO and Russia in Europe, lines are being drawn again in Bosnia.

Battle lines drawn

Republika Srpska is turning away from the central government in Bosnia and is seeking an imminent breakup. It is being equipped with weaponry from Russia and China, in anticipation of the breakdown of the international liberal order that is now openly challenged. Meanwhile, the Western-allied component that rules from Sarajevo seeks NATO membership. If conflicts heat up around the world once again, there may be no avoiding a war of further disintegration in Bosnia.

The position of the central government in Sarajevo is, of course, fundamentally hypocritical. Their country unilaterally seceded from Yugoslavia, and yet now they declare that there may be no secession from their authority by Serbs. There is no moral justification for supporting Bosnian separatism and rejecting Serb separatism.

In the event of a renewed conflict, there is no denying the inferior strategic position of the Serbs. They are cut off from their natural allies, the Russians, just as they were in the First World War, and enveloped by the NATO powers. However, the Serbs have been swallowed by many empires before, and have proven to be a bellyache to them. They were no gift to the Ottomans, to the Austrians or to the Nazis, and Western-allied Europe would be foolish to volunteer to go through the same symptoms.

Rather than defeat anything during the so-called war on terror, the United States instead caused a proliferation of threats. Despite having lost, it decided to restart Cold War tension in Europe and Asia.

Under such circumstances, the possibilities available to undefeated terrorist groups are almost infinite. While it is a good thing that local forces may now be entrusted to defend their own interests against terrorists without Western intervention, international terrorist groups may quickly gain the ability to inflict disaster on the new Cold War belligerents while their backs are turned.

End of Days

We have no idea how groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda view the developing Cold War between People's Republic of China and Russian Federation on one side, and the United States and European Union on the other. However, most likely, they view it as a chance for respite and an opportunity to plan new attacks.

By far the worst possibility is an apocalyptic one. Terrorist interlopers could infiltrate the battlegrounds of this new Cold War and stage operations aiming to draw the superpowers into destroying one another in a nuclear escalation, threatening everyone on the planet in the process. Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are considered to be irrational actors in international relations, so they may believe this is a doable and beneficial operation for them. Even if they understand the consequences, ISIS or al-Qaeda leaders could decide they will bring about the end of days.

The Russian front

One policy that could present an opportunity for ISIS is the expansion of NATO across Eastern Europe, potentially up to the Russian border. This presents a region where militant anti-Russian sentiment in countries such as Ukraine results in a willingness to accept help from anyone, including potential international terrorists, in an effort to confront what they see as the Russian threat. They want to join NATO, but an anti-Russian ISIS or al-Qaeda fighter or a neo-Nazi is just as much of an attractive ally for them and they are delighted with them all.

Imagine a day of tension along a huge, thousand-mile frontier between NATO and the Moscow-led CSTO alliance. That is what the frontier would be like, if Ukraine joined NATO. Somewhere - anywhere - along that broad front, is an ISIS cell in possession of a small armed drone they put together in cooperation with anti-Russian fighters in Ukraine. Their intention, against the wishes of the Ukrainian government and NATO, is to attack the Russians with it, and provoke an incident. The Western side is too naïve to have imagined the scenario, and the Russians are too focused on the massive NATO threat to see the subsequent explosion as anything other than the opening of a NATO attack on the local Russian nuclear forces based in the area. Without any delay, the Russians launch tactical nuclear weapons at assigned targets inside NATO Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland, fearful that any delay may give the West a chance to neutralise these weapons. Every subsequent escalation would then be a loss to the West and East, and yet a victory for ISIS who secretly started it.

Avoiding the premature end of the world

The solution to the above scenario would be for NATO to step back from the Russian frontier, agreeing to a demilitarised zone (DMZ) of buffer states or regions between the two sides, since this would avert a situation of continuous tension and distrust along a thousand-mile frontline. To agree to such a DMZ, NATO would have to realise that a tense frontier simply takes power away from political leaders, decreases security for all, and possibly empowers third parties and low-ranking officers with the ability to start a war neither side wants. As well as giving ISIS or al-Qaeda the ability to start World War Three, a NATO-Russia frontline could even give solitary lunatics this ability if they shoot over the border between the two sides.

The delusion that one can simply abdicate from an existing war without winning it, and declare a different war, is extremely perilous. On the one hand, it suggests that Western politicians exaggerated the terrorist threat over a period of twenty years. Perhaps they don't really take it as seriously as they said they did, seeing it just fine to forget about it without even having accomplished anything nearly like a victory, but rather a defeat in Afghanistan. On the other hand, it may signal a false belief that a mortal enemy was defeated when it wasn't. A US decision to take the fight to Russia and China, when ISIS is still out there looking for opportunities to destroy both sides, may well be as idiotic as the West hypothetically deciding to focus all their resources against the Soviets before the Nazis had been defeated.

No cooperation on terror threats

Finally, even discounting the above scenarios as unrealistic, which they might be, the new Cold War potentially eliminates all possibilities of cooperation against international terrorism. The Russians and Chinese, and possibly the Turks (because the West is so much against them too) refusing to cooperate on terrorism could be fatal to the West. It could result in Europe being abruptly flooded with tens of thousands of armed militants keen to take the battle into Westerners' living rooms, high on victory in Afghanistan.

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