World War III Blues
Will the European 'shatterzone' plunge the world into another global conflict?
At the height of the Cold War, Bob Dylan recorded ‘Talking World War Three Blues’ – a witty satire of the destructive absurdity of mutual assured destruction that his generation had grown up with, in which he described how: ‘One time ago a crazy dream came to me/ I dreamt I was walking to World War Three.’
After recounting his surreal and comical encounters with a psychiatrist and the inhabitant of a fallout shelter who shoots at him because he looks like a communist, the singer-narrator finds that ‘Well now time passed and now it seems/Everybody’s having them dreams.’
That song was recorded in May 1963, less than a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the Cold War as close as it ever came to a nuclear exchange.
Today, in 2022, we stand at the brink of another global conflagration, at a time when the world has barely begun to emerge from a devastating pandemic; when democracies across the world have slid into the corrupting embrace of authoritarian populism; when a coordinated international response is required to deal with the multiple threats posed by climate change, and once again it seems that everybody’s having them dreams.
Even before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, rightwing Twitterati could be found issuing strident warnings that World War III was about to begin – an outcome that many of them seemed alarmingly willing to welcome and embrace.
Since the invasion, the possibility that we might once again be ‘walking to World War Three’ has received more mainstream acceptance. The tone was set by Vladimir Putin himself, who warned that ‘whoever tries to hinder us’ in Ukraine would see consequences ‘you have never seen in history.’
Putin subsequently placed Russian nuclear forces on high alert, a decision that his government attributed to Liz Truss’s endorsement of foreign volunteers in Ukraine - an endorsement that no one will be surprised was made without any knowledge of her own country’s laws.
The Instagram-obsessed narcissist occupying the position of Foreign Secretary is a pretty weak justification for a nuclear engagement, and there is no doubt that the Russian response is as dishonest as so much that comes out of Putin’s mouth.
But is Putin merely engaging in what the British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace calls a ‘battle of rhetoric’? Would be press the button?
Yes, according to the American Russia expert Fiona Hill, who believes that World War III is already underway:
We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War.
Citing Russia’s use of polonium and novichok to assassinate Putin’s opponents, Hill argues that Russia has already used ‘a nuclear weapon in some respects’ and that therefore ‘if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again.’
Whatever Putin’s individual psychology, it’s a giant leap from using radiation and nerve gas to kill political opponents, to launching nuclear strikes that would result in the annihilation of much of Europe and Russia itself, and it is not at all clear that Putin would be the only person to decide on this.
That doesn’t mean that such a possibility can be discounted, and even if such a conflict did not go nuclear, even a conventional war involving Russia, Europe, and the United States could be terrifyingly destructive and unleash a cascade of unforeseen devastation.
At present the European Union, the United States, and NATO are supplying ‘defensive’ weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces. This is very different to the Afghan war against the Soviets, when Western support for the mujahideen was channelled mostly through semi-secret initiatives such as the ‘Safari Club’ group.
Then, the use of proxies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia enabled the likes of Charlie Wilson and the CIA to maintain a veneer of ‘plausible deniability’ for what was then the largest covert operation in American history.
Today there is no such deniability. Germany, the United States, Britain and the European Union have openly declared that they are supplying weapons to Ukraine, and that they intend to continue doing it. So this is as close to war as it gets without war actually being declared.
There is no guarantee that this situation will continue indefinitely. The more Russia encounters resistance, the more likely it is to intensify the firepower at its disposal to compensate for its erratic progress so far, and the more likely it is to blame foreign interference for the intensity of the resistance it is facing.
If the invasion succeeds in toppling the Ukrainian government and destroying its armed forces, and Ukraine descends into insurgency, then Russia will find itself facing what to all intents and purposes will be a new proxy war, in which Ukraine’s allies will be supplying weapons to ‘terrorists’ across the country’s extensive land borders.
No-Fly Zones
All these possibilities can very easily trigger a conflict that spills over into neighbouring states and ultimately leads to the kind of military conflict that NATO and the Soviet Union rehearsed over and over again throughout the Cold War.
This would be a conflict in which no one wins and everyone loses. It is not something to be leapt into in the heat of a very bad moment.
Yet as is often the case in all the West’s wars of the last twenty-one years, there are those who want to jump the gun, and as always some of the most strident voices calling for NATO to go to war with Russia live very far from the gun and have never held one in their hands.
In the UK, various petitions have been signed calling on NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, in keeping with Tory MP Tobias Ellwood’s call for NATO and the UK to be ‘far more front-footed’ in its response to the Russian invasion. Ellwood has at least had military experience to bring to bear in his insistence that
It is misleading, simplistic and indeed defeatist to suggest engaging in a no-fly zone over Ukraine would automatically lead to a war, even a nuclear conflict with Russia.
The same cannot be said of similar calls from some of our newspaper columnists, such as the Daily Mail’s foremost keyboard warrior Dan Hodges (no surprise here), who has tweeted:
Elsewhere the Independent’s Sean O’Grady has insisted that NATO must ‘confront’ Russia in order to prevent what he calls a ‘barbaric, medieval siege’ of Kiev, and also because like Fiona Hill, he believes that ‘war is already upon us.’ In these circumstances, the fall of Kiev will be just the beginning, faced with a dictator who wants to ‘turn back the clock: to medieval times’.
