There’s a lot of noise and fury these days around Ukraine, but the truth is getting harder to understand. What is not disputed is that Ukraine is in fact engaged in a ‘struggle for existence’. Despite its heroic struggle, there is a gradual realization that the war in Ukraine is heading for a stalemate. In the current reckoning, it appears that matters can only go downhill from here as Russia appears intent on employing advanced air strikes, including the latest hypersonic missiles, to subdue Ukraine.
As a result, and in appreciation of the heroism of the people of Ukraine, serious efforts are being made across Europe – including in France, Germany and the United Kingdom – on how to end the war. Neither side is likely to be able to claim a decisive victory, and any expectation that Russia may be forced to retreat from areas where it has made initial gains is considered extremely remote. As the initial euphoria seems to have been replaced by ‘battle fatigue’, and the Ukraine crisis has come to be seen as a ‘US-backed NATO proxy war’ against Russia, European leaders are currently trying to find ways and means to engaged thereby to cease fire, than to maintain the conflict.
impact on europe
Many other reasons can also be added to the current mindset of Europe. First, despite generous supplies of state-of-the-art weapons from the United States, Europe is painfully aware that it remains entirely at the mercy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the US. Europe’s defense industry remains extremely fragile, and change seems remote, thus maintaining Europe’s dependence on the US and NATO. Second, in the field of economics, Europe is hurting, and the prospect of prolonged stalemate and war without end seems exceedingly daunting. European leaders, including Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, are now quietly engaging in diplomacy to end the war, without revealing that Europe has had to make major compromises.
In the meantime, what has become very clear, not only to Europe, but to much of the world, is that the Ukraine conflict has demonstrated convincingly that America was the true savior of Europe, and not after World War II. Was seen. It is deeply ingrained in people’s minds that without America, Europe would neither have come together nor provided Ukraine with the support it needed to resist Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Concrete demonstrations of American superiority over Russian weapons with respect to surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank weapons like the Javelin, and launchers like the HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Mobility Rocket System) have given the US additional confidence since then. To receive all who come. In turn, this kind of thinking may take them to the next step of convincing the world that America today can fend off any challenge to its supremacy.
The situation is fraught with many possibilities. Ukraine’s audacity, however, is helping the US shed images of its withdrawal from Afghanistan, which had dented America’s reputation as a world power. It has fueled new ambitions in US and Western minds ever since.
There are both right and wrong lessons to be learned from this. This may encourage America, buoyed by its recent success in Europe, to believe that the momentum is now with it, and that if there is a tide in a nation’s affairs that can be exploited at the right time, It can lead to success. This is perhaps the best time and opportunity for such an experiment.
Such reasoning can also prove to be dangerous. The war in Ukraine and in Europe is hardly a laboratory for similar experiments elsewhere. US ‘victory’ or what it would have achieved in Ukraine without the loss of a single American life, as well as a display of its weapons superiority, could lead to adventurism. China is clearly not Ukraine, or Russia for that matter, and Asia is not Europe. What has happened in Ukraine and Europe may not be indicative of what could happen if there is a conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific.
China’s tough stand
At the same time, China is preparing for all kinds of situations. The language being used by China today is the harshest and most direct in recent times. Alleging that the US is engaged in suppression and control of China, he warned that “no amount of guardrails will stop the derailment if the US doesn’t hit the brakes and continues to speed down the wrong path”. which may lead to conflict and confrontation”. Chinese President Xi Jinping, for his part, has directly accused the US and Western countries of China’s all-round control, encirclement and repression.
Many of these statements were made on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress (NPC) earlier this month, where China’s newly appointed foreign minister, Qin Gang, openly criticized the US for its Indo-Pacific strategy (which, according to him, is NATO’s). Asia-Pacific version) and whose real objective was to encircle China.
Chinese criticism is usually blunt and rarely direct, but this time it has been unusually forthright, raising concerns that China may be gearing up for direct confrontation with the US in order to regain its dominant position in China. The US effort to restore the US could be effectively thwarted. Global Affairs.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping recently told delegates attending the NPC to add to such concerns, “to systematically upgrade the country’s overall strength and safeguard its strategic interests and realize its strategic interests.” To maximize its ‘national strategic capabilities’ objective”.
While Taiwan may remain a flashpoint in the Indo-Pacific, new tensions are raising the prospect of conflict in other regions in the Indo-Pacific, exacerbated by repeated visits by top US military leaders to Taiwan in recent weeks . In the wake of the Ukraine conflict, the US claims that defeating all sides could fuel further tensions, leading to a conflict that comes dangerously close to open confrontation ending in a war.
danger of sparking a world war
All wars begin with a misinterpretation, or misunderstanding, of the other side’s intentions. America’s success in helping Ukraine to counter Russian aggression, and incidentally reducing Russia’s image of being a sort of superpower in Europe, allowed the US and some other Western powers to redefine the global power equation and return appears to encourage them to seek return. The period after 1945 in world affairs. After Europe, the target appears to be China.
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However, it would be a gross misreading of the situation if the US attempted to contain China at this time, flush with its success in Europe and incite retaliation elsewhere, thus paving the way for a new world conflict. Is. It could become a tragedy of colossal proportions.
MK Narayanan is former director of Intelligence Bureau, former National Security Advisor and former Governor of West Bengal