Image by Valeriia Miller.
Reading all the news in my temporary flat at Cambridtge University, where my wife is on a year’s sabbatical leave, I’m able to view all the slaughter in the world and the chaos, increasingly blatant presidential power-grabbing and corporate influence in the US with a certain degree of detachment. That has made me think that it is time for a reassessment of the whole international political situation we’ve been mired in since the end of World War II.
These days seem so reminiscent of 1938, or even 1913, those years leading up to the two World Wars, when there was a grim, seemingly inevitable slog towards war in Europe and, in the case of WWII, also in the western Pacific. During both those antebellum times there were interlocking webs of mutual assistance treaties that had been created as bulwarks against a war, premised on the notion that if attacking a weak country would mean going to war against a number of countries bound by treaty to come to that country’s assistance, such an initial attack would not happen.
In the end, that idea failed catastrophically and in fairly short succession. Instead of preventing war, such treaties instead assured that any first attack would spread like the spark of a prairie fire that under dry climate conditions, or, in a political context, an environment of mutual distrust and paranoia, spreads out of control. In a span of just 31 years during the first half of the 20th Century, that resulted in a total of 85-107 million civilian and military deaths — 70-85 million of these occurring in WWII, and 15-22 million in WWi.
With the benefit of hindsight, I have to say it looks like the tired trope that WWII happened because British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeased Adolf Hitler, has it wrong. Chamberlain was mindful of the incredible destructive power of the modern military war machines of the major powers in the late ‘30s and was trying to prevent a war from happening. He failed not because he was naive but because the network of treaties obliged Britain and France to go to war against Germany once Hitler and Stalin attacked Poland which then meant a war across virtually all of Europe and in its colonial possessions. Similarly, in 1914, a massive war was assured by the interlocking mutual assistance treaties among the European powers, who ended up having to go to war over a single anarchist’s assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne since not responding would have besmirched the honor of those bound by the treaties.
But surely both those wars could have been avoided and over 100 million lives saved — 100 million men, women and children!. As war clouds began to loom on the horizon both times, the governments of the various potential combatants should have held a grand meeting and worked out a rational solution to their disagreements, grievances, fears and perceived threats. Doing so would not have been seen by the populations of the nations as appeasement but as cause for relief.
In today’s world, where we have incomparably more destructive weapons that would make a global conflict vastly more lethal, with death tolls numbered in the billions, not millions, and could potentially wipe out what passes for “civilization,” quite possibly humanity, and even potentially life on Earth. (The total tonnage of explosives used in all of WWII, including the two atomic bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was 3 megatons. Since the largest thermonuclear bomb in the US nuclear arsenal at present, the B83 is 1.2 megatons, that means just three of these bombs, each designed to be delivered by a low-flying B-1 bomber moving at supersonic speed, would alone significantly exceed the destructive power of all weapons used by all sides in WWII. And there would be hundreds or even thousands of nuclear bombs used in a global nuclear war, or even in a war between two of the larger nuclear nations. )
Given this reality, and the numbers of human beings who would die in even a limited war between two nuclear nations, it is time for the nations of Europe and the Asia-Pacific and the United States, to come together in a global conference to de-escalate the rhetoric, the threats, and the paranoia and to work out a way to get along. The starting point is a global ceasefire in all conflicts and the calling of a global peace conference. The people of the world need to demand this of their leaders.
There is, we know, a crisis facing humanity that is much bigger than any crisis faced by individual nations. A crisis of survival that while it may not be felt yet or acknowledged by many, is inexorably approaching. That is the climate catastrophe of global heating which will make the world unlivable at worst, and certainly incapable of supporting even the current population of 8.31 billion people alive today.
That crisis is daunting already and will become increasingly daunting as the years slip by with no concerted global action to address it. Humanity has thus far done little and in many cases has been slipping backwards, particularly in the US. In fact quite the opposite, the nations of the world together spent $2.1 trillion on war and preparation for war in 2024 and are on track to spend more this year even if a major war doesn’t break out.
The US, by conservative estimates, spent $811 billion that year, almost three times China, the second biggest arms spender at $298 billion. America’s arms spending also exceeds the spending of the next nine biggest military spenders, including China, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea.
it is thus incumbent on the US, the country with the largest and most powerful military the world has ever known—one which enjoys the most geographically protected location, bounded as it is by thousands of miles of ocean separating it from countries that could even contemplate attacking it—to take the first step in moving towards a world without war.
How such a winding down of the threat of war can be worked out at the United Nations remains to be seen. But the first task, which would set things moving in the right direction, would be to end the very dangerous war between Ukraine and Russia, and the Israeli war on Gaza. and the West Bank.
Both these conflicts should be resolvable. In the case of Ukraine, it is clear that Russia invaded Ukraine, but it is also clear that the invasion of Ukraine was driven by a legitimate fear Russia — a nation repeatedly attacked over its history by powerful nations to its west — had of the US-promoted drive to sign up nations that were formerly under the control of the Soviet Union or were part of the old Soviet Union, bringing them under the protection of NATO and even placing US military equipment and nuclear weapons and delivery systems at bases in those countries near to or even bordering Russia, and was pushing to do the same with Ukraine, a former soviet (state) of the USSR.
