| On 23 May, at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger struck a nerve with his remarks about war in Ukraine. Rather than getting caught up ‘in the mood of the moment’, Kissinger called on the West – led by the United States – to pursue a peace agreement that satisfied Russia’s interests. ‘Pursuing the war beyond [this] point’, Kissinger said, ‘would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself’.
Kissinger, by no means a peacenik, warned that this conflict risks not only establishing a new iron curtain around Eastern Europe and Asia but also perhaps erupting into open and lethal warfare between the West and Russia as well as China. By and large, the Western foreign policy establishment has rolled its eyes at and dismissed Kissinger’s comments.
We are seeing a dangerous military, economic, and political escalation by the United States and its Western allies against Russia and China. The United States seeks to prevent a historical process that seems inevitable, the process of Eurasian integration, which threatens the primacy of the Euro-Atlantic elites. It is this threat that drives the dangerous attempt by the United States to pursue global nuclear supremacy and use any means to ‘weaken’ both Russia and China, even at the risk of destroying the planet.
The three essays in this study – written by Deborah Veneziale, John Bellamy Foster, and John Ross – closely and rationally analyse the longer-term trends that have manifested themselves now in Ukraine. |
