Editorial – An end to the war in Ukraine?
Hopefully the war in Ukraine will end quickly. Ideally, it should end immediately and unconditionally — in the interest of humanity in general and the working class in particular, the killing and destruction should just stop — but this is not how wars end. Unless one side wins outright, there are negotiations based on the perceived balance of force between the two sides.
Russia claims the main issue at stake in Ukraine has been whether or not the country should join NATO, with the rulers of the Russian state arguably perceiving this as an existential threat in the same way that in 1962 the rulers of the USA saw the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba. On that occasion Russia backed down and the crisis was defused. In 2022 the US and its allies in NATO refused to back down. So did Russia and they decided to invade.
Normally, wars are fought to win but the US declared that its aim was limited to weakening Russia by forcing it to divert resources into fighting a war without end. Russia has been waging war to win, perhaps not necessarily to conquer the whole of Ukraine but certainly to conquer as much as it can along its frontier and to force Ukraine to sue for peace.
Russia would certainly like to capture Odessa and Kharkov too but it looks as if they will have to settle for the 20 percent of mineral-rich Ukraine that they have already taken, if only on condition that what’s left of Ukraine doesn’t join NATO (or, ideally, the EU either). A block on NATO membership seems to be what Trump has offered Putin as the basis for a settlement, which has come as shock both to the Ukrainian government and the European members of NATO.
The European leaders were also shocked at the US exploiting Ukraine’s weakness to extract free access to rare earth metals there. They saw this as ‘transactional’ and said NATO was about ‘defending democracy’ rather than such sordid considerations. Maybe NATO is not primarily economic but this was no shock to socialists. It’s how we would expect a state engaged in the competitive struggle for profits to behave given half a chance,
Why this change of US attitude? We can only speculate. America seems to have decided that Ukraine’s joining NATO is not after all that strategically important from its point of view, especially when it has other, more important strategic considerations in East Asia and the South China Sea and has arguably been pulling back from many of its foreign commitments for years, the latest being Afghanistan.
Since the complete defeat of the USSR in the Cold War, represented by its break-up into independent states at the end of December 1991, what was left as Russia has not constituted too much of a threat to the US as such. No doubt there are revanchists among Russia’s ruling elite who dream of re-incorporating the parts of the former USSR such as the Baltic statelets, but not necessarily to overrun the whole of the rest of Europe, as claimed by war-mongering generals and fabulating politicians.
The US has decided that that’s not its problem but Europe’s to deal with — and, more particularly, to pay for. European governments, including Labour here, are to increase military spending. Another example of how capitalism wastes resources that, in a different world, could be used to meet people’s needs.