“Gentlemen you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!” (“Gentlemen, you can’t fight here, we’re in the command center”), launched Peter Sellers as President of the United States, indignant to see his chief of staff and the Soviet ambassador come to blows in the crisis cell room in Washington, as American atomic missiles streaked towards Moscow in Doctor Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s film.
Despite the invectives, the insults, the tensions over the last century, the Russians and the Americans have never come to blows directly. By necessary prudence, they always remained “gentlemen” among themselves. The United States was at war with the English, the French (1) or the Germans, but never with the Russians. The United States and Russia have always fought through client countries.
No doubt the United States would like to bring down Vladimir Putin in order, on the one hand, to make democracy triumph there, and, on the other hand, to replace an inefficient plutocracy there with a rational capitalism managed by Harvard and Yale alumni. , thus allowing them indirectly to get their hands on part of the treasure of Russian raw materials which would come to counterbalance the trillions of dollars of the American deficit and prepare the confrontation with China… Russia, for its part, wants to remain a great power, to put the hand over the wealth of Donbass and bring into the Russian family, in defiance of international legality, its population, which feels predominantly Russian.
Those who die are Ukrainian civilians, Russian and Ukrainian soldiers. They die for a war which should have been avoided and which unfortunately signals the defeat of diplomacy.
“The important thing is not to go to war with Russia”
The important thing today for Europe is to continue to help Ukraine, the attacked country, but also and above all not to go to war with Russia, as the Ukrainian regime, which is pushing us, wishes. A conflict would again destroy Europe for the next decades. For Europe, and particularly for France and Germany, we must work to find a compromise that is as fair or reasonable as possible, in order to stop this war that brings death to those who wage it and brings misery to the European and global populations who suffer and will increasingly suffer the consequences.
Putin is a plutocratic autocrat who started a war that was unnecessary, Russia not being immediately threatened, but he is not Hitler. The latter wanted to make slaves of the Slavs, and wanted a Europe ideologically subject to National Socialism, from which the Jews would be excluded. Putin wants to keep his power, and get his hands on the Donbass. This does not justify the United States and Europe going to war.
Let us add that Europe was built on the victory over Nazism, and that it is contradictory for today’s Europe to remain voluntarily silent while, since 2014, the Ukrainian regime has toppled the monuments commemorating the victory on Nazism, or raises statues, baptizes stadiums, names broad avenues in honor of the Ukrainian nationalists who, during the Second World War, collaborated with the Nazis and exterminated tens of thousands of Jewish families. This truth cannot be suppressed indefinitely, and the problem must be addressed if Ukraine wishes to join the European Union.
“The United States will not support Ukraine forever”
Those who think that the United States will support Ukraine indefinitely are mistaken. The Americans have let down Vietnam, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Shah of Iran, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt etc… They are in love with democracy, it’s true, but they are also in love with their interests. If the Ukrainians do not succeed in making their counter-offensive triumph, it is likely that the Americans will come to terms with the Russians behind their backs.
What has American democracy learned from the Cuban missile crisis? That you had to be strong and hold on against a dictatorship, or make compromises? The two… They blockaded, and they pulled their missiles out of Turkey.
Let us also keep in mind that despite the rationality of the Russian and American leaders, it happens that a spark involuntarily starts a fire. “History is a tale full of sound and fury told by an idiot and meaning nothing” wrote Shakespeare.
1) The quasi-war of 1798 to 1800, undeclared naval warfare.