by Laurie Calhoun | Jul 5, 2022
Wars are fought by leaders who intend to win, one way or another, using any and all means available to them. The Cold War was a decades-long series of proxy battles between the two nuclear-armed superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, during which the communist and capitalist arch enemies engaged in conflict on the terrain of lesser states, to the detriment of millions of civilians living in those places. But the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in neither a period of world peace nor a dramatically reduced U.S. military budget. Instead, U.S. foreign policy elites, emboldened by a newfound sense of impunity, suddenly realized that they could wage war and impose their will wherever and whenever they pleased. Who, after all, was going to stop them?
Despite the complete conversion of post-Soviet Russia to capitalism, the fear-driven antipathy used to promote and prolong the Cold War has been rehydrated among War Party duopolists, many of whom, perhaps addled by six years of mainstream media obsession with the Russiagate hoax, appear to have forgotten why the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. were enemies in the first place. Better dead than red! was the slogan which drove policymakers to attempt to stop the expansion of the Soviet empire by all means necessary. Better dead than red! concisely conveys the fervor which gave rise to both the massive development and stockpiling of nuclear warheads and the creation of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The current curious quest on the part of hawks to support nonnuclear-armed Ukraine as it fends off nuclear-armed Russia reflects a failure to understand the logic of not only war but also nuclear deterrence. The most glaring problem is that if, against all indicators, Ukraine were somehow to prevail in the conventional war against Russia, it would remain an option for Putin to deploy nuclear weapons, against which Ukraine would have no defense. Given that this conflict has morphed into a quasi-proxy war, with massive U.S. funding and CIA operatives on the ground in Ukraine, any use by Russia of nuclear weapons would likely trigger the use of the same by the United States.
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