The summit that is opening at Vilnius is a real time bomb because it risks taking decisions that pave the way for the escalation of the war in Ukraine and therefore to World War III.
The delusional thing is that this risk is growing exponentially not by virtue of a lucid strategic plan of the Western ruling classes but because of the dramatic mistakes carried out by these themselves, in particular – in my opinion – by the US ones. The use of force without a strategic plan other than the use of force itself has led the USA, and therefore NATO, into a dead end of which all humanity risks paying the price.
The first mistake of the USA and therefore of NATO was to take advantage of the weakness and then of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s to impose the USA as dominant power on a global scale and NATO as its armed wing. At that time, a world order of peace and cooperation that successfully transcended the Cold War was within reach. Instead of taking the opportunity for peace, the opportunity was taken to build the new unipolar world order tightly controlled by the United States.
In 2014, Vice President Biden and the foreign minister’s head of European affairs, Victoria Nuland, supported what I believe was a coup d’état in Ukraine, with the idea of continuing NATO acquisitions of countries of the former Warsaw Pact. While the global competitor was increasingly becoming China, the US administration opened a conflict incurable with Russia, a huge military power but not an economic competitor of the USA. Every appeal and warning issued in international fora by the Russian government during those years was deliberately ignored. This second huge mistake has set in motion an avalanche of which the current war in Ukraine is one of the consequences.
Read Also
Security of Ukraine, accession of Sweden and relations with China: NATO decides its future at the Vilnius summit
In 2021, when it was crystal clear to everyone that the situation had reached its breaking point, President Biden, instead of looking for a compromise with Russia to avoid war, he chose the path of conflict, effectively opening one between Russia and NATO, that is, between Russia and the USA. This third big mistake represents for the US ruling classes probably the biggest strategic mistake made in recent decades: while the global competitor is China, they plunge into a war with Russia which, militarily, is much stronger than China .
The choice of war was followed by a fourth gigantic mistake: the requisition of 300 billion dollars of the Russian central bank deposited abroad and the sanctions. This theft – because this is what it is about – has frightened all the ruling classes of the emerging powers: from China to India, from Brazil to Arabia and so on. Everyone thought that a possible dispute with the USA could lead to the seizure of their deposits and shareholdings abroad: this scared everyone and unified many. It is no coincidence that the attractiveness of the BRICS and the choice to find alternative channels to the use of the dollar as an international trading currency have grown exponentially in the last twelve months. This process of reaction to the sanctions is severely undermining the “imperialist rent” which the US economy and finance has enjoyed up to now. Likewise the sanctions forced Russia to find alternative channels of exchange and this too has fueled an alternative trading system to that of the dollar.
The fifth mistake is directly military. The US thought it was trapping Russia in a war of attrition that would destroy the Russian economy and at the same time produce so many deaths as to undermine the Putin regime’s bases of consensus. This calculation also turned out to be wrong. In the positional warfare that characterizes the current conflict in Ukraine, the Russian military is not losing the war. There is no Afghanistan but a giant slaughterhouse where the Ukrainian people are being offered as sacrifices in a NATO-led proxy war.
In the spring of 2022 Ukraine and Russia had reached an agreement to end the war: it revolved around the knot of neutrality of Ukraine. NATO opposed it and decided that Ukraine would fight this war by proxy thinking they could win it, or at least make it last for years, if not decades: to wear down Russia and dissolve it as a political entity. They miscalculated – the West is not even able to supply Ukraine with the necessary ammunition.
Read Also
Ukraine, live coverage – NATO to Zelensky: “Membership only when all the conditions are met”. The president’s attack: “Absurd postponements”
Lastly, Biden thought he could have some military successes in order to justify a very expensive war before the US presidential election, whose electoral campaign will begin with the primaries on February 3 next year. To date there are no successes and the counter-offensive has produced in two months huge numbers of dead and Western weapons destroyed, but no territorial successes. In this context, the risk of increasing the level of confrontation to justify the continuation of the war is very high: given that we are at stake and there are hundreds of thousands of dead, we must go on to winwhatever the cost, even with the nuclear escalation (with the retrospective thought that it can be confined to Europe).
For all these errors the situation is today dramatic: the US ruling classes have got everything wrong, both as regards the interests of humanity (disarmament and cooperation) and as regards their own interests (having unified Russia, China and others against them): from this situation in which Zelensky cannot win the war he is making his own people fight by proxy, humanity is at great risk. Because either NATO chooses a compromise strategy, and therefore the war ends in a few days, or the risk is military escalation, which raises the level the more it creates the conditions for degenerating into a total nuclear conflict.
In this picture it is decisive what Italy will do and what Western Europe will do. Because among the effects of the US’s wrong choices are the tendential destruction of the German and Italian economies – in favor of the US – and, paradoxically, the full suicidal unification of NATO behind the US’s wrong choices. If Western Europe – which has the most to lose – doesn’t tell them that the US strategy is wrong, who is to tell them?