Putin’s gamble is failing. And this is where the real danger for world peace begins. The president and commander-in-chief of the second nuclear superpower, with his ill-fated Ukrainian war of aggression, has shown to the world he is no Suvorov, the legendary Russian general who never lost a battle. His shock-and-awe tactics, in the face of Ukraine’s unexpectedly fierce resistance, is getting nowhere. The war of attrition that can never be won by either side, must end in some uneasy ceasefire and compromise. It has already devastated large parts of Ukraine, where 4 million refugees have left the country in despair: mostly women with young children because men up to 60 years of age are staying behind to fight.
Russia, as its president crudely warned the world before ordering the attack, has an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction second to none, that with approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads roughly equals that of the United States.
| But, even if Putin has no real military background, having moved from law school straight into the Soviet KGB secret service – where he retired as a mere lieutenant colonel before his unexplained meteoric ascent to the top at the Kremlin – he surely knows what the nuclear endgame is about: mutual assured destruction, or MAD. Putin, the longest serving president of post-communist Russia, does not want to go down in history as “Putin the Exterminator”. |
The clear and present danger however, in the Russian-American showdown is not even that of a nuclear Apocalypse, which would obliterate entire cities, with effects more devastating than the shameful destruction of defenseless Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – an unpunished war crime incidentally, that the postwar winning powers wantonly chose to self-pardon, in accordance with the notorious principle that “Might is Right!”
The immediate risk, with the two nuclear superpowers exchanging taunts and insults while the Ukrainian war of attrition continues unabated, is twofold. It’s called acceptance of a nuclear war as an inevitability, and nuclear proliferation.
Lawrence Friedman, emeritus professor of war studies at Kings College in his classic and now forgotten Atlas of Global Strategy, written in the “bad old times” of the Cold War remarked: “There have been no direct superpower crises over the past decade, although indirect conflict over Angola, Ethiopia, Indochina, Poland and, most of all, Afghanistan has soured relations. It might be that a sense of equivalence in nuclear strength added to Soviet self-confidence”. Certainly, he concluded, “a key objective of the overall foreign and military policy has been to ensure that the USSR is second to none and enjoys the international respect and consideration appropriate to its rank”.
The Friedman Atlas was published in 1985, when Reagan in Geneva said to Gorbachev: “The United States and the Soviet Union are the two greatest countries on Earth. They are the only ones who can start World War III; but also, the two countries that could bring peace to the world”. Change Soviet Union into Russia, update a few details, and perhaps you have the outline of what the present leaders of the two nuclear superpowers ought to discuss in order to push back the dreaded World War III that is slowly but surely getting closer.
If only matters were that simple; Putin unfortunately is no Gorbachev. He is an authoritarian introvert with no vision, no political–let alone military strategy–and the strange fixation of being remembered as the president for life who reversed the fatherland’s decline and restored the lost greatness of Mother Russia. And no recent U.S. president, over the past more than two decades of failing Russian American relations, has (or had) what it takes to stop the nuclear clock from ticking forward.
Ronald Reagan, a simple, and some would say simplistic conservative leader, of limited culture but with an extraordinary intuition and human touch, knew how to restore confidence and make a deal. Gorbachev in Moscow, now in his 90s, is totally removed from the Kremlin pyramid of power. He still remembers Reagan with respect and genuine affection. But the old bipolar world is gone. An unstable multipolar world is now appearing, where present-time Russia and the United States will have to make painful concessions, not only to the fast growing Chinese dragon but to the new emerging powers, North and South and not only East and West. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate. Its name is Nuclear Holocaust.
(c) 2022 Longitude Magazine. – VNY La Voce di New York.
