A Time for Peace in Europe and Asia |
Photo by Sunguk Kim
The US has a long history of not knowing how to end or peacefully resolve vexing international crises and conflicts with less powerful nations.
A triumphalist attitude in the national character is partly to blame, but in part, at least, it is also likely the result of our history.
The country was founded through an act of violence — a long war of independence which the rebels ultimately won. The new country was then enlarged through further acts of violence and the genocidal destruction of indigenous inhabitants. The new United States then established itself as a global industrial power by first a civil war that the Union won through application of overwhelming force and the destruction of a rival economy based upon slavery.
Finally, there was the USA’s participation in two global wars in the 20th century in which the nation emerged unscathed itself, leaving rival powