Wolfgang Streeck:

Currently the declared war aims of Ukraine include driving all Russian forces back to Russia, the unconditional return of Crimea to Ukraine, the return of the breakaway provinces to the central authority of Kyiv, and Ukrainian membership, if not of NATO, then at least of the EU. NATO and the EU have publicly committed themselves to leaving it to the Ukrainians to decide what to aim for, when to negotiate and what to agree. To the delight of the Ukrainian government, the US and other Western countries including the UK have also indicated that for them, the objective of the war is a ‘victory’ over Russia that would ‘decisively weaken’ its military and economy, while having Putin stand trial in an international criminal court. (Scholz’s line on this is that Russia must not win the war and Ukraine must not lose it, rather than Ukraine having to win and Russia to lose.) It is against this background that Ukrainian access to advanced military hardware matters, since it affects whether Ukraine, fighting on its own without US and NATO forces by its side, might be able to withstand a war lasting, potentially, several years, with a chance, slight as it may be, of ‘winning’ one way or another. For this, the Ukrainian government would have to ask its citizens to accept massive losses of life and wealth for the sake of maximalist national objectives, in a conflict that amounts to a proxy war on behalf of the ‘West’, aimed at eliminating Russia as an independent economic and political power.

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For Europe, the nuclearization of the Ukrainian war would be a catastrophe, whereas the US would hardly be affected if at all. Germany in particular is less interested than the US in a long war fought with freely supplied Western equipment. For Scholz, going slow on arms delivery may be an attempt, if a weak one, to make the Ukrainian government consider a settlement short of Putin having to be handed over to The Hague, provided a Normandy-like deal is still available. (Attempts to affect the Ukrainian war aims by a country threatened by nuclear fallout could be reflected in a slogan like ‘No annihilation without representation’.)

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Unspeakably awful as it is for the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian war is no more than a sideshow in a much larger story: that of an approaching shoot-out between a declining and a rising would-be global hegemon. One function served by the war in this context is the consolidation of the US hold over its European allies, who are required as backing for the American ‘pivot to Asia’ (Obama) – to what used to be the South China Sea and is now referred to by the loyal Western mediacracy as the Indo-Pacific.