The dominoes will fall. If Ukraine collapses, it looks very much like neighbouring Moldova will be next. It too, has a breakaway Russian-sponsored state, Transnistra, and is ripe for colonisation. Then, perhaps, a rest before Putin comes with demands for formal neutrality and renunciation of Nato by Findland, and getting the military alliance out of the Baltic republics. Then Romania, then Bulgaria, then Poland, then Hungary.
This is where humanitarian concern for Ukrainians blurs into outright hysteria, and where bad historical analogies about ‘appeasement’ and ‘Hitler’ can become the justification for bad policy.
There is no doubt that Putin will escalate the war, but now those aims are devoted more to saving face than conquest. Because if Russia expected the resistance it has encountered, there is no sign of any preparation for it in its planning or in the execution of the invasion.
Should Russia manage to conquer Ukraine, it will almost certainly face a prolonged and well-equipped urban insurgency.
As David Petraeus - who ought to know - said on Channel 4 News yesterday, this outcome will require a lot more soldiers than Putin currently has in Ukraine, and it will suck in manpower and resources that will leave little extra to topple other ‘dominoes.’
Does anyone seriously believe that the Russian army can simply move on from Ukraine to attack Finland - a country that has already defeated it in the past? Or any of the countries where NATO currently has missiles and troops?
So far NATO has resisted the no-fly option, showing sense that has often been absent from its previous dealings with Russia. It’s easy to understand why Ukrainians want such a zone to be established, but this isn’t Iraq in 1991 or Yugoslavia in 1993, or Libya in 2011.
In this case a no-fly zone would require NATO to engage in combat with the second-largest airforce in the world.
It would require NATO fighter planes to shoot down Russian planes or shoot down Russian helicopters. It would not protect civilians, unless NATO is prepared to attack Russian artillery and missile positions on the ground.
Back to the Shatter-Zone
It should be obvious to anyone but the most gung ho laptop bombardier that these aren’t possibilities to be willingly embraced, without full consideration of their potential consequences, even if they make us feel good about ourselves.
Such consideration is not always easy to find, after years of grubby politics that certainly echo Auden’s description of the 1930s - as a ‘low, dishonest decade’ albeit without the ‘clever hopes’.
It is easy for some - especially those who will not fight or send their children off t fight - to see a major war against the gangster-Chekhist in the Kremlin as some kind of moral turning point, in which Europe and its allies rush gallantly to war to avoid ‘another Munich’ and the West finally stands up for its ‘values.’
There is no doubt that Ukraine does represent a turning point. Whatever Putin and others might say about NATO’s eastwards expansion, what he has done has gone far beyond any legitimate security concerns.
Russia has set out to erase a neighbouring state from the map which Putin and his kleptocratic clique have decided has no right to exist.
Ukrainians have every right to resist this brutal assault, just as every other invaded or occupied country has the same right. And the West - regardless of and perhaps because of its mistakes in the past - ought to do everything it can to help them do this, while also doing what it can to avoid a fullscale military confrontation.
This is not moral cowardice or ‘Munich’, it is common sense.
Like a nightmare we cannot awake from, world history has once again returned the to the region that nineteenth century geographers once called the ‘shatter zone’ or ‘crush zone at the borderlands of ‘Eastern’ or ‘Central’ Europe - depending on which geopolitical compass or school of thought you orient yourself by.
In World War I, Austria responded to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand with a full mobilisation against Serbia, which then triggered the system of alliances that plunged the world into the conflagration and ultimately destroyed the Hapsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires, and gave way to the creation of new states which helped paved the way for World II.
In 1939, the outbreak of war was more predictable. But once again it was the Nazi attempt to establish a new German empire in the east that provided the flashpoint.
Given these precedents, and the failed military adventures of the last twenty one years, and the poor policy decisions and missed opportunities that gave Putin the pseudo-justification he has used to invade Ukraine, not to mention the very low calibre of so many of our leaders, it would be wise to avoid the rush of blood.
We need to consider other ways of responding to Ukraine’s plight that avoid sucking the world into a war that would be unimaginably more devastating than the one that is already taking place.
This does not mean pacificism. There are many things that the West can do to hurt Putin and hurt Russia that fall short of direct military confrontation.
If Ukrainians want weapons then let them have them. If volunteers want to fight in Ukraine then let them. It’s shameful and bizarre to find sections of the left that once argued ‘by any means necessary’ to people resisting occupation, to oppose the supply of armaments to Ukraine and effectively replaying a new version of the non-intervention pact that doomed the Spanish Republic.
Ultimately what is really required, in the short and the long term, is the end of Putin’s authoritarian regime.
That will depend in part, on whether he fails or succeeds in Ukraine. But it will also require a global antiwar movement, including Russians, that not only opposes ‘war in general. but specifically this war.
As Dylan once sang, you can be in my dreams if I can be in yours. If we are to have the slightest chance of preventing this calamity from dragging the world into the vortex of a wider war, these dreams must be dreams of peace, not fantasies of war, that reach into Russia, as well as Ukraine.
Such a movement cannot be a movement that simply reduces the entire conflict to NATO, recycles old anti-imperialist nostrums that fail to take account of Putin’s neo-imperial aspirations, or refuses to show solidarity with the people at the receiving end of Russian tanks and guns.
Thousands of Russians have already shown enormous courage in opposing Putin’s war on the streets. Ukrainians are fighting tooth and nail for the survival of their country.
And just as the hawks shouldn’t be allowed to drag us into a world war, nor should the doves minimise or evade what has actually taken place: the savage and merciless destruction of one state by its more powerful neighbour that threatens to destroy the old world, before we have even begun to think of what the new one might be like.
.