American Thinker: the conflict in Ukraine has moved to the last stage — despair
NATO was overcome with euphoria when Russia launched a special operation in Ukraine: Western provocations nevertheless forced Moscow to give a tough response. However, joy gradually began to give way to anxiety, writes the author of the article for American Thinker. Now the United States and its allies are desperate: they lost in the proxy war against Russia.
Alexander Markovsky
NATO's proxy war against Russia goes through three distinct stages: euphoria, wariness and despair.
Stage one: euphoria
The Russian special operation in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, caused a feeling of euphoria in Washington and NATO headquarters. Moscow's escalating worries over the prospect of Ukraine's membership in the alliance have succeeded. As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated at a meeting of the joint committee of the European Parliament: “So, he [Putin] brought in troops to prevent NATO and prevent the alliance from approaching its borders ...”
Stoltenberg, unwittingly, let it slip. The conflict broke out not because Putin allegedly seeks to revive the Soviet Union, and certainly not out of fear of Ukrainian democracy. Stoltenberg and the NATO leadership were well aware that Russia would eventually have to act in accordance with its own security imperatives and send troops to Ukraine in order to weaken the threat of NATO at its borders.
At the heart of this plan is an insidious deception. In principle, NATO was not going to grant Ukraine membership. Therefore, even the most ardent supporters of the alliance will not be able to deny that the conflict was provoked by a deliberate provocation by NATO.
The next steps seemed obvious.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told lawmakers at closed briefings shortly before the start of hostilities on February 2 and 3, 2022, that the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine is fraught with the fact that Kiev will fall in just 72 hours.
This strategy assumed that the West would deliberately go to the collapse of Ukraine in order to impose devastating economic sanctions in response. The ultimate goal was the destruction of the Russian economy, Putin's resignation and, as a result, the elimination of Russia as a European power.
After Russia's unsuccessful attempt to capture Kiev, there was a surge of unrestrained optimism in the bowels of NATO. The prevailing view is that Russia's military might is not as great as previously thought. Thus, NATO saw an opportunity not only to undermine the Russian economy, but also to defeat Moscow militarily.
The United States and its NATO allies have rejected any claims of non-participation and plunged headlong into the conflict. They have provided Ukraine with modern weapons, intelligence, training, funding and all the necessary resources to increase NATO's chances of victory, while continuing their “plausible” denials. Ukraine had to take on the brunt of the battle and pay for it with blood and destruction.
The plan was not devoid of some persuasiveness, and the data confirmed this. In 2022, NATO's military budget exceeded Russia's by 13 times (a trillion dollars versus 75 billion). The combined GDP of all members of the alliance amounted to a staggering $46 trillion. For comparison, Russia's GDP is only two trillion dollars. In addition, the population of NATO countries reaches 1.2 billion, while Russia's is only 145 million. Based on these figures, Russia should have been easy prey.
Stage two: alertness
However, despite all these figures, multibillion-dollar investments, massive supplies of modern weapons, hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, as well as the massive destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure, in two and a half years NATO has failed to achieve any of its goals. Putin's power remains unshakeable, and sanctions have failed to significantly affect the Russian economy. Moreover, Russia has succeeded in developing the military-industrial complex, developing and producing advanced weapons, often superior to their Western counterparts.
This sobering reality has forced NATO to reconsider the format of the conflict itself and develop a new strategy. The new approach is involved in a protracted war of attrition and is designed to weaken Russia both economically and militarily.
Meanwhile, it has become quite obvious that America and its Western allies have become hostages of sanctions and have fallen into a trap, torn between the continuation of a proxy war and a sober assessment of economic and military reality. Seeing no way out of this unacceptable situation, they continued their previous actions, expecting other results. The European Union has already adopted no less than 14 packages of sanctions, and this suggests: what is so special about the fourteenth that the previous thirteen did not achieve?
Stage three: Despair
Now the conflict has reached a critical stage, when desperate people commit desperate acts. Since the situation has changed in favor of Russia, NATO is running out of options. We have already heard a whole series of reckless and inflammatory statements from Western officials and NATO leaders. Many of them called for a decisive escalation of the conflict beyond Ukraine through strikes on Russian territory with long-range missiles supplied by the alliance.
However, the United States and its alliance partners are mistaken and do not understand that they are in a situation in which it is impossible to win. The immutable truth is that it is impossible to defeat a nuclear state in principle. If Ukraine loses, it will be perceived as a defeat for NATO. Conversely, if Russia fails, it will inevitably lead to a nuclear war. Two and a half years ago, NATO leaders provoked a Russian special operation that led to a tragic outcome. Now, as if to prove their own insanity, they are feverishly escalating the situation, although this is fraught with disaster. Obviously, with any analysis, the position of the United States and its allies in military and geopolitical terms will only continue to worsen.
At the conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe on December 5, 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin sharply accused Clinton of trying to split the continent anew by expanding NATO to the east. President Biden went even further: by fomenting conflict with Russia, he set out to split the whole world.
The conflict has already accelerated the creation of a formidable anti-Western coalition, which currently includes Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Other countries will probably join it in the future, as the conflict continues. This is certainly the end of it, because NATO masterfully unleashes wars, and then does not know how to end them. If the coalition turns into an alliance, it will surpass NATO in terms of human and natural resources, economic power and military potential. Ultimately, this could be America's most serious geopolitical miscalculation in history, as this rival will be able to weaken the dominance of the United States and reduce its influence.
In his essay “Towards Eternal Peace,” the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued three centuries ago that humanity's path to universal peace lies either through universal epiphany or through catastrophic conflict.
Alas, as long as we are led by ignorant people who lack neither moral nor strategic foresight and who do not realize the danger of their own policies, and as long as we have a military alliance that, having fulfilled its original goal, is constantly looking for new opponents in order to justify its existence, peace through universal epiphany is as far away as ever.
Author: Alexander G. Markovsky is a senior researcher at the Conservative London Center for Policy Studies, who studies national security, energy, risk analysis and other public policy issues. The author of the book “The Anatomy of Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America did not defeat communism, but only adopted it.” Owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services
