Emanuel Todd believes that this is an existential conflict for the United States of America.
Can the Russian invasion of Ukraine be prevented from escalating into World War III? One of the greatest authorities on international politics, former US Secretary of State and diplomat Henry Kissinger, wrote an essay for the conservative British magazine “The Spectator” that the Ukrainian conflict has clear parallels with the year 1914, when all the great powers were gradually drawn into the conflict.
He called for a ceasefire with Russian forces pulling back to the lines before the conflict starts in 2022, meaning Putin’s army would remain in eastern Ukraine, as well as in Crimea. According to Kissinger, the priority is to prevent the war from turning “into a war against Russia as such” and it is necessary to give Russia the opportunity “to rejoin the international system”.
However, Kissinger changed his position regarding Ukraine’s membership in NATO. He claims that before the start of the conflict he was against Ukraine’s entry into the Western military alliance because he was afraid of the very scenario that happened, but now Kissinger from the stage of the World Economic Forum in Davos says that Ukraine’s membership in the NATO alliance is a logical outcome. However, according to Kissinger, it is important to give Russia the opportunity to adjust its historical positions through the diplomatic process because it is a country with a huge nuclear arsenal, so it is necessary to avoid its destabilization and deepening of the conflict. Unlike Kissinger, who believes that the Third World War can still be stopped, one of the leading French intellectuals of today, Emanuel Todd, gave an interview to “Figaro” in which he stated that the Third World War has already begun.
“It is obvious that the conflict, which began as a limited territorial war, is escalating into a global economic confrontation between the entire West on one side and Russia and China on the other, and is becoming a world war”Todd said.
The French intellectual believes that Putin was wrong at the beginning of the conflict because he believed that Ukraine was a “failed state” that would collapse immediately at the beginning of the invasion, but it turned out that the Ukrainian nation, with foreign financial and military resources, managed to find a new kind of balance , as well as the hope that he can win.
By the way, Tod refers to Merheimer’s analysis of the conflict, which warns that Ukraine should be considered a de facto part of the NATO alliance since 2014, because even then the Ukrainian army began to receive some form of aid and training from the American, British and Polish military forces. On the other hand, the Russians have declared that they will never tolerate the presence of the NATO alliance in Ukraine and therefore claim that they are waging a defensive-preventive war.
Mearsheimer, reminds Tod, claims that the Russians will strike harder the harder they are in Ukraine because they feel existentially threatened. At the same time, the Americans are overestimating themselves when they think that they can participate in the military conflict in Ukraine as in one of the military war games, after Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. America is actually fragile, Todd says, and Russia is proving to be holding up better than expected under sanctions organized by the NATO alliance. It is possible that Russia, with the support of China, will withstand all sanctions, while American monetary and financial control of the world will collapse, and with it the possibility of financing the enormous American trade deficit. This effectively made the conflict existential for the United States. America cannot withdraw from it.
“So we are now in a never-ending war, a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other,” Todd says.
Todd’s message is quite pessimistic and scary for the West in the long run:
“I have just read a book by the Indian foreign minister, published before the war, in which he sees American weaknesses and claims that the confrontation between China and the United States will not have a winner but will free up space for other countries like India. But not for the Europeans. Everywhere we see the weakening of the US, but not in Europe and Japan, because due to the weakening of its imperial system, the US is trying to maintain positions in the initial protectorates. As the US system shrinks, it puts more and more pressure on local protectorate elites, including Europe.”concludes Todd.
(WORLD)