Having lost control of the escalatory ladder

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The politics around the war has become zero-sum and the peace of the victors is the goal. Put another way, all sides have lost control of the escalatory ladder.

There’s only one way, just one, that the Russo-Ukrainian war will end. A deal. Russia and Ukraine will sit down at a table some place and come to a peace agreement. This is inevitable. It is how wars stop.

What form the deal will take is an open question – maybe one side wins the war and dictates the terms of the peace. Perhaps the warring parties look ahead, decide that outright victory is unlikely, and negotiate an end to the hostilities. Such an agreement would probably make neither party happy, but at least the guns would be silenced and children won’t be rendered into chunks of screaming flesh.

Or third parties may intervene and cajole the combatants into an agreement; for example, the Chinese and Americans sit the Russians and Ukrainians down and hammer something out. Ukraine depends on American support to continue the war and Russia needs China to avoid economic collapse. This kind of scenario would require America and China to de-escalate their mutual and growing hatred, but that would be no bad thing.

So since a deal will be signed eventually, why not cut one now and avoid more bloodshed? For as Pope Francis wrote on 13 April 2022, “War disrupts everything, it is pure madness, its only goal is destruction and it develops and grows through destruction.”

At the moment a peace deal looks farther away than ever. Neither party is really in the mood for a lasting ceasefire and negotiations; total victory is the aim. How did we get here? A war threatening the viability of a sovereign democratic nation and the impacts – higher food and energy prices and ominous global instability – affecting us all?

The best chance for peace, at least in the immediate past, was during the build-up of Russian troops on the borders of Ukraine from October 2021 to this February. For whatever reason, the moment was lost. Another failure of the global architecture to prevent war. The African Union hasn’t stopped the conflicts in Libya and the Sahel. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has failed to halt the Rohingya genocide and the civil war in Myanmar. On 17 April 2022 Turkey, a member of NATO, sent aircraft and troops into northern Iraq to fight the Kurdistan Workers Party. The charter of the United Nations states that its purpose is “to maintain international peace and security”. It’s clearly not working.

Axiomatically, the most critical point of escalation in the Russo-Ukrainian war was Vladimir Putin’s immoral and unjustifiable decision to invade – make no mistake, this is Putin’s war of choice. There was also an escalation of rhetoric coming from America and its allies before the invasion, namely that if Putin launched a war, massive sanctions would result. Some American politicians were arguing at the time for pre-emptive sanctions, ie even before the invasion.

Since then the war has become more brutal and the sanction regime has become harsher. What started out as a strategy to prevent and then halt the war rapidly became something else: economic warfare. The sanctions are now an attempt to devastate the Russian economy and thus help the Ukrainians to win outright.

On 26 March 2022, President Joseph Biden said, “For God’s sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power.” While humanity would certainly be better off without repressive autocrats like Putin running around, Biden’s remark hardly suggests that a negotiated peace is on his agenda.

In reaction to Russia’s bombing kindergartens and executing civilians, the West’s material support to Ukraine's armed forces has increased dramatically and quickly. Hardly a day passes without one Western nation or another pledging more missiles, armoured vehicles and heavy artillery. Moreover, European nations are substantially increasing their own defence budgets. The bonds binding NATO nations have deepened and in all probability both Finland and Sweden will join the organisation. The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, said on 20 April 2022, “We will do everything possible ... to make sure that Ukraine will win the war.”

Russia’s only response to the sanctions, the West’s material support and the strengthening of NATO has been to double down on the war. In all likelihood Putin sees this as an existential war and he will continue it. And Russia has some friends left, most notably China which is rapidly building up its military. If you want to know where China stands, head on over to the Global Times, the English-language mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The jingoistic newspaper constantly repeats Russia’s propaganda and sees the West as fighting a neo-imperialist war against Russia and in the process is seeking to prevent China’s rise.

The Soviet Union’s greatest foreign policy victory was the CPC: Stalin backed Mao Zedong’s brutal rise within the party. The Soviets funded the CPC right from the start and provided very substantial military support during the party’s struggle against the nationalist government. There would be no communist China if it hadn’t been for the USSR. And this fact is not forgotten.

For the moment, China will continue to increase its trade with Russia and assist in softening the impact of Western sanctions. But what would happen if Russia started to really lose the war? The internal logic of the CPC might cause it to increase its support, fearing that a defeat would both undermine China’s geopolitical standing and increase America’s power. With every bit of extra support given, China would then drag itself deeper into the conflict.

The politics around the war has become zero-sum and the peace of the victors is the goal. Put another way, all sides have lost control of the escalatory ladder.

Another thing gets lost in every war: the voice of humanity. By its very definition, wars generate a “we vs them” mentality and any mention of the “we” is seen as support for the enemy. In addition to halting the sixth mass extinction and preventing catastrophic global warming, one of the progressive goals of humanity at large is to end all conflicts, to abolish all militaries, not to accept that war is an inherent part of the human condition. We should strain all of our common resources to obtain a lasting peace in places like Tigray, where mass rape and starvation are being used as weapons of war. There is no such thing as a good war.

In Unpopular essays the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” Putin fears NATO expansion and the loss of his throne. EU countries are scared that Russia will invade them again. Ukraine understandably fears dismemberment. America fears the end of its hegemony. And China is afraid that its rise to great power status will be thwarted. Fear underlies all the guns, bombs and sanctions. It is what lies behind the bellicose statements and absurd propaganda. 

Unless fear is overcome and peace becomes the priority of the powers that be, another type of deal is likely to end the war: Russia and Ukraine will grind each other down and have the peace of the exhausted, crippled and dead.

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