So much depends on the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
It isn’t just the Ukraine war, the war in Gaza, a possible war with Iran, a regional war in the Middle East, and war over Taiwan. The very future of the United States is now at stake as never before. And bound up in that is the viability of the world’s liberal democracies in the face of totalitarianism in one form or another.
As for Ukraine, the survival of a democracy is quite an achievement on the part of the Ukrainians and their western supporters. The grotesque Putin invasion might well have snuffed it out – especially when the fact that the Kyiv government refused to believe that Putin was doing any more than sabre-rattling is remembered.
But now that the war has settled into a Flanders-style meat-grinder mode, the question arises as to whether or how the Ukrainians can repossess the heavily fortified occupied eastern territories seized by Russia since 2014, and whether they have the military resources to do so. Bearing in mind that conventional military wisdom is that an attacker needs at least three-to-one superiority and air superiority to dislodge defenders, the prospect of a successful counterattack on a large scale seems remote.
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With or without a Trump presidency, it appears increasingly likely that some form of armistice, like that in the Korean War along a de facto line of truce, will eventually transpire.
Does anyone seriously argue that the Ukrainians, even greatly rearmed with planes, missiles, munitions, and intelligence resources, are likely to expel the Russians from all of the eastern provinces and from the Crimea which was added to Ukraine in 1954?
Unless Putin’s regime collapses from the inside, it is more probable than not that such a stalemate will bed down as the outcome of Putin’s folly and his war crimes. If this becomes inevitable, the only remaining issue is whether the West offers and delivers Ukraine a security guarantee and a path to EU membership. Anything less would endanger all of eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Finlandisation of Ukraine would be a disastrous first part of a domino chain of regional subjugation.
If Putin wants a new Cold War, so be it. His policy of covert, low intensity subversion of western Europe’s democracies (which is to be seen in the attempted guerrilla-type attacks on the Paris Olympics) is serious but can be countered successfully.
As far as the Middle East is concerned, there is every sign that Israel has effectively destroyed most of the support it once had in the West, apart from the US. What has happened and is happening to the Palestinians at the hands of the Netanyahu government is simply unforgivable. The younger generation of Europeans and Americans will never forgive or forget what Israel has done.
After the horrific Hamas atrocity raid of October 7th 2023, I wrote here that the response of Netanyahu could be one that resounded though the ages if he refrained from doing what he now has done – unleashing a genocidal campaign of death and destruction on the innocent and helpless corralled in an enclave of hopelessness.
There is no forgiveness for what has happed to many tens of thousands of civilians, and hundreds of thousands of wounded, traumatised, bereaved, orphaned and childless human beings. Gaza is the scene of a crime against humanity. No legitimate purpose of Israel can remotely justify the scale and cruelty of what that state has released upon the innocent.
Extirpating Hamas is a forlorn aim – especially if an entire people are imbued with a hatred of the perpetrators who have condemned them to an existence of scrabbling for their relatives and their very way and means of life among the rubble of their world.
After a year, where are the hostages? Are many still alive? Can they survive the annihilation of their ruthless captors? Will they be yielded up as a prelude to the liquidation of every Hamas fighter or former activist? How does this savage bloodletting and genocide end up with a safe and secure Israel?
The UK is now distancing itself from Israel. So is public opinion right across the free world. At last, the Israeli settlements in the West Bank have been authoritatively declared illegal under international law. The perpetrators of the Hamas atrocity raid last October and the Israeli genocidal response will find themselves condemned as war criminals at the bar of international justice some day.
The war in Gaza must stop. It is not a war of self defence by any rational measure. It is not an existential struggle for the survival of a democracy which is governed by Netanyahu. It is cruel beyond words. It is unspeakably disproportionate. It is futile and self-destructive for the honour and future of all Israelis.
Trump and American Republicans may flirt with Netanyahu’s government but they are courting a deeper and dreadful danger for America and the free world. That is what is in issue in November.