Is a US-Russia War Becoming Inevitable?

At the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland was invited to join the alliance. What does this mean for Finland? If Russian President Vladimir Putin breaches the 830-mile Finnish border, the United States will rise to Helsinki’s defense and fight Russia on Finland’s side.

What does Finland’s membership in NATO mean for America? If Putin makes a military move into Finland, the U.S. will go to war against the world’s largest nation with an arsenal of between 4,500 and 6,000 battlefield and strategic nuclear weapons.

No Cold War president would have dreamed of making such a commitment—to risk the survival of our nation to defend territory of a country thousands of miles away that has never been a U.S. vital interest. To go to war with the Soviet Union over the preservation of Finnish territory would have been seen as madness during the Cold War.

Recall: Harry Truman refused to use force to break Joseph Stalin’s blockade of Berlin. Dwight Eisenhower refused to send U.S. troops to save the Hungarian freedom fighters being run down by Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956. Lyndon B. Johnson did nothing to assist the Czech patriots crushed by Warsaw Pact armies in 1968. When Lech Walesa’s Solidarity was smashed on Moscow’s order in Poland in 1981, Ronald Reagan made brave statements and sent Xerox machines.

While the U.S. issued annual declarations of support during the Cold War for the “captive nations” of Central and Eastern Europe, the liberation of these nations from Soviet control was never deemed so vital to the West as to justify a war with the USSR.

Indeed, in the 40 years of the Cold War, NATO, which had begun in 1949 with 12 member nations, added only four more—Greece, Turkey, Spain, and West Germany. Yet, with the invitation to Sweden and Finland to join as the 31st and 32nd nations to receive an Article 5 war guarantee, NATO will have doubled its membership since what was thought—certainly by the Russians—to have been the end of the Cold War.

All the nations once part of Moscow’s Warsaw Pact—East Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria—are now members of a U.S.-led NATO—directed against Russia. Three former republics of the USSR—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—are now also members of NATO, a military alliance formed to corral and contain the nation to which they had belonged during the Cold War. Lithuania, with 2 percent of Russia’s population, has just declared a partial blockade of goods moving across its territory to Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave on the Baltic Sea. To Putin’s protest, Vilnius has reminded Moscow that Lithuania is a member of NATO.

It is a dictum of geostrategic politics that a great power ought never cede to a lesser power the ability to draw it into a great war.

In 1914, the kaiser’s Germany gave its Austrian ally a “blank check” to punish Serbia for its role in the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne. Vienna cashed the kaiser’s check and attacked Serbia, and the Great War of 1914-1918 was on. In March 1939, Neville Chamberlain issued a war guarantee to Poland. If Germany attacked Poland, Britain would fight on Poland’s side. Fortified with this war guarantee from the British Empire, the Poles stonewalled Hitler, refusing to talk to Berlin over German claims to the city of Danzig, taken from her at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler attacked and Britain declared war, a war that lasted six years and mortally wounded the British Empire. And Poland? At Yalta in 1945, Winston Churchill agreed that a Soviet-occupied Poland should remain in Stalin’s custody.

Putin is a Russian nationalist who regards the breakup of the USSR as the greatest calamity of the 20th century, but he is not alone responsible for the wretched relations between our countries. We Americans have played a leading role in what is shaping up as a Second Cold War, more dangerous than the first. Over the last quarter-century, after Russia dissolved the Warsaw Pact and let the USSR break apart into 15 nations, we pushed NATO, created to corral and contain Russia, into Central and Eastern Europe.

In 2008, neocons goaded Georgia into attacking South Ossetia, provoking Russian intervention and the rout of the Georgian army. In 2014, neocons goaded Ukrainians into overthrowing the elected pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. When they succeeded, Putin seized Crimea and Sevastopol, for centuries the home base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

In 2022, Moscow asked the U.S. to pledge not to bring Ukraine into NATO. We refused. And Putin attacked. If Russians believe their country has been pushed against a wall by the West, can we blame them?

