Global politics
Was February 24th The Beginning Of World War Three?
Should we panic? Is it time to panic? We’re at a very perilous point in European history. What happens next?
So here’s the thing everyone wants to know. Is this the beginning of World War III? A simple question about an eventuality usually associated with hyperbolic comedy and overreaction. Now it’s a legitimate question, with almost everyone from boomer downwards having zero concept of what a full-blown land war in Europe might be like.
Having seen Band of Brothers and Dunkirk I can say with some faux-expertise I’m not keen. I’m also terrible at games like Call of Duty and Medal of Honour. where my speciality is running around without a strategy and panic shooting when surprised.
I am a liability to anyone on my team.
If I’m in the first draft in World War III then the world has real problems. But how likely is the current situation to escalate? What might require an armed Penguin like me to be airlifted to the front line to start shooting indiscriminately into the air before getting stuck in a corner.
I’d say ‘not very’ — then I’ve been wrong about geopolitics before and this one could get very messy, very fast
My first real concern is NATO
I’d say the real problem is NATO but this isn’t strictly true, there’s nothing wrong with NATO in principle. A bunch of countries in Western Europe making the Dumas epithet a military reality; ‘all thirty for one, and one for all thirty!’
From where I’m sitting, it does feel a little ‘First World War’. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the history, early 20th Century Europe was a selection of carefully posed alliances. This would hold the world in perfect balance as a form of empire based mutually assured destruction. The problem?
It turned out to be bollocks.
It was far easier to have a war than not have a war. The alliances continued to be triggered one after the other until everyone’s gran and their dog was involved and sending troops off to bash the enemy and win the war by Christmas.
Four Christmases later and it became apparent the proliferation of machine guns and other warfare technology had changed the game somewhat. An entire generation of young men were lost and the trauma of that conflict continues to rumble on in families today.
And here we are.
NATO is an alliance between most of the nations of Europe and America. It’s there to stabilise the world and prevent war and so far it’s worked perfectly. When the USSR collapsed, NATO gobbled up the Baltic countries and much of the Eastern bloc. Those countries became Western allies, Russia was left to lick its wounds and develop a passionate hatred of liberal democracy.
Divided between the Russian East and the Liberal West, Ukraine decided to join NATO in 2008 and have played the in-out game for a long time. What they’re after is a membership action plan. They finally made a determined effort to be in from 2020 onwards and Putin isn’t keen.
Ukraine is the physical geographical manifestation of the gulf between Western liberal democracy and Russian oligarch autocracy. The more likely it was Ukraine would join NATO, the more likely a Russian invasion would take place.
“Ukraine has shown to its principles and positions that we are fully prepared and able to be a member of NATO. This means that at the Madrid summit this year we hope to see and hear very specific conditions and information about this, because today, especially today, I would like to repeat that now this is a matter of life and death for our country.” — Andrii Yermak
At the moment the conflict remains limited to Ukraine. This is a proxy war. Despite its best efforts at the time of the invasion Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO and isn’t entitled to protection by other NATO members. It’s fending for itself while everyone else in Europe stands at the sidelines saying ‘shucks buddy, I wish we could do more, but we can’t’.
If they’d let Ukraine into the club back in 2008 we might be looking at a very different geopolitical ballgame.
Ukraine has very little chance of winning an outright war with Russia and we can expect its capital city Kyiv to fall within a matter of days. The President of Ukraine has simultaneously told everyone the military can handle it, but also put out the message that anyone who can hold a gun is welcome to join the army.
These two points seem somewhat at odds with each other. He’s also banned men between 18–60 from leaving the country.
What about the West?
Western leaders have never looked weaker. America has at its helm a man who probably served as a private in their Civil War and who recently withdrew troops from a previous conflict. In the general population, appetite for war on the other side of the world is very low. Isolationism is the order of the day.
A previous President was so keen to leave NATO that in 2019 the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee put a bill in front of Congress requiring Congressional approval for American withdrawal from NATO. The Tangerine Dream could be back by 2024 which would leave Russia in a very strong position and America taking a more ‘hands off’ position.
Given that European armies now consist of eighty men, one drone and a Spaniel called Trevor, if America withdraws its backing… I don’t fancy Western Europe’s chances against an empowered Putin.
Meanwhile, my homeland the UK has flounced out of Europe with zero friends and elected the posh equivalent of a village idiot. He’s a man with dreams about being Churchill, but lacking the wit, intelligence or political nous of his imagined hero. Johnson is the least equipped politician we could’ve picked to handle this situation and he’s the one we’re stuck with.
The Queen has Covid, Prince Andrew is paying off accusers, Prince Harry is causing chaos on Netflix, Prince Charles is mired in a cash-for-honours scandal. All this is unfolding while our PM is bogged down answering questions at police stations about parties he allegedly attended during Covid, (potentially breaking laws he created).
Let’s remember a few years ago, Russia flew two assassins over here and killed two British citizens in Salisbury. The response was a light verbal slap on the wrist by then Prime Minister Theresa May. Why might that be the case? Well… Russian nationals have been ploughing money into the Conservative Party for years.
Russia have been buying political power at an alarming rate. Throw in the alleged cyber assistance to elections like Brexit and the 2016 US Presidential election and a long-form game plan emerges from the shadows.
Elsewhere in Europe, the steady hand of Angela Merkel is out of the way, replaced by her relatively unknown (at least outside of Germany) Vice President. Macron seems to be leading the way on Western European rhetoric, but was recently ghosted by Putin a la Big Nev Chamberlain. He thought he was brokering peace, he was buying time for the olympics to finish. It may all be academic anyway.
NATO may already be undermined from within by Hungary.
Viktor Orban has no love for the liberal-left love-in of Western Europe, he’s been quickstepping to the political right since the late 1990s. He’s opposed to European troops being moved to the border and although he’s come out and said war would be bad for Europe, he has the general demeanour of Wormtongue from the Lord of the Rings films.
Orban’s position on Putin is an interesting one… he arguably has more in common with Vlad than the West and what happens if someone within NATO wants to cooperate with Russia? For the time being though, Orban is going to toe the ‘Putin was a naughty boy’ line.
A little like an elederly dog accidentally farting itself awake, Western Europe has been surprised by its own cohesive response.
What about further escalation?
The big question in my avian mind is ‘what will China do now?’ China has been looking at Taiwan for a long time, flying planes in and out of the South China Sea, being a bit obstinate and shitty in Hong Kong.
A little like Japan in the Second World War, it may use the distraction of proxy war elsewhere to achieve its political aims. America doesn’t want to get dragged into one war it definitely doesn’t want two… and Russia and China are two powerful economies allied in a common dislike.
If the West seems content to stand on the sidelines while Putin helps himself to a slice of Ukraine pie, the Chinese might start their own takeaway.
The rest of the world has made their feelings known through the United Nations — an organisation with all the teeth and bite of a geriatric manatee. The UN Secretary-General stood up and announced it was the saddest moment in his tenure.
That’ll show ’em. I don’t know about the rest of you but I certainly don’t want to see António Guterres weeping uncontrollably in the corridors of power.
But Putin may not want a war with NATO, at least not yet. It wouldn’t be as one-sided as his war with Ukraine. The Americans have already deployed forces into Poland, but with a populist isolationist challenger on the cards in a few years, that might all change.
Oh, and we shouldn’t forget that both the US and Russia have enough nuclear weapons to end the world a few times over. Mutually assured destruction still applies now the Cold War has become lukewarm again.
This was always the risk. History will see World War I and World War II as the same conflict… the same way the Hundred Years War, or the Napoleonic Wars were a collection of related conflicts. I think we’ll do the same here.
The collapse of the USSR might well have been temporary, we were just too caught up in the era to know.
What is indisputable is the fact that Putin is one of the most experienced and calculating leaders on the world stage. I’d argue this isn’t something he dreamed up in the last few months, this plan has been years in the making. The balance of power is shifting East, we can all feel it and this might be the straw that broke the imperialist hegemony.
And that could spell trouble for the rest of us. If the woke thinks things are bad under a liberal democracy, this could be the quick slap back into reality this generation needs.
But I think things might be worse than we think.
As with WWI, there’s a new type of conflict at play that hasn’t been fully tested yet. Cyber warfare. If Putin has spent years developing ways to crash entire cyber systems then we could be in for a wild ride. It could be banks, it could be businesses, it could be any part of the national infrastructure. We don’t know what cyber war looks like — but it could be terrifying.
Whatever happens, we’d better hope military tacticians adapt quicker than Lord Kitchener did to the machine gun.
The big problem
Relations between Moscow and the West have been slowly declining for years. It would be nice to say this is all Putin’s fault — but that’d be a one-sided look at the historical situation. NATO have been inching their way closer to Russian borders since the 1990s and every military advantage that could be taken has been taken.
For their part, Russia has been interfering in elections, buying political power and running an autocratic regime on the down-low. There’s zero trust remaining between Putin and the rest of the world.
That’s a scary backdrop on which to have a screaming argument with your neighbours. For many Europeans, the possibility of all-out war was unthinkable and has been so for the last few generations.
Perhaps we were too complacent. Perhaps we thought liberal democracy and peace were the status quo. History may suggest otherwise.
Too depressing? Want a surprisingly prescient comedy piece about Russian infiltration based on stock photography? Sure you do.
