Erik
Bulatov (USSR), People
in the Landscape,
1976.
Dear
friends,
Greetings
from the desk of Tricontinental:
Institute for Social
Research.
There
was a time when calls
for a nuclear-free
Europe rang across the
continent. It began with
the Stockholm Appeal
(1950), which opened
with the powerful words
‘We demand the outlawing
of atomic weapons as
instruments of
intimidation and mass
murder of peoples’ and
then deepened with the
Appeal for European
Nuclear Disarmament
(1980), which issued the
chilling warning ‘We are
entering the most
dangerous decade in
human history’. Roughly
274 million people
signed the Stockholm
Appeal, including – as
is often reported
– the entire adult
population of the Soviet
Union. Yet, since the
European appeal of 1980,
it feels as if each
decade has been more and
more dangerous than the
previous one. ‘It is still
90 seconds to midnight’,
the editors at the Bulletin
of the Atomic
Scientists (the
keepers of the Doomsday
Clock) wrote
in January. Midnight is
Armageddon. In 1949, the
clock sat at three
minutes to midnight, and
in 1980 it had retreated
slightly from the
precipice, back to seven
minutes to midnight. By
2023, however, the
clock’s hand had moved
all the way up to ninety
seconds to midnight,
where it remains, the
closest we have ever
been to full-scale
annihilation.
This
precarious situation is
threatening to reach a
tipping point in Europe
today. To understand the
dangerous possibilities
that could be unleashed
by the intensified
provocations around
Ukraine, we collaborated
with No
Cold War to
produce briefing no. 14,
NATO’s Actions in
Ukraine Are More
Dangerous than the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
Please read this text
carefully and circulate
it as widely as
possible.
![](https://ci4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/Lwi_AVY31qk0RMOuolQihGSIAia7V_rx1E_gRjF_8Ncg3sEoBx3x1reVJxKJ_PcBfBkQoh9lDYftjzUsx7Lvf9fX9g4spO1IBecVEJ8iEaicAWbrPDYogWq6BOeFHg8vk08MTn148SWB4J4x06l3i9w=s0-d-e1-ft#https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Briefing14_Card_EN-e1719421770376.png)
For
the past two years,
Europe’s largest war
since 1945 has been
raging in Ukraine. The
root cause of this war
is the US-driven attempt
to expand the North
Atlantic Treaty
Organisation (NATO) into
Ukraine. This violates
the promises
the West made to the
Soviet Union during the
end of the Cold War,
such as that NATO would
move ‘not one inch
eastward’, as US
Secretary of State James
Baker assured Soviet
President Mikhail
Gorbachev in 1990. Over
the past decade, the
Global North has
repeatedly snubbed
Russian requests for
security guarantees. It
was this disregard for
Russian concerns that
led to the outbreak of
the conflict in 2014 and
the war in 2022.
Today,
a nuclear-armed NATO and
a nuclear-armed Russia
are in direct conflict
in Ukraine. Instead of
taking steps to bring
this war to an end, NATO
has made several new
announcements in recent
months that threaten to
escalate the situation
into a still more
serious conflict with
the potential to spill
beyond Ukraine’s
borders. It is no
exaggeration to say that
this conflict has
created the greatest
threat to world peace
since the Cuban Missile
Crisis (1962).
This
extremely dangerous
escalation confirms the
correctness of the
majority of US experts
on Russia and Eastern
Europe, who have long
warned against the
expansion of NATO into
Eastern Europe. In 1997,
George Kennan, the
principal architect of
US policy in the Cold
War, said
that this strategy is
‘the most fateful error
of American policy in
the entire post-Cold War
era’. The Ukraine war
and the dangers of
further escalation fully
affirm the seriousness
of his warning.
Elif
Uras (Turkey), Kapital,
2009.
How
Is NATO Escalating the
Conflict in Ukraine?
The
most dangerous recent
developments in this
conflict are the
decisions by the US
and Britain
in May to authorise
Ukraine to use weapons
supplied by the two
countries to conduct
military attacks inside
Russia. Ukraine’s
government immediately
used this in the most
provocative way by attacking
Russia’s ballistic
missile early warning
system. This warning
system plays no role in
the Ukraine war but is a
central part of Russia’s
defence system against
strategic nuclear
attack. In addition, the
British government supplied
Ukraine with Storm
Shadow missiles that
have a range of over 250
km (155 miles) and can
hit targets not only on
the battleground but far
inside Russia. The use
of NATO weapons to
attack Russia risks an
equivalent Russian
counter-response,
threatening to spread
the war beyond Ukraine.
This
was followed by NATO
Secretary-General Jens
Stoltenberg’s June announcement
that a NATO headquarter
for operations in the
Ukraine war had been
created at the US
military base in
Wiesbaden, Germany, with
700 initial staff. On 7
June, French President
Emmanuel Macron said
that his government was
working to ‘finalise a
coalition’ of NATO
countries willing to
send troops to Ukraine
to ‘train’ Ukrainian
forces. This would place
NATO forces directly in
the war. As the Vietnam
War and other conflicts
have shown, such
‘trainers’ organise and
direct fighting, thus
becoming targets for
attacks.
Nadia
Abu-Aitah
(Switzerland), Breaking
Free, 2021.
Why
Is Escalation in Ukraine
More Dangerous than the
Cuban Missile Crisis?
The
Cuban Missile Crisis was
the product of an
adventurist
miscalculation by Soviet
leadership that the US
would tolerate the
presence of Soviet
nuclear missiles only
144 km from the nearest
US shore and roughly
1,800 km from
Washington. Such a
deployment would have
made it impossible for
the US to defend against
a nuclear strike and
would have ‘levelled the
playing field’, since
the US already had such
capabilities vis-à-vis
the Soviet Union. The
US, predictably, made it
clear that this would
not be tolerated and
that it would prevent it
by any means necessary,
including nuclear war.
With the Doomsday
Clock at 12
minutes to midnight, the
Soviet leadership
realised its
miscalculation and,
after a few days of
intense crisis, withdrew
the missiles. This was
followed by a relaxation
of US-Soviet tensions,
leading to the first
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
(1963).
No
bullets flew between the
US and the USSR in 1962.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
was an extremely
dangerous short-term
incident that could have
ignited large-scale –
including nuclear – war.
However, unlike the
Ukraine war, it did not
flow from an already
existing and
intensifying dynamic of
war by either the US or
the USSR. Thus, while
extremely dangerous, the
situation could also be,
and was, rapidly
resolved.
The
situation in Ukraine, as
well as the growing
conflict around China,
are more structurally
dangerous. Direct
confrontation is taking
place between NATO and
Russia, where the US
just authorised direct
military strikes
(imagine if, during the
1962 crisis, Cuban
forces armed and trained
by the Soviet Union had
carried out major
military strikes in
Florida). Meanwhile, the
US is directly raising
military tensions with
China around Taiwan and
the South China Sea, as
well as in the Korean
Peninsula. The US
government understands
that it cannot withstand
erosion to its position
of global primacy and
rightly believes that it
may lose its economic
dominance to China. That
is why it increasingly
moves issues onto the
military terrain, where
it still maintains an
advantage. The US
position on Gaza is
significantly determined
by its understanding
that it cannot afford a
blow to its military
supremacy, embodied in
the regime that it
controls in Israel.
The
US and its NATO partners
are responsible
for 74.3% of global
military spending.
Within the context of
the US’s increasing
drive for war and use of
military means, the
situation in Ukraine,
and potentially around
China, are, in reality,
as dangerous, and
potentially more
dangerous than the Cuban
Missile Crisis.
Tatiana
Grinevich
(Belarus), The
River of Wishes,
2012.
How
Are the Warring Parties
to Negotiate?
Hours
after Russian troops
entered Ukraine, both
sides began to talk
about a drawdown of
tensions. These
negotiations developed
in Belarus and Turkey
before they were
scuttled by NATO’s
assurances to Ukraine of
endless and bottomless
support to ‘weaken’
Russia. If those early
negotiations had
developed, thousands of
lives would have been
spared. All such wars
end in negotiations,
which is why the sooner
they could have
happened, the better.
This is a view that is
now openly acknowledged
by Ukrainians. Vadym
Skibitsky, deputy head
of Ukraine’s military
intelligence, told
The Economist
that negotiations are on
the horizon.
For
a long time now, the
Russia-Ukraine frontline
has not moved
dramatically. In
February 2024, the
Chinese government released
a twelve-point set of
principles to guide a
peace process. These
points – including
‘abandoning the Cold War
mentality’ – should have
been seriously
considered by the
belligerent sides. But
the NATO states simply
ignored them. Several
months later, a
Ukraine-driven
conference was held in
Switzerland from 15–16
June, to which Russia
was not invited and
which ended with a communiqué
that borrowed many of
the Chinese proposals
about nuclear safety,
food security, and
prisoner exchanges.
Velislava
Gecheva
(Bulgaria), Homo
photographicus,
2014.
While
a number of states –
from Albania to Uruguay
– signed the document,
other countries that
attended the meeting
refused to sign on for a
range of reasons,
including their sense
that the text did not
take Russia’s security
concerns seriously.
Among the countries that
did not
sign are Armenia,
Bahrain, Brazil, India,
Indonesia, Jordan,
Libya, Mauritius,
Mexico, Saudi Arabia,
South Africa, Thailand,
and the United Arab
Emirates. A few days
before the Switzerland
conference, Russia’s
President Vladimir Putin
stated
his conditions for
peace, which include a
guarantee that Ukraine
will not join NATO. This
view is shared by those
countries of the Global
South that did not join
the Switzerland
statement.
Both
Russia and Ukraine are
willing to negotiate.
Why should the NATO
states be allowed to
prolong a war that
threatens world peace?
The upcoming NATO summit
in Washington from 9–11
July must hear, loudly
and clearly, that the
world does not want its
dangerous war or
decadent militarism. The
world’s peoples want to
build bridges, not blow
them up.
Maxim
Kantor (Russia), Two
Versions of
History,
1993.
Briefing
no. 14, a clear
assessment of current
dangers around the
escalation in and around
Ukraine, underscores the
need, as Abdullah El
Harif of the Workers’
Democratic Way party in
Morocco and I wrote in
the Bouficha
Appeal Against the
Preparations for War
in 2020, for the peoples
of the world to:
- Stand against the
warmongering of US
imperialism, which
seeks to impose
dangerous wars on an
already fragile
planet.
- Stand against the
saturation of the
world with weapons of
all kinds, which
inflame conflicts and
often drive political
processes toward
endless wars.
- Stand against the
use of military power
to prevent the social
development of the
peoples of the world.
- Defend the right of
countries to build
their sovereignty and
their dignity.
Sensitive
people around the world
must make their voices
heard on the streets and
in the corridors of
power to end this
dangerous war, and
indeed to set us on a
path beyond capitalism’s
world of unending wars.
Warmly,
Vijay