Americans appear dismissive of dark Russian warnings that rather than accept defeat in Ukraine, the humiliation of their nation, and their encirclement and isolation, they will resort to tactical nuclear weapons. Is it really wisdom to dismiss these warnings as “saber-rattling”?

Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin (Kremlin.ru / via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Comments (9)

Of course it isn’t wise to dismiss warnings and continue provocation. But who in the US regime is wise? Tyrannical? Yes. Publicly admitting lies and corruption? Yes. Thieves and murderers? Yes.

If only there was an alternative to this neoliberal catastrophe that would respect the rights and freedoms of all.

The Ethics Of Liberty – https://thecrosssectionrmb.blogspot.com/

July 15, 2022 RMB Reply

Vietnam was not in any American vital interest..

July 17, 2022 Stephen Feldman Reply

Americans have not fought for any vital American interest since the Confederacy resisted Yankee aggression.

All wars thereafter, from the Spanish-American War on, have been Yankee-imperialist wars for political and economic dominion on the world stage (if not for territory in the old way, like Rome) and from self-congratulatory liberal-ideological globalist crusading. (Minding one’s own business and leaving others in peace are dispositions alien to the psychology of the ever-meddling Yankee neocon-liberal.)

These Yankee-imperial wars have all been AT THE EXPENSE OF AMERICA’S VITAL INTERESTS.

Since 1865, the Yankee-Hamiltonian outlook — with its over-arching concern for national glory, power, wealth and world empire — has dominated American foreign-policy circles and decision-making, and has monstrously disserved and obfuscated the actual or true interests of Americans . The Hamiltonian centralization and consolidation of American government since 1865 are of a piece with — and in reciprocal causal relation to — our imperial posture since 1865.

Now, the Yankee neocons and libs have us half way round the world, in Ukraine, in a dangerous (because potentially nuclear) proxy war with Russia, just as we are being invaded on our wide-open Southern border by over a quarter million a month of beggarly, unprepossessing, racially undesirable, tax-consuming, criminal, politically subversive gate-crashers, terrorists, and drug and child-sex dealers.

July 18, 2022 Winston McCuen Reply

You destroy your whole argument by trying to characterize all Central American immigrants as terroristic narco-trafficking pedophiles.

July 18, 2022 Oliver Reply

No, Oliver. Read more carefully. The string of six descriptive adjectives modify four distinct nouns.

July 19, 2022 Winston McCuen Reply

Moreover, in the sentence is question,, contrary to your claim, “pedophiles” is not even one of the nouns being modified.. Again, in that sentence, six descriptive adjectives are modifying four different and distinct nouns.

July 19, 2022 Winston McCuen Reply

Oliver, were you responding to Buchanan, or McCuen? Either way, I see nothing that suggests each and every immigrant coming into the US is a terrorist or pedophile, or both. But when a certain race of immigrants has a history of trafficking, unfortunately, we in America are going to be wary of that race coming into America unvetted. For instance, two million Mexicans crossing the border is definitely something to worry about, since Mexico has a high human trafficking rate. And lo and behold, human trafficking HAS gone up in the US since Biden’s open border policies. The immigrants crossing our borders just view American girls as free game at this point. They see so many criminals getting away with crime in the US, and they think, “wow, is there anything better than getting to do whatever we want with no consequences?”

http://beingreasonable.com/

July 20, 2022 Diet Woke Reply

Oh, and Oliver, I see that I said “every immigrant”, whereas you said “every Central American immigrant”, but even so, my argument still stands for Central American immigrants.

July 20, 2022 Diet Woke Reply

Poland was not the reason for the WWII, Poland was the beginning of WWII. Buchanan yet again is demagogically refusing to acknowledge this obvious fact.
Neither Britain nor France ever went to war for Poland. They were subsequently attacked by Germany as soon as they, collaborating with Stalin (Ribbentrop – Molotov pact), divided Poland. Buchanan knows very well the war was not about the corridor and Gdansk. Morgen die ganze Welt was yelled from the rooftops well before Sept. 1st 1939.

July 20, 2022 Christopher Waz Reply

Is a US-Russia War Becoming Inevitable?

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