There had been a golden opportunity, with the 1991 collapse of the Communist government of the USSR and its dissolution into the Russian Federation and a group of smaller new independent states. At that point Russia, whose economy was in collapse, would have welcomed being brought into the European Union and NATO (the military pact created expressly to “contain” the USSR), but the US was not interested in doing that, so it didn’t happen.
Even Henry Kissinger, the hardline Secretary of State and national security advisor to Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, a committed anti-Communist and no soft-hearted peacenik, at that historical inflection point in world history, had argued against the US “taking advantage” of Russian weakness to expand NATO and against continuing with the “containment strategy” of the Cold War. Instead of listening to him, a series of US presidents beginning with Bill Clinton and on through Joe Biden did just that, with the result that Russia recovered economically and rearmed in response to the threat posed by NATO and turned towards a increasingly powerful ally, China, leading to the situation we have today.
“Stupid’ is the only word to apply to US policy since the Reagan-Gorbachev summit that brought an end to the Cold War and the only major nuclear disarmament agreement of that frightening era.
With Russia having invaded and conquered 20% of Ukraine and with the US and a number of major NATO allies having provided Ukraine with over a billion dollars’ worth of advanced weaponry to combat Russian troops and even to launch missiles and drones deep into Russian territory, it will be difficult now to get back to a condition of mutual trust, but it must be done. And again, it has to be the US that takes the lead. It is not the US that is threatened, it is the European countries that remember being attacked by Germany (and in Poland’s case, the Germany and the Soviet Union) in 1939, and it is Russia, attacked by France in 1812 and by Germany in 1941-45 ad that the we were threatening with nuclear missiles and in nuclear-capable bombers and supersonic fighter bombers placed in NATO countries throughout the Cold War, and that was having NATO bases placed in countries right on its borders in the more recent 1991-2022 period.
So let’s, as citizens of the US, start letting our government — Senators, Representatives and President Trump and the mass media — know that we want an honest peace in Europe. The US and the European nations of NATO need to offer an end to all the sanctions that have been plaguing Russia in return for an immediate ceasefire, a neutral an independent Ukraine, recognition of the majority Russian regions of eastern Ukraine as either an autonomous state or as part of Russia, following an internationally supervised plebiscite, and a dismantling of the anachronistic NATO, with the proviso that NATO could be revived if Russia were to return to hostilities against Ukraine. In return, Russia would be invited to become part of the European Economic Community.
Turning to the Gaza war, the solution is relatively simple: That festering sore of a captive and subjugated Palestinian population under the thumb of the Israeli state has been allowed to go on for way too long. Again its roots go back to the Cold War that followed World War II, which saw the US adopt and bankroll the new state of Israel founded in 1948 as a reliable ally in the strategically important oil-rich Middle East and North Africa at a time that the Arab nations and the Persian nation of Iran were trying to rid themselves of the colonial bonds and legacy of France and the UK. So important to the US was Israel during that era of US-USSR global rivalry that Washington allowed Israel to establish a theocratic apartheid and specifically Jewish state, with Palestinians suffering political exclusion, second-class status, pogroms, property expropriation, and expulsions.
All that abuse of a captive people has to end in order for peace to come to that powder-keg region. The US alone has the power to stop it. Israel’s genocidal leveling of Gaza over the last two years had been perpetrated largely using the planes, howitzers, tanks, rockets, bombs and diplomatic cover provided by the United States. If the Trump administration and Congress were to cut off those weapons and the spare parts needed to keep American planes flying, Israel would have to back off. The US could demand that Jewish Israeli settlers who been allowed to expropriate and move into territory in the conquered and Israeli-occupied West Bank must be compelled to return stolen lands, IDF forces would have to leave Palestinian territory, and a major redevelopment program to enable the creation of a viable Palestinian state would have to be undertaken.
After those two conflicts are resolved, the world can move on to solving other smaller conflicts, and proceed with a phased reduction by all countries of their outsized military forces, beginning with the US, which should offer an immediate unilateral 25% reduction in its military budget, including offering to a negotiate major reduction in its and Russias’s still absurdly huge nuclear stockpiles. (Russia has 5977 nuclear weapons and the US has 5428 — numbers so large that if even a significant percent of them were used by only one country in a successful first-strike, would destroy both countries and much of the world.)
The time for such action to move towards global peace is now!
President Trump claims he wants peace, both in Ukraine and in Gaza, but he’s going about it wrong. It’s not “Peace through American strength” that the world needs; it’s leadership towards global peace through example by the world’s most powerful nation“ that is called for at this historic time. And that will only happen if the American people, many of whom are fed up with massive military spending of needed funds, demand it.
Then we can really start to confront the real enemy of mankind: climate apocalypse.
Source: Counter Punch
