{"id":19657,"date":"2022-11-02T07:07:44","date_gmt":"2022-11-02T06:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=19657"},"modified":"2022-11-02T07:34:23","modified_gmt":"2022-11-02T06:34:23","slug":"19657","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/?p=19657","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<!-- Added by Post\/Page Specific Custom Code plugin, thank you for using! -->\n<style>.small-caps {\r\n  font-variant: small-caps;\r\n}<\/style>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/newleftreview.org\/issues\/ii137\/articles\/susan-watkins-five-wars-in-one\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Susan Watkins, New Left Review<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"body_text\">In March, Kiev\u2019s position at the Istanbul peace talks was for (hyper-guaranteed) neutrality and the retreat of Moscow\u2019s forces to pre-invasion lines. In April, the\u00a0<span class=\"small-caps\">us<\/span> pulled the rug out from under the Russian\u2013Ukrainian talks, delivering the message that, for the West, Putin would not be a negotiating partner.<a href=\"https:\/\/newleftreview.org\/issues\/ii137\/articles\/susan-watkins-five-wars-in-one#note-21\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><sup>21<\/sup><\/a> Today, Kiev demands the full Ukrainianization of Crimea. Moscow wanted a treaty with <span class=\"small-caps\">nato <\/span>and has ended up in an <span style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">all-consuming<\/span> war. Washington aimed for the painless extension of its hegemony across Eastern Europe and instead has had to grapple with inflationary fuel prices, as key congressional elections loom. Looking at the abstentions and <span style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">no-votes<\/span> on Ukraine at the\u00a0<span class=\"small-caps\">un<\/span>\u00a0this October, Brzezinski could have pointed out that Washington is precisely losing support in <span style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">Eurasia\u2014<\/span>India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as well as the Central Asian republics, China, Iran, Vietnam and <span style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">Laos\u2014<\/span>and two-thirds of Africa, from Algeria, the Sudans and Ethiopia to the\u00a0<span class=\"small-caps\">dcr<\/span>, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. <span style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">The\u00a0<span class=\"small-caps\">us <\/span><\/span>was left with the <span class=\"small-caps\">nato <\/span>and <span class=\"small-caps\">asean <\/span>states, plus (most of) Latin America.<\/p>\n<p class=\"body_text\">The result of the escalatory dynamic has been, firstly, a disastrous deepening of the Ukrainian civil conflict.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n<p class=\"body_text\">Unless there are dramatic new developments before the winter, Russia\u2019s war of territorial conquest seems set to freeze into one of defensive attrition that will eventually take a high economic toll. At the same time, unless the\u00a0<span class=\"small-caps\">us<\/span>\u00a0radically changes its game, Ukraine does not appear to have a military strategy to recover the lost fifth of its territory. If, as Zelensky now claims, its aim is the reconquest of Crimea, Kiev\u2019s war will take on a neo-imperial character too, subduing rebel regions. So far, the Biden Administration\u2019s only tactic for achieving regime change in Russia is to drag out the war. Meanwhile,\u00a0<span class=\"small-caps\">nato<\/span>\u2019s truly chilling <span style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">2022 \u2018Strategic Concept\u2019<\/span> document brigades its thirty-odd member states behind Washington in the stand-off against Beijing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"body_text\">In theory, the major European states could have balanced with Russia against the\u00a0<span class=\"small-caps\">us<\/span>\u00a0after the end of the Cold War, insisting on a more accommodating, globally multiculturalist frame&shy;work that would have made room for rising powers, as some American strategists were suggesting. Blocking that outcome was not just the conviction of the\u00a0<span class=\"small-caps\">us<\/span>\u00a0foreign-policy elite that the alternative to its rule was global chaos. After fifty years of sapped sovereignty, European states lack the material and imaginative resources for a counter-hegemonic project. Germany in particular has been further shackled to Atlanticism with each new crisis: Yugoslavia, the financial crash, Ukraine. \u2018Sleepwalkers\u2019 was the indelible term coined by Christopher Clark for the descent of the great powers into World War One. In the 2020s, the Europeans are wide awake, smiling and cheering, exulting in their \u2018<span style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">strategic autonomy<\/span>\u2019 as they are frogmarched towards the next global conflict for\u00a0<span class=\"small-caps\">us<\/span>\u00a0primacy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Susan Watkins, New Left Review: In March, Kiev\u2019s position at the Istanbul peace talks was for (hyper-guaranteed) neutrality and the retreat of Moscow\u2019s forces to pre-invasion lines. In April, the\u00a0us pulled the rug out from under the Russian\u2013Ukrainian talks, delivering &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/?p=19657\">Weiterlesen <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}