By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
On March 11, 2022, President Biden
reassured the American public and the world
that the United States and its NATO allies were
not at war with Russia. "We will not fight a war
with Russia in Ukraine," said Biden. "Direct
conflict between NATO and Russia is World War
III, something we must strive to prevent."
It is widely acknowledged that U.S. and NATO
officers are now
fully involved in Ukraine’s operational war
planning, aided by a broad range of US
intelligence gathering and analysis to
exploit Russia’s military vulnerabilities, while
Ukrainian forces are armed with US and NATO
weapons and trained up to the standards of other
NATO countries.
On October 5, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of
Russia’s Security Council,
recognized that Russia is now fighting NATO
in Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Putin has
reminded the world that Russia has nuclear
weapons and is prepared to use them "when the
very existence of the state is put under
threat," as Russia’s official nuclear weapons
doctrine declared in June 2020.
It seems likely that, under that doctrine,
Russia’s leaders would interpret losing a war to
the United States and NATO on their own borders
as meeting the threshold for the use of nuclear
weapons.
President Biden
acknowledged on October 6 that Putin is "not
joking" and that it would be difficult for
Russia to use a "tactical" nuclear weapon "and
not end up with Armageddon." Biden assessed the
danger of a full-scale
nuclear war as higher than at any time since
the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Yet despite voicing the possibility of an
existential threat to our survival, Biden was
not issuing a public warning to the American
people and the world, nor announcing any change
in US policy. Bizarrely, the president was
instead discussing the prospect of nuclear war
with his political party’s financial backers
during an election fundraiser at the home of
media mogul James Murdoch, with surprised
corporate media reporters listening in.
In an
NPR report about the danger of nuclear war
over Ukraine, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear weapons
expert at Harvard University, estimated the
chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon at 10 to
20 percent.
How have we gone from ruling out direct US
and NATO involvement in the war to US
involvement in all aspects of the war except for
the bleeding and dying, with an estimated 10 to
20 percent chance of nuclear war? Bunn made that
estimate shortly before the sabotage of the
Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea. What odds will he
project a few months from now if both sides keep
matching each other’s escalations with further
escalation?
The irresolvable dilemma facing Western
leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How
can they militarily defeat Russia, when it
possesses 6,000
nuclear warheads and its military doctrine
explicitly states that it will use them before
it will accept an existential military defeat?
And yet that is what the intensifying Western
role in Ukraine now explicitly aims to achieve.
This leaves US and NATO policy, and thus our
very existence, hanging by a thin thread: the
hope that Putin is bluffing, despite explicit
warnings that he is not. CIA Director
William Burns, Director of National
Intelligence
Avril Haines and the director of the DIA
(Defense Intelligence Agency), Lieutenant
General
Scott Berrier, have all warned that we
should not take this danger lightly.
The danger of relentless escalation toward
Armageddon is what both sides faced throughout
the Cold War, which is why, after the wake-up
call of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962,
dangerous brinkmanship gave way to a framework
of nuclear arms control agreements and safeguard
mechanisms to prevent proxy wars and military
alliances spiraling into a world-ending nuclear
war. Even with those safeguards in place, there
were still many close calls – but without them,
we would probably not be here to write about it.
Today, the situation is made more dangerous
by the dismantling of those nuclear arms
treaties and safeguards. It is also exacerbated,
whether either side intends it or not, by the
twelve-to-one imbalance between US and
Russian military spending, which leaves Russia
with more limited conventional military options
and a greater reliance on nuclear ones.
But there have always been alternatives to
the relentless escalation of this war by both
sides that has brought us to this pass. In
April,
Western officials took a fateful step when
they persuaded President Zelensky to abandon
Turkish- and Israeli-brokered negotiations with
Russia that had produced a promising
15-point framework for a ceasefire, a
Russian withdrawal and a neutral future for
Ukraine.
That agreement would have required Western
countries to provide security guarantees to
Ukraine, but they refused to be party to it and
instead promised Ukraine military support for a
long war to try to decisively defeat Russia and
recover all the territory Ukraine had lost since
2014.
US Defense Secretary Austin declared that the
West’s goal in the war was now to
"weaken" Russia to the point that it would
no longer have the military power to invade
Ukraine again. But if the United States and its
allies ever came close to achieving that goal,
Russia would surely see such a total military
defeat as putting "the very existence of the
state under threat," triggering the use of
nuclear weapons under its publicly stated
nuclear doctrine.
On May 23rd, the very day that Congress
passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine,
including $24 billion in new military spending,
the contradictions and dangers of the new
U.S.-NATO war policy in Ukraine finally spurred
a critical response from The New York
Times Editorial Board. A
Times editorial, titled "The Ukraine
War is Getting Complicated, and America Is Not
Ready," asked serious, probing questions about
the new U.S. policy:
"Is the United States, for example, trying to
help bring an end to this conflict, through a
settlement that would allow for a sovereign
Ukraine and some kind of relationship between
the United States and Russia? Or is the United
States now trying to weaken Russia permanently?
Has the administration’s goal shifted to
destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does
the United States intend to hold Putin
accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to
try to avoid a wider war…? Without clarity on
these questions, the White House…jeopardizes
long-term peace and security on the European
continent."
The NYT editors went on to voice what
many have thought but few have dared to say in
such a politicized media environment, that the
goal of recovering all the territory Ukraine has
lost since 2014 is not realistic, and that a war
to do so will "inflict untold destruction on
Ukraine." They called on Biden to talk honestly
with Zelenskyy about "how much more destruction
Ukraine can sustain" and the "limit to how far
the United States and NATO will confront
Russia."
A week later, Biden
replied to the Times in an Op-Ed
titled "What America Will and Will Not Do in
Ukraine." He quoted Zelenskyy saying that the
war "will only definitively end through
diplomacy," and wrote that the United States was
sending weapons and ammunition so that Ukraine
"can fight on the battlefield and be in the
strongest possible position at the negotiating
table."
Biden wrote, "We do not seek a war between
NATO and Russia.…the United States will not try
to bring about [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow." But
he went on to pledge virtually unlimited US
support for Ukraine, and he did not answer the
more difficult questions the Times asked
about the US endgame in Ukraine, the limits to
US involvement in the war or how much more
devastation Ukraine could sustain.
As the war escalates and the danger of
nuclear war increases, these questions remain
unanswered. Calls for a speedy end to the war
echoed around the UN General Assembly in New
York in September, where
66 countries, representing most of the
world’s population, urgently called on all sides
to restart peace talks.
The greatest danger we face is that their
calls will be ignored, and that the US
military-industrial complex’s overpaid minions
will keep finding ways to incrementally turn up
the pressure on Russia, calling its bluff and
ignoring its "red lines" as they have since
1991, until they cross the most critical "red
line" of all.
If the world’s calls for peace are heard
before it is too late and we survive this
crisis, the United States and Russia must renew
their commitments to arms control and nuclear
disarmament, and negotiate how they and other
nuclear armed states
will destroy their weapons of mass
destruction and accede to the
Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear
Weapons, so that we can finally lift this
unthinkable and unacceptable danger hanging over
our heads.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
are the authors of
War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless
Conflict, available from OR Books in
November 2022.
Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of
CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of
several books, including
Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics
of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent
journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the
author of
Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion
and Destruction of Iraq.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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