Earlier this morning while leisurely sipping Kenyan coffee, I noticed that World War 3 was trending on Twitter. So your man on Substack — you’re welcome — decided to investigate. And while Trending in the United States is not necessarily the most effective way to consume and process information, it was a notion not entirely without merit. My findings — No, we are not at this moment slouching towards an inevitable thermo-nuclear cataclysm with China and Russia. But, frankly, yes, things are getting very heated between the great powers of the planet. Allow me to explain.
Witness: Munich. At the Munich Security Conference this week, Western official after official — from Biden to Stoltenberg to Boris Pistorius — lined up behind Ukraine, offering steadfast reassurance, in the fight against Putin. The unity of the West against Russian aggression seemed, at least in the moment, certain. But then, this devastating assertion from Julia Ioffe in Puck that rings true:
There were a couple off the record events I went to, so I can’t say who they were with, but the distinct sense I was starting to get from them and as I left Munich was that for all the talk of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” the West was fundamentally not comfortable helping Ukraine to win on Ukraine’s terms. There was a very realistic and accurate assessment that Putin’s nuclear threats were not empty and that he very well might act on them if the Russian military collapsed or if Ukrainians took Crimea. That is, Putin would go nuclear if Ukraine won the war.
Putin has made this war existential. He cannot lose it and survive as the leader of Russia. At that point, everything is on the table, and given my conversations with Moscow, that still very much includes a potential tactical nuclear strike on the battlefield.
This, if correct, suggests a diplomatic solution that would cynically occur if and when the Ukrainian population was utterly exhausted and depleted. At this point Kiev would have no choice but to negotiate, with the West at its back. Such a dark and sanguinary diplomatic solution would probably entail rewarding Putin with the Donbas region as well as formalizing their control of Crimea. That is, of course, a very big if. And who would negotiate such a theoretical diplomatic solution? What world leader — what country — has the status to bring Putin and Zelensky as well as the West to the negotiating table?
Which brings us to what can only be properly construed as the bipolar disorder between the United States and China. American intelligence believes that China is considering sending offensive weaponry to Russia in the Ukraine. American officials — aided by the horrific political timing of the spy balloon — warned Chinese officials that any such weapons' transfers would be a “red line.” But the relationship between Russia and China is close, even as the relationship between China and America is veering towards an inevitable Cold War. We are in conscious decoupling phase, or, at least, as decoupled as the two largest economies in the world can aspire to become.
Latin America doesn’t want any part of this, by the way. Why should they? Argentina, Columbia and Brazil have all rejected American attempts to wrap them up in Vladimir Putin’s festering invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this year, Latin American leaders turned down a proposal by General Laura J. Richardson of the US Southern Command. The proposal was that Latin American countries would donate their old Russian-made military equipment to Ukraine. In exchange, Washington would replace it with superior American weaponry. “Brazil has no interest in passing on munitions to be used in the war between Ukraine and Russia,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said. Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro went even further. “Even if they end up as scrap in Colombia, we will not hand over Russian weapons to be taken to Ukraine to prolong a war,” he said.
In the Middle East is the Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict. This long lasting conflict involves many of the aforementioned players, such as Russian mercenaries laying waste to any and all architecture. And then there is Africa, forever overlooked by the West, though greatly affected by the price of grain because of the Ukraine War. Russia and China scramble across the Continent, madly, making up for lost time with their own, specific brands of neocolonialism. Ironically, the South African leadership is actually participating in military drills with those predatory, malevolent powers, seemingly unaffected by the probable domestic backlash. What fools these mortals be!
All in all, the consensus is that the so-called Third World is once again coalescing into a sort of “non-Aligned nations, 2.0.” The reintroduction of the non-aligned bloc in a bipolar world order — the “when elephants fight” strategy — though this time between Washington and Beijing, with Moscow on the outs. “The world order that seems to be emerging out of the Ukrainian rubble looks an awful lot like that of the Cold War,” writes Andrew Kluth for Bloomberg Opinion. “A democratic and capitalist First World would once again be facing off against an autocratic (and vaguely klepto-capitalist or post-communist) Second, with the Third yet again feeling up for grabs, overlooked, resentful and restive.” Indeed.
So, are we at World War 3? No. In many ways, alas, we have backslid to the Cold War period, immediately following World War 2, where one false move could turn things scorching hot. And the threat of nuclear war remains still looms. Which reminds me of that old quote from that forgotten philosopher George Santayana: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
“How Bellingcat collects, verifies and archives digital evidence of war crimes in Ukraine Nick Waters, who documents civilian harm caused by Russia’s invasion, explains how his team ensures their findings will stand up in court.” (Reuters)
“Last month, Pat Buchanan announced that he was retiring as a newspaper columnist, an event that went strangely under-noticed in the mainstream press. The simple fact is, Buchanan is one of the most influential writers and thinkers on the American right since World War II.” (Jeet Heer)
“Development is as an important part of the filmmaking process as the production or post, as important as the casting or selection of any of the participants.” (Ted Hope)
"The twelve architecture firms that have been revealed as participating in this stupid, brutal, and improbable vanity project are in no way marginal players." (The Baffler)
“The Universal film, directed by Elizabeth Banks, follows, quite literally, a black bear that consumes a significant amount of cocaine that is dropped in a forest, launching a murderous rampage of cops, criminals, tourists and teens.” (THR)
Come for the puppy learning to swim, stay for the comments section. (Reddit)