by Michael F. Duggan
If anybody has a feeling for where the war in Ukraine is heading, I’m all ears. Sometimes you can adumbrate the direction of events even in the early stages (for many who read history, the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq seemed doomed from the start, and some of us predicted failure before they began). But other than grim and even apocalyptic generalities, this one beats me.
Early on I thought that invasion was Russia’s attempt to bite off the Donbas region and a punitive campaign to underscore Russia’s security claims about NATO expansion. Nobody would be stupid enough to try to take over, occupy, and subdue Europe’s second largest nation with an anemic force of fewer than 200,000 troops, I reasoned. I appear to have been wrong.
So what happens now? Does Russia continue to slowly occupy this Texas-size country? Does the Ukrainian Army melt away into the countryside to fight a protracted asymmetric people’s war, like the Taliban, Vietcong, and European resistance fighters of WWII? How soon after that do the bona fide atrocities start? When Western weapons start flowing over Ukraine’s porous borders with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania—all NATO countries—will Putin declare a wider war, the way that Nixon did against Cambodia in 1970? What if Poland were to give its old MiG-29s to Ukraine? When Ukrainian pilots fly these planes into Ukrainian combat airspace, will Russia consider it to be an attack by NATO? If the war becomes an open-ended festering sore, what are the odds that somebody at some point will miscalculate and start WWIII and by extension a thermonuclear holocaust? What if heavy ordinance hits one of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors or if zealots take over a power plant and threaten to blow it up or melt it down? At the very least, the war will work strongly against the international cooperation needed to address the unfolding crises of the environment. Again, if anybody sees a realistic way out of this that does not involve catastrophe, I’m listening.
Andrew Bacevich writes that the events in Ukraine do not constitute a departure from the existing historical paradigm. He is right: by itself the war does not inaugurate a new world. Rather it is a continuation of the insane old world—a political and policy world that is as old as humankind’s aggressive, irrational nature. Of course, if the current conflict were to spread and eventually turn nuclear on a global scale, that would be new. It would be the “unthinkable” conflict that the US and the USSR avoided during the Cold War. Because of this, the entire effort of the West should be dedicated to containing the war with the goal of reaching a peaceful resolution as soon as possible. At this point, both of these things seem unlikely or impossible.
The guiding star of US policy should be that nuclear weapons are a far more dangerous and permanent enemy than any temporal human foe or regime.