Does the West have the required skills to know how far they can push the escalation before it backs away at the eleventh hour?
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Although both Ukraine and Russian officials recently met for so-called ‘peace talks’, one of the surprising outcomes of the Ukrainian attack on Russian bombers is not so much how arrogant and entirely fixated the Ukrainian president is, but how the strike has pushed a lot of highbrow pundits in DC to ask “how do you win a nuclear war”.
The nuclear option is always presented by Western media as one which Putin toys with but never the West, but in fact a number of respected players in DC are now asking this question.
One of the takeaways from the attack is that Ukraine certainly has a possibility of hitting Russia through unconventional means, which in any other context would be described as terrorism – it isn’t in this case as no civilians were harmed or killed. But the underdog has to resort to innovation and creativity that the Goliath enemy doesn’t normally resort to or even consider. Henri Kissinger’s often repeated phrase of ‘the conventional army loses if it does not win’ certainly applies and we have to ask ourselves how much of this hit is even really anything to do with Zelensky?
The strikes have CIA and Mi6 written all over them as it would seem Europe and the deep state in the U.S. are so determined to keep this war going, that a new level of ingenuity seems to be the order of the day. Hit ‘n’ runs attacks with cheap hardware. Drones. While once we used to think that the U.S. and EU countries are at a standoff over the war, the attack should raise eyebrows about Trump’s intentions in Ukraine. It is inconceivable that he was not informed of it before it happened and his claims that he was unaware are profoundly fatuous, if not hilarious.
Once again, the regular man in the street is dumbfounded by the smoke and mirrors and duplicitous tactics of western leaders and can’t follow the complicated maze of lies, half-truths and hidden agendas. Trump claims to want peace so he invents a confrontation with EU countries so that he can pursue a surreptitious plan against Putin? Not as far-fetched as it sounds. Plausible deniability might, by some, be considered too smart for Trump but it can’t be ruled out as it is hard to imagine that he would openly attack Putin.
Yet the immediate threat of a new chapter in this war, where Russia takes the gloves off, is now more of a reality than ever before. Does the West have the required skills to know how far they can push the escalation before it backs away at the eleventh hour? Probably not. Putin, it is believed, will almost certainly increase the bombing of Kiev and strike at the centre of Ukraine’s tactical military thinking. While out on the frontlines we are seeing the infamous 3 tonne ‘glide’ bomb do extraordinary damage against Ukrainian forces, the thinking now of Putin will be that he has to know show the West that he can trump any such drone attack on Russian bombers.
Have we all been fooled by Trump? Was the spat arranged in the White House a while back with Zelensky real on any level? Or was it staged to look like Trump and Zelensky are never going to get along and work together as partners, allowing a nefarious agenda to take place?
Friends and foes change so quickly from one U.S. administration to another that it’s hard to keep up. In the Middle East, Trump was actually working alongside Iranian commanders in Iraq in a military campaign to wipe out the very terrorist, head-chopping group which is now running Syria and seen as an ally to the U.S. and to Israel. These days, he is talking to the Iranians as he wants them to never have the capability of a nuclear weapon. Are we to assume that he is using that proximity as a tool to keep Israel in check as, despite being a Zionist, Trump doesn’t want Israel to dictate U.S. foreign policy and drag the U.S. into a war with Iran which even Trump knows can never be won. For Ukraine, Putin now much realizes that the only way the war brings Moscow closer to Washington is when it is the overall victor as Trump now has made it clear whose side he is on. Traditionally the Americans are always playing a double bluff in wars. In Afghanistan, they pretended they were not part of the war between the mujahidin and Russian forces, yet they supplied the former with Russian weapons, which fooled no one, least of all the Soviets. In Syria and Iraq, they created ISIS by a series of what looked like policy blunders but then used this group to fight Iran and its proxies and install its head as a legitimate leader in Damascus. For most of the 80s and 90s, they used Gadaffi as a perfect scapegoat which allowed them to not appear to be weak with Iran. And this is even being played out today with a number of dubious cases or files seeing the light of day after decades which supposedly points the finger at the Libyans.
Recent talks between Ukraine and Russia reveal that there is too much distance between what both sides want, particularly with the Russian-speaking regions. The kaleidoscope of U.S. foreign policy and who it aligns with just got twisted with the Zelensky attack on the Russian bombers leaving many of us confused about the U.S. role in peace which is going to accelerate the war onto a new level soon. Trump doesn’t only not have a strategy for peace, but he doesn’t have a strategy for his own administration’s acclimatization to where it places itself when the dust settles. So much for settling a war in 24 hours.
