April 3, 2024 - 10:30am
Speaking in the city of Grodno near the infamous Suwałki Gap at the Polish-Lithuanian border on Tuesday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko did little to dispel the region’s fearful reputation as a likely flare-up point for a conflict between Nato and Russia. “We are preparing for war,” Lukashenko warned. “Don’t believe anyone that we want to fight. If you want peace, prepare for war.”
These preparations, including the training of military units and supply of weaponry and equipment to the armed forces, echo steps already being taken by many Nato countries. Most notable of these is Belarus’s neighbour Poland, which has invested enormously into defence and war-readiness since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Lukashenko’s rhetoric, meanwhile, is strikingly similar to that of Nato leaders. Just days earlier, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk had starkly raised the spectre of a coming war, telling European media that we must now accept we live in “the pre-war era”.
Such warnings, from both sides of the East-West divide, have been construed by some as risible attempts by desperate politicians to whip up fear in order to justify continued spending on the Ukraine war. This is one way to interpret the statement, given in a press conference last week by Czech President Petr Pavel along with security chiefs, that his country faces its most serious security threat since the Second World War. Whether or not such claims are true, they are by now becoming clichéd and prompt little public reaction.
A few weeks earlier, though, the Chief of Staff of the Czech Army sparked a national debate by raising the possibility of reintroducing military service, which was abolished in 2004. In another example of war being treated as inevitable, he said that due to the Russian threat, “some form of military service, whether compulsory or voluntary,” will need to be considered by the Czech government.
The normalisation of such fatalist war rhetoric from all quarters — implying that conflict between Nato and Russia is not just possible but likely — should be taken seriously. It matters little whether Western leaders prophesying conflict are motivated by Churchillian aspirations or pettier political concerns. A nihilistic attitude to the opposition of East and West — and a seeming indifference to exploring ways to take the world off this collision course — is already having destructive diplomatic consequences, even between the oldest of allies.
In March, the Czech government froze meetings with the new Slovakian administration led by “pro-Russian” Prime Minister Robert Fico, after Slovakia’s Foreign Minister met with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov at a conference in Turkey. “We do not consider it appropriate,” explained Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, “to hold intergovernmental consultations with the government of the Slovak Republic in the coming weeks or months. It is impossible to hide that there are significant differences of opinion on key foreign policy topics.”
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SubscribeThe author makes the essential point and makes it well.
My one question is what is driving this madness. Is it the same sort of mind virus that gave us such recent wonders as mask mandates and vaxx mandates? Or is there a deeper social malaise at play? Or is it simply lazy, cowardly choices by politicians unfit to be statesmen?
I really think that the madness derives from politicians craving attention and wanting to tell other people what to do. Going to war satisfies both at an epic level.
Digital communications have destroyed the control that the political establishment used to wield through a compliant media. Perhaps the warmongering is a reaction to that?
Lazy and cowardly politicians are part of this, but this has been long coming. This new cold war didn’t start in March 2022 – it has been long cultivated by our generally Russophobic Establishment, many components of which were happy to keep the post Cold War I scares alive to justify their continued salaries and positions.
More recently it’s been nailed down by a decade of quite astonishing propaganda that has seen Russia blamed for almost every reversal suffered by our betters – from the failure to replace the Syrian government with a load of head-choppers, to Brexit, power-outages, computer viruses, strange collapses in Salisbury parks and, most notoriously the alleged election of a Kremlin asset to the POTUS.
Any attempt at all to extend any kind of strategic empathy to the Russians or even moderately challenge some of the narratives is met with smears of useful idiocy and apologia (see for example the reaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s statement in the Commons that we might like to wait for a proper investigation into the Salisbury Poisonings before jumping to conclusions – the ‘Public’ Inquiry is delayed, but ongoing btw).
In this context it would be a brave politician indeed to attempt the kind fo negotiations we need now – and there are never that many of them around in the first place.
It does make one wonder whether the Cold War was necessary.
The Soviet Union had been utterly devastated during WW2 and whilst having “won” had suffered 20 million dead. The prospect of it ” taking” Western Europe seems unlikely.
Probably Germany should have been re-unified in the early 1950s as a prosperous neutral state like Austria.
Not so much a malaise as normal human behaviour going back to prehistory.
We hope that those involved will gather their feeble capacity for reason to prevent the war, there is no guarantee.
Also the memories of the horrors of WW1 and 2 have faded.
Interesting to note that the horrors of WW1 were fresh in the minds of statesmen at the end of WW1 and their attempt to build a postwar ‘rules bound international order’ failed miserably.
We might concede that it is already too late to avoid a war in Europe, perhaps Asia as well. The questions are when will the explosion happen and how bad will it get?
If both West and East continue to turn their backs on diplomacy and debate, Tusk’s words about living in a “pre-war” period may turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Nothing new from the author. Self-flagellation of the West is the common place today, either we see that on the left or on the right.
The West has set the bar high with its ideals of liberty and democracy. Those who criticise its failings judge it by those high standards.
If it’s not a sarcasm, I’ve never heard anything more pompous.
Doing that while comparing the West to brutal dictatorships isn’t right. Israel is getting the same double standard vis a vis Hamas and Iran.
“The US has too many people in prison” is not a fair retort to criticism of China’s concentration camps holding millions of Uighers, just as a the fact that Israel has killed civilians as collateral damage to military action is not a fair retort to criticism of Hamas’ intentional rape murder and torture. It’s a feeble as trying to white wash the Holocaust and Japan’s genocidal behavior in Asia by citing Allied bombings that killed civilians.
Holding the West to higher standards is too often used to portray us as the bad guys, and excuse the behavior of sundry thugs and dictators.
Tusk has always been a little bit hysterical.
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In her recent history of the British Empire, Caroline Elkins presents the argument that the League of Nations came about after The Great War because the European political class had been exposed as not the leaders of, but rather followers of their jingoistic and exitable tribes. Hence ,the matter of war and peace needed to be codified and trusted to the legal profession instead. I sometimes wonder if we are witnessing a return to this era
Jingoistic etc media ,and politocians such as Lloyd Feorge. What popular longing for war was there? Seems an odd argument.
It is a thought worth exploring. I think politicians turning their backs to diplomacy as we see now is a case of abdicating their responsibility, and from where can the pressure they feel to do so come from?
Brendan Simms makes a very similar case in his “Europe, the Struggle for Supremacy 1453 to the Present” where he presents political revolutions and regime changes as mainly driven by popular protests against perceived or real failures in foreign policy when it came to advancing the nation interests abroad, upholding the honour and prestige, keeping up in the armaments races, militarisation etc.
Lloyd George changed his position radically, btw, when he got into a position of power, something that may also be seen as support for the observation
That worked out well then!
problem is they put the politicians in charge of the League and it’s successor the UN, so nothing actually changed
I am wary about taking Caroline Elkins too seriously. A rather more likely explanation is that the League was an attempt to rebuild, and improve upon, the Concert of Europe. The Concert was established at the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It would be hard to say that Metternich, Tsar Alexander, etc saw themselves as the helpless prisoners of their “excitable tribes”.
This is worth a peek: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE200/PE226/RAND_PE226.pdf
A rather unconvincing argument by Caroline Elkins. The monarchs and political classes were actually terrified of being eliminated by the ‘excitable tribes.’ They feared the Russian Revolution of 1917 would spread into Western Europe, as intended. Surely, the Communist call for International Revolution was the very antithesis of jingoism? Further, in Britain at least, women over 21 did not get voting equality with men until 1928. Hence, the start of equality in democratic participation and well after the date of the creation of the League of Nations.
Note, the Czech President ex. NATO general is an ex Kommunist general in the Czechoslovak Armee.
Western politicians with their moral scripture of the Second World War are living with the ghost of a predator, as zoologists would describe it.
Beavers have been reintroduced into the UK. They continue to build defensive structures as if their predators, such as wolves, still live alongside them. If they could think, they would stop building such things.
Likewise, Western politicians live with the ghosts of the predatory Third Reich. Now that any dissent is turning people into maniacs, any dissent from allies over Russia and its new ‘Hitler’ is also becoming a mania.
Living with such ‘ghosts’ means the world must be pre-war.
This article feels like arguments I remember from years past, holding that it was solely the responsibility of the West to find the formula for defanging brutal dictators to the East. Does the author see Putin as a misguided soul who will do right when Western diplomats utter some magic words? Putin has clearly articulated his vision for Russia. What is wrong with believing him and preparing for his next actions?
I think the Poles may soon be more worried about a second wave of Ukrainian refugees forced Westwards by the Russians systematic progression of their destruction of the Ukrainian energy system. Also the likelihood of ‘civil’ unrest in the more Westerly parts of Ukraine where Eastern refugees appear to be fleeing from the black-outs and other chaos that comes from the kind of damage the RF are inflicting. it isn’t just black-outs that make places uninhabitable, it’s the massive power-surges that follow the Ukrainians attempting to keep things even minimally functioning. These surges may make their way deep into Poland and Romania too.
If you don’t already, check out John Helmer’s analysis of the Russian’s possible intentions here. The Russians have spent over a year targeting and atriting the Ukrainian power transmission system and are now targeting generation. Most of the Ukrainian electrical power system uses 330V infrastructure, something that only the Russians produce nowadays. The cost to replace this with anything else would be astronomical and there’s no indication that VDL aside, the EU would be up for footing the bill.
https://johnhelmer.org/how-the-electric-war-is-redrawing-the-ukraine-map-in-black/
Every few years, our tribal lords convene in a distant city to strategize on distracting or deceiving us, (remember the pandemic so long ago!) ensuring that when reality strikes, we’re (the serfs) incapacitated, unable to rise and question them. We will be in a position of accepting any red meats thrown at us.
The bluster about tribal affiliations, NATO, or Putin is, in truth, to lay the groundwork for an economic juggernaut unlike anything we’ve witnessed in our lifetime – AI (show me one decent article about AI and labour – just one – they are not allowed to print because guess who owns the sites?). The discussions of wars and conflicts are precisely aimed at finding ways to amend laws (recall all the rule-based discourse etc), leading us to consent unwittingly to our own downfall by creating a survival environment.
I do not want to be too ambiguous but the next governance is to get rid of governments all and have billionaires become the de facto government – removing the middle man (govt) by having wars with machines already own by the billionaires. We are stupid enough to think our votes mean something but we are late to the party – the governments no longer own weapons of mass destruction! Individuals do!
I admit, I sound cynical, but I challenge you to prove me wrong.
Do not be entertained by me. Just keep making same arguments that is music to their ears!
So your future is like robots fighting robots, all owned by billionaires, that have disposed of the government just so they can have a big robot fight with each other? That’s sounds mighty challenging to prove wrong.
Just the facts that billionaires might have better things to do, if there is a big war with China you are looking at the single biggest business disruption the world has ever seen and the sh*t you need to make those robots will not be on the way because shipping will be f***ed. The battery stuff all comes from there too, so they would have to be wind up, not electric. We aren’t good at making bullets or munitions either apparently so you might find your war shorter than you imagine.
What does creating a ‘survival environment’ we are ‘unwittingly consenting’ to, have to do with introducing AI?
‘Such a reaction to “significant differences of opinion” among allies — throwing one’s toys out of the pram and refusing to engage — is indicative of a political climate that’s dangerously hostile to negotiation or compromise.’
WHY do we have the UN for diplomacy and negotiation if it can’t do it’s job? I’m sure it’s their job to prevent a global conflict. Actually one of the reasons for it’s very existence.
‘ As World War II was about to end in 1945, nations were in ruins, and the world wanted peace. Representatives of 50 countries gathered at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, California from 25 April to 26 June 1945. For the next two months, they proceeded to draft and then sign the UN Charter, which created a new international organization, the United Nations, which, it was hoped, would prevent another world war like the one they had just lived through. ‘
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/history-of-the-un#:~:text=Four months after the San,a majority of other signatories.
What are they doing and how much is it costing us for them not to do their job.
How many people are we paying to be diplomats that can’t even do diplomacy.