War is highly probable, but it is not inevitable.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

We are living in an extremely dangerous moment in history. We are also living in an extremely irrational time, at least when it comes to evaluating the mentality, conduct, and words of Western politicians and media in the face of disaster.

On the one hand, Western leaders, pundits, and military commanders clamor with predictions of war with Russia as being imminent. Yet on the other hand, there is an astounding dereliction to avert it. Diplomacy and understanding are boorishly shunned. Indeed, there is an absolutely irrational choice of escalation towards war, especially among European politicians.

Underlying this, of course, is an ideological supremacist belief, a contempt for Russia and other officially designated enemies (China, Iran, and so on), whereby the Western political class sees itself as superior, not as equals. That mentality makes for war and precludes diplomatic engagement and dialogue.

In any objective reading of the situation, there is little doubt that the danger of all-out world war is upon us. Incredibly, for the third time in just over a century, the planet is facing the specter of a massive international conflict. But on this occasion, the outcome would be nuclear conflagration with the extinction of life as we know it. This repeated destruction is a damning indictment of the Western system, its capitalist and imperialist engines for violence, domination and, inevitably, conflict. Surely, such a system should be abolished.

The Doomsday Clock, overseen by the independent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is at its closest point to midnight in all of 80 years of existence. The clock was inaugurated following the U.S. atomic horror attacks on Japan in 1945. It was meant to serve as a warning of the increasing risk of nuclear war. It is truly a frightening spectacle that today’s danger of global disaster surpasses the many perils that were encountered during the Cold War decades. Today’s tensions surpass even those of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the United States and the Soviet Union edged towards a nuclear war.

Many Western scholars, legal experts, analysts, and seasoned diplomats have increasingly added their voices warning of the ultimate disaster. We pay respect to the sane voices of people like Alfred de Zayas, Jeffrey Sachs, Larry Johnson, and Scott Ritter, voices in the West that, unlike their political class, are passionately warning of the path to perdition the world is on and needs to urgently get off.

The warning words are flashing like a red light, yet Western leaders keep making decisions and issuing belligerent statements that are driving the world to the precipice.

This week, European politicians have again openly advocated attacking the Russian Federation by blockading Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and NATO chief Mark Rutte (former Dutch premier) have echoed calls from other European politicians to effectively attack Kaliningrad, that is, to attack the Russian Federation. Russia’s nuclear doctrine explicitly states that such an assault compels it to use nuclear weapons in response.

So, why do NATO leaders keep pushing provocation? Such moves are merely an extension of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Their war is a failure. But the Western pro-war politicians cannot admit they are wrong. They are willing to incite a wider war rather than admit defeat and face the political repercussions from their own citizens.

Russia this week issued a grave warning, saying that any attack on Kaliningrad would result in Russian retaliation with nuclear weapons.

Instead of coming to their senses and sobering up, European politicians haughtily dismiss Russia’s warnings as a “bluff” or accuse Moscow of nuclear saber-rattling.

In a plenary address to the Valdai forum in Moscow on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin underlined the infernal precariousness.

“If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation – in this case, Kaliningrad, although it could potentially involve other territories as well – the question of Russia using all the weapons at its disposal would inevitably and immediately arise. That is inevitable,” said Putin.

In an ominous assessment of the reckless direction, he noted:

“We must realise that the moment when nothing can be changed any longer may come very quickly and unexpectedly for everyone. The logic of escalating, increasingly harsh retaliatory measures leads to a fatal point of no return.”

The Russian leader is saying that the West’s relentless escalation in words and deeds is leading to an abyss. Incredibly, the Western politicians refuse to restrain themselves. “At the heart of this escalation lie arrogance and overconfidence… The spiral is tightening, and the devastating consequences are growing.”

This appalling dynamic is redolent of the prelude to the First and Second World Wars, when Western political establishments were insouciant about the impending doom.

But a Third World War is truly a point of no return.

“All the more so today, when the arsenals of the world’s leading powers contain weapons capable of destroying all life or, at the very least, reducing the Earth to a catastrophic state,” Putin said.

What is deplorable is the total propagandizing of public discussion in the West. Anyone who dares to speak about the objective historical causes that have given rise to the current tensions is censored or pilloried as a Russian stooge.

There are eminent voices of sanity in the West, as noted above. But they are systematically excluded from public discourse by the mainstream media and academia. The public has to rely on alternative media sources for information. That has, thankfully, energized critical views among citizens in ever greater numbers, who are questioning the whole warmongering policy of inordinate military spending and weapons for Ukraine to fight a futile war against Russia. Notably, this week German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and NATO’s Mark Rutte were heckled and booed when they appeared in public in Muenster, Germany.

Increasing numbers of people understand that we have been pushed to an existential crisis by Western governments (regimes) who took undemocratic, secret decisions to wage war against Russia years ago.

As former British diplomat Ian Proud pointed out in an excellent podcast this week while attending the Sochi forum, the rulers in London made a conscious decision to go to war with Russia as far back as 2014, when the West sponsored the fascist coup in Kiev.

Other Western figures, like former U.S. state planner Victoria Nuland and former NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, have also admitted in their own words that NATO deliberately weaponized Ukraine after 2014 for the purpose of confronting Russia. This was before the hostilities erupted in Ukraine in February 2o22.

Thus, the world has been pushed to a nuclear “extinction event” all because of Western policy to pursue confrontation with Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy.

War is highly probable, but it is not inevitable. Western politicians and media, through their arrogance and Russophobia, are certainly doing their worst to make it inevitable. But these criminal elements may not prevail.

There are international structures and laws; there is still diplomacy, albeit abused and trashed; perhaps more importantly, there is mass public opinion against the odious warmongers; and there is a burgeoning social and political uprising against the evidently bankrupt Western political system.

The political elite in the West who are pimping for war may seem dominant, owing to apparently dominant media narratives. But their power is vastly overrated against the huge public opposition to their criminal agenda.

History may rhyme, as with lead-ups to previous infamous wars. This time, however, a crucial difference is that there may be sufficient public awareness so as not to fall for the warmonger ruse of bailing out the rotten system.

We are on the eve of destruction, but there is every sound hope that rather than war, the destruction tomorrow could be that of the Western imperialist system, thereby giving way to a truly better, more just and peaceful world.

Peace cannot be built through uninterrupted rearmament or by forcing one side into capitulation.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

This is the first part of Mats Alexandersson’s series on war, peace, and security. The next three parts will be published during September and October on the Clarté blog.

For a long time, the United States has united economic, financial, military, and political power to secure a U.S.-centered capitalist world order. This has often been legitimized with what has been called liberal hegemony: a rhetoric in which democracy, individual rights, market economy, and international rules are presented as universal norms. But in practice, these principles have repeatedly been subordinated to the demand to preserve American supremacy and prevent rival great powers from dominating strategic regions.

What has come to be called the rules-based world order has therefore also functioned as a self-image and a language of power. The United States has ascribed to itself a special historical task: to guarantee stability, open markets, and security in the world economy. This belief in an American superiority with a special historical task has become a kind of meta-ideology. Behind this universalism, however, a more tangible class and power interest has operated, in which the American state’s geopolitical role has ultimately served the expansion and security of capital.

Two figures clearly demonstrate this line. Henry Kissinger made American realpolitik visible in its most brutal form. In Chile, the United States helped undermine Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government and subsequently supported Pinochet’s dictatorship. The same logic recurred in Cambodia, East Timor, and support for Pakistan’s military regime: democracy and human life had to give way to geopolitical control.

When Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard in 1997 more sophisticatedly formulated that no rival must be allowed to dominate Eurasia, this practice became an explicit doctrine.1 The line from Kissinger to Brzezinski is therefore clear: from secret intervention to open strategy for global supremacy. It is in this development that today’s bloc formation, war economy, and growing risk of great-power war must be understood.

The painting “Die Namenlosen” (1916) by the Austrian painter Albin Egger-Lienz.
Why Eurasia is gaining additional significance

Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio constitutes a central node in the U.S. foreign and security policy apparatus, where the White House, the Pentagon, intelligence services, NATO, and financial policy bodies cooperate. At the same time, the strategic environment is increasingly shaped by the technology and defense industry: AI, cloud, satellite, semiconductor, and weapons companies influence the technology of war, information flows, and investments. American hegemony therefore appears not only as state exercise of power, but as an intertwined military, digital, and financial system.

On Brzezinski’s map, Europe was never peripheral. In The Grand Chessboard, Eurasia is described as the decisive geopolitical playing field, and Europe as the United States’ most important bridgehead on the continent. An integrated Europe, bound to the United States through the transatlantic link and NATO, would strengthen American influence in western Eurasia. Europe therefore appears less as an independent power pole than as a strategic platform in a U.S.-led order.

This logic becomes clearest in Brzezinski’s view of Russia and Ukraine. He argued that Russia’s most important geostrategic option lay in a Western orientation, but on terms that did not make the country an equal power pole. Ukraine was given a key role as a “geopolitical pivot”: without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire, while control over Ukraine would once again give the country decisive strategic weight. Here the limitation of the great-power perspective is also visible: Ukraine has been reduced to a piece in a larger power game, despite its own political agency and right to self-determination.

Brzezinski advocated a geopolitical pluralism in Eurasia, that is, an order in which no single power may dominate the entire continent. In practice, this meant that the United States should support regional counterweights, alliances, and independent states in order to limit both a revanchist Russia and a rising China. That model can be interpreted as a strategy for balance of power, but also as a manual for playing regional actors against one another in order to preserve American supremacy.

The same approach characterized Brzezinski’s analysis of Central Asia and the Caucasus, which he described as the “Eurasian Balkans”: an area where energy, transport routes, weak states, and ethnic conflicts make the region an object of great-power rivalry. The region thus becomes primarily of strategic value to external powers, not through the local societies’ own goals. Superpower thinking turns smaller countries into objects of geopolitics rather than equal political subjects.

There is rearmament for war

The historical retrospective is needed to understand today’s situation. The war in Ukraine, Europe’s rearmament, and the growing fear of a Russian conflict with NATO cannot be explained solely as the consequence of an isolated conflict. They must also be seen against the background of the U.S.-led security order that emerged after the Cold War — an order whose goal has been to preserve American dominance in Eurasia. Today, this policy has had contradictory consequences: Russia, China, and Iran have moved closer to one another, Europe’s room for maneuver has been limited, and the risk of great-power conflict has increased.

Brzezinski’s book formulated this strategy unusually openly. The United States was to prevent a rival power or coalition from gathering sufficient strength to dominate Eurasia. This meant limiting a resurrected Russia, preventing China from becoming an equal competitor, and keeping Europe politically and militarily tied to the United States. In this perspective, NATO is not only a defense alliance, but also a tool for American power projection in Europe and its neighborhood.

The Eurasian counterweight

Cooperation between China, Russia, and Iran is more than a temporary reaction to sanctions and individual wars. China contributes industry, capital, and market; Russia contributes energy, raw materials, military capability, and geographical depth; Iran contributes regional weight and a strategic location. Their interests are not identical, and the cooperation contains clear contradictions. But the relationship between China and Russia has acquired a material foundation that makes it more durable than many Western assessments previously assumed.

Here lies an ironic consequence. A policy intended to prevent a Eurasian counterweight may have helped create it. At the same time, the United States faces its own economic tensions: large budget deficits, growing national debt, and high interest rates increase vulnerability. The dollar’s status as a reserve currency continues to provide room for maneuver, but does not eliminate the risk of a crisis of confidence. The cost of such a crisis would likely be passed on to ordinary wage earners through inflation, cutbacks, and deteriorating public services.

Europe’s dilemma

Economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued that Europe has historically had significant economic complementarity with Russia: European industry and technology could be linked to Russian energy, raw materials, and market. According to Sachs, sanctions, conflict policy, and dependence on the United States have broken this possibility and weakened Europe’s strategic independence.2

That assessment is disputed, not least because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has drastically changed the conditions for economic cooperation. But it raises a necessary question: Can Europe formulate its own security policy, or is the continent reduced to an arena for other powers’ conflict? Sachs advocates direct diplomacy with Moscow, a clearer separation between EU foreign policy and NATO, and a European defense that is more independent and less dependent on the United States.

The risk of war

The acute danger is escalation. There is no simple or risk-free path to a military defeat for Russia, but policy continues to sharpen the confrontation. If the goal slides from Ukraine’s defense to a lasting weakening or subjugation of Russia, the risk increases that the proxy war turns into a direct conflict between nuclear powers.

Peace cannot be built through uninterrupted rearmament or by forcing one side into capitulation. A sustainable peace requires diplomacy, recognized security interests, and an international order in which no great power is given the right to dominate others. Public opinion in Europe and the United States can become decisive: when the costs of the arms race, social cutbacks, and the risk of war become clear, pressure can grow for a different course.

Le perdite dell’Ucraina diventano sempre più difficili da nascondere di fronte ai crescenti problemi di mobilitazione e alla carenza di risorse umane. Le dichiarazioni di Tusk e Budanov sollevano il velo sulla portata della crisi, che potrebbe portare a un ulteriore inasprimento della mobilitazione.

Segue nostro Telegram.

Lo scorso maggio, Anne Keast-Butler, direttrice del Government Communications Headquarters (Gchq) britannico, ha dichiarato che, alla fine di maggio, le forze armate russe avevano subito quasi mezzo milione di morti e circa un milione tra feriti e dispersi.

Richard Knighton, Capo di Stato Maggiore delle forze armate britanniche, ha fornito ulteriori dettagli. Secondo le sue valutazioni, enunciate l’11 settembre, l’esercito russo avrebbe riportato una quota preponderante delle perdite a partire dal gennaio 2023. Cioè da quando «la Russia ha conquistato appena il 2% del territorio ucraino […]. Credo che queste cifre mostrino chiaramente lo spreco insensato e futile di vite umane a fronte di progressi così scarsi e per un obiettivo così illegittimo del presidente Putin», ha affermato Knighton.

Per lo Stato Maggiore di Londra, le perdite totali subite dalla Russia in Ucraina supererebbero l’ammontare complessivo dei caduti registrati dalle forze armate sovietiche e russe in tutti i conflitti combattuti dalla seconda metà del XX Secolo.

Le stime dell’alto comando britannico risultano sostanzialmente convergenti con quelle formulate dal Center for Strategic and International Studies (Csis) statunitense, che all’inizio di luglio quantificava in 1,4 milioni di unità il totale delle vittime riportato dalla Russia, tra cui circa 450.000 morti.

Mediaziona, testata indipendente russa che, con la collaborazione della «Bbc», tiene dall’inizio del conflitto il conto dei caduti russi sulla base dell’analisi di registri cimiteriali, necrologi e post sui social network, fornisce una stima di quasi 260.000 morti e oltre 350.000 feriti al 21 settembre.

Quanto alle perdite ucraine, è molto più difficile reperire stime pubbliche all’interno dei Paesi membri della Nato. Un delle poche eccezioni era costituita dal Csis, che a giugno stimava 125.000-150.000 morti e 400.000-500.000 feriti.

Qualcosa è tuttavia cominciato a cambiare. Lo scorso 17 settembre, nel corso di un intervento pronunciato davanti alla Camera Bassa del Parlamento polacco, il primo ministro Tusk ha affermato, sulla base di informazioni ottenute dal governo ucraino, che, «di recente, l’Ucraina ha registrato 27.000 tra morti e feriti al mese; si tratta, purtroppo, di cifre record nel senso più triste del termine per questa guerra. A questo ritmo, l’inverno in Ucraina potrebbe rivelarsi catastrofico».

Tusk ha imputato il netto peggioramento della situazione sul fronte bellico alle «nuove capacità tecnologiche della Russia», a partire dai droni dotati di motore a reazione impiegati con sempre maggiore frequenza dalle forze armate russe.

Non è chiaro se il dato numerico indicato dal premier polacco si riferisca al periodo estivo o a un lasso di tempo più lungo, ma risulta perfettamente compatibile con il quadro tratteggiato soltanto poche settimane prima da Budanov, che in qualità di capo del gabinetto del presidente Zelensky ed ex direttore del Gur aveva quantificato in almeno 30.000 persone al mese l’ammontare minimo degli ucraini da mobilitare per reggere l’urto russo.

Le valutazioni relative alle perdite riportate dall’Ucraina formulate da Tusk e Budanov non collimano affatto con le stime riferite dal presidente Zelensky, che a luglio aveva parlato di 50.000 caduti e 400.000 feriti subiti dall’Ucraina a partire dal febbraio 2022, e risultano profondamente discordanti rispetto alla narrazione propinata in tutto l’Occidente fin dall’inizio del conflitto.

Con qualche eccezione. In un’intervista rilasciata a «Sky News Australia» nell’ottobre dello scorso anno (segnalata in Italia soltanto da «Analisi Difesa»), James Carden, specialista di questioni geostrategiche con trascorsi come consigliere del Dipartimento di Stato per le relazioni russo-statunitensi sotto l’amministrazione Obama, dichiarò che «dalle mie fonti risulta che il rapporto di perdite tra ucraini e russi è di 36 a 1. Sono le perdite ucraine ad essere vicine a un milione. La guerra d’attrito attuata fin dall’inizio dai russi è stata un successo, sono gli ucraini ad essere sull’orlo del disastro».

Nel novembre 2022, la stessa presidente della Commissione Europea Ursula Von der Leyen si lasciò sfuggire che l’Ucraina aveva subito fino a quel momento circa «oltre 20.000 caduti civili e 100.000 soldati». Senonché, il filmato originale del discorso fu rimosso e sostituito con una versione “epurata” dallo scottante riferimento alle perdite ucraine.

Resta quindi da capire il perché due dei più strenui sostenitori dello sforzo bellico ucraino come Tusk e Budanov abbiano deciso proprio ora di sollevare il velo su una realtà molto meno edificante rispetto a quella descritta da governi e giornali sia negli Stati Uniti che in Europa.

Una infusione di pessimismo risulta funzionale per un verso a “predisporre” l’opinione pubblica ad accettare nuovi e ben più gravosi sacrifici per sostenere l’Ucraina, identificata a tutt’oggi come “scudo d’Europa” dal presidente Zelensky e dai suoi collaboratori.

Per l’alto, a legittimare l’adozione di misure che restringano il perimetro legislativo per il conferimento dello status di rifugiati agli ucraini in età di servizio militare. Si tratta, in altri termini, di aprire il varco a provvedimenti implicanti il rimpatrio forzato, prodromico al reclutamento nelle fila dell’esercito, di almeno una parte dei cittadini ucraini riparati presso i Paesi membri dell’Unione Europea. A partire proprio dalla Polonia, che di concerto con Russia e Germania ospita il maggior numero di rifugiati ucraini divenuti nel corso dei mesi oggetto di crescente risentimento popolare.

Budanov, dal canto suo, ha riconosciuto il forte malcontento suscitato in seno all’opinione pubblica ucraina dai sempre più ricorrenti episodi di mobilitazione forzata, e posto contestualmente l’accento sulla necessità che lo Stato adotti un approccio più costruttivo.

A tale scopo, il viceministro della Difesa Liubov Halan ha annunciato un’imminente riforma dei Centri territoriali di reclutamento che sembra tuttavia discostarsi profondamente dalle raccomandazioni dell’ex direttore del Gur.

Lo si evince dalle affermazioni di Roman Kostenko, che in qualità di segretario della Commissione Parlamentare per la Sicurezza Nazionale, la Difesa e l’Intelligence ha proclamato l’introduzione di “modifiche radicali” alle procedure di mobilitazione, comprendenti una possibile abbassamento dei requisiti per la coscrizione relativi all’età contestualmente al passaggio a un modello di reclutamento più “estensivo” reso impellente anche dalla portata sempre più imponente del fenomeno dei cosiddetti “imboscati”.

Già nel gennaio di quest’anno, l’allora ministro della Difesa Fedorov aveva dichiarato alla Verkhovna Rada di aver ereditato oltre 200.000 casi di “abbandono arbitrario del reparto” (un reato distinto dalla diserzione perché presuppone l’intenzione di tornare a combattere da parte dell’inosservante) e più di due milioni di cittadini ricercati per renitenza alla leva.

Le donne restano, quantomeno per ora, escluse dalla riforma del meccanismo di coscrizione, come specificato dalla Verkhovna Rada attraverso una nota che sottolineava l’assenza di iniziative legislative e perfino di discussioni interne riguardo la mobilitazione femminile. Il pronunciamento del Parlamento ucraino fa seguito alle dichiarazioni di Keith Kellogg, generale a riposo ed ex inviato speciale dell’amministrazione Trump per l’Ucraina e la Russia secondo cui Kiev dovrebbe procedere al coinvolgimento delle donne, in quanto «combattono bene quanto gli uomini». Negli stessi giorni in cui Kellogg forniva i suoi suggerimenti, il «Telegraph» descriveva il servizio militare femminile in Ucraina come una vittoria per il femminismo, riportando le dichiarazioni di un’operatrice di droni favorevole alla leva femminile.

La proposta di mobilitare la componente femminile della società ucraina era già stata discussa all’inizio del 2026, dopo che una donna comandante di unità di droni aveva appoggiato pubblicamente l’idea sull’onda del clamore popolare suscitato dalle convocazioni militari recapitate per errore a una decina abbondante di donne ucraine. Nei primi giorni di agosto, è stata presentata una petizione che sollecita la coscrizione delle donne senza figli, sponsorizzata dall’ex ministro della Difesa Alekseij Reznikov secondo cui, «così come Israele, possiamo sopravvivere solo se tutti accettano di dover difendere l’Ucraina […]. Il reclutamento delle donne, raddoppierebbe le nostre risorse per la mobilitazione».

Non basta rendere sicuri i singoli sistemi di intelligenza artificiale, bisogna guardare alle loro interazioni. È una lezione lasciata dalla crisi finanziaria: comportamenti individualmente razionali possono produrre risultati collettivamente disastrosi.

L'articolo L’intelligenza artificiale ha un problema di stabilità proviene da Lavoce.info.