Has WWIII Started?

In the space of a couple of days this week two completely unprecedented attacks occurred that have the potential to rewrite world history. The US and UK directly attacked Russia and, for the first time ever in war, an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile was fired – by Russia. Naturally, most people in the West paid little attention.

Within moments of the silo opening at the Kapustin Yar rocket base in Russia on Thursday, American eyeballs were on it. They had received a warning from the Russians a few minutes before, through the joint nuclear risk-reduction channels, but no one on the Western side could actually guarantee what payload the rocket carried, what the destinations of its multiple warheads really were, or what would happen when those warheads struck their targets travelling at 12,000 km/h. If nuclear-armed, one such missile has the ability to destroy several of the major cities of Europe. Thankfully, the warheads were conventional and all were concentrated on a military-industrial complex in Dnipro, Ukraine, 800 km away. They struck about 5 minutes later.

Stephen Clark, writing on the US tech site Ars Technica says the attack portends a new era of warfare.

Wednesday. The strike came hot on the heels of another major and historic escalation, this one undertaken by the US and UK, using their long-range ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles, to hit inside Russia for the first time, reportedly targeting sites that included the headquarters of Russia’s Army Group North.

Le Monde reported that 12 British Storm Shadow missiles were fired. Pause and think about that: the British military using their own targeting experts, inputting proprietary coding data, top-secret weapon initiation sequences, real-time satellite coordination, etc, fired missiles into Russia.

A bit like cutting a ribbon, some Ukrainian might have been allowed to push a bright red button to get things moving. Not even at the height of the Cold War was either side reckless and brainless enough to do such a thing.

President Putin says the war has now been globalised. The Russians lost no time in counter-striking.

Thursday’s attack on the Yuzhmash military-industrial complex was the first use of a new generation of missile, the Oreshnik, which the Russians say is now in serial production. They travel 6,000 km/h faster than US Patriot missile interceptors and are almost certainly unstoppable.

The footage is staggering: the sky lights up and a volley of warheads strikes at Mach 10 (12,000km/h). Nima Alkhorshid from Dialogue Works asked a very sensible question about the Russian strike on Dnipro and Putin’s speech that followed: “Did the West receive the message?”

Typically, Western leaders say any Russian warning is bluffing and sabre-rattling but I hope they are sitting up and paying attention. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case. Jean-Noël Barrot, the French foreign minister, said France has no “red lines” in terms of escalation and reiterated that the project is still on for Ukraine to be part of NATO.

Russian-American military analyst Andrei Martyanov says it may be time to “kick the Chihuahua”. If the West fires more missiles into Russia, the next targets for the Russians is likely to be military installations on NATO territory, possibly in Poland or Romania, but equally likely British naval vessels or bases either in the UK or places like Cyprus. Martyanov says the British seem to want to experience real war first hand.

“What was demonstrated to the United States, as well as to those Chihuahuas like Britain and France, was that they have no means of intercepting anything like this and they can be dealt with when Russia decides to.”

Bellicose language but Russians are furious at being attacked by the UK and US.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke of a “qualitative shift” in the war. “We will be taking this as a qualitatively new phase of the Western war against Russia and we will react accordingly.”

With US strategy in Ukraine increasingly incoherent, US officials admit the “permission” to use long-range missiles “is not a game-changer”; yet it represents the kind of escalation President Biden had previously said could lead to WWIII. Is he just trying to hand a poisoned chalice to Trump?

The war’s tempo is clearly quickening. Also this month, President Putin outlined a change in the country's policy for employing nuclear weapons in conflict, lowering the threshold.

In military terms this week’s dramatic events are about “moving up the escalation ladder”. Leopard and Abrams tanks were first kept off the battlefield, then included. Cluster munitions were suddenly used, including on civilian targets; F16s were considered too dangerous a signal to Russia, then they were permitted. This and more all took a couple of years, one rung at a time. Now we are moving up the escalation ladder in leaps and bounds. Where will it end?

“Russia holds overwhelming conventional escalation dominance,” Martyanov said. “but if they (the West) want to go nuclear, we’re all pretty much done.”

But here’s the crazy thing: the hope of defeating Russia, taking back all Ukrainian territory, dealing a deadly blow to the Russian economy, placing NATO missiles in Ukraine, and achieving regime change is all-but-certainly a shattered dream. Russia has won the war in Ukraine; the West must accept this and negotiate or drive us all to the precipice.

The winds of disappointment are blowing through the capitals of the West. In a piece, “Ukraine Morale Falls”, Deutsche Welle reported this week that 30,000 Ukrainians have deserted this year; the judicial system is so clogged that the Rada (parliament) passed a bill saying deserters who returned would be forgiven.

The long suffering of the Ukrainian people, the deaths and mutilations, their shattered economy, blasted infrastructure and all the misery that comes with defeat in war will not be alleviated by escalation, it will only be made worse.

Anatol Lieven, visiting professor at King's College London and senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote an excellent article this week calling on the Democrats to fundamentally reorient their foreign policy – to summon the courage to break free of the “Blob”, the permanent state within the US state, that has disastrously misguided US foreign policy.

Lieven says, I think wisely, “The US needs to abandon its messianic strategy of spreading ‘democracy’ through US power, which has become in practice little more than a means of trying to undermine rival states.”

He goes on to recommend, as many of us have for years, that peace with Russia must be pursued, that the NATO expansion project must be abandoned, and that the US must get out of the planetary hegemon game.

Ukraine is simply the latest in a string of national projects that were fatally captured by a great power in pursuit of its own ends. The US has as little concern for Ukrainians as it does for Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Afghans or Vietnamese. So many of those who drank the US Kool Aid and shackled their national projects to the US geopolitical juggernaut eventually got crushed and left in the dust of their own countries as the Americans moved on to their next project.

Back in 1618 Europe started to tear itself to pieces in the geostrategic contest known as the Thirty Years War. Once the continent was devastated, its leaders signed the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 ushering in an era of diplomacy and recognition of the importance of balancing the security interests of all parties. They had cannons, swords, pikes and muskets. We have nuclear weapons. We all need to evolve our psychology and think more like statesmen and stateswomen – and less like nutters.

EUGENE DOYLE
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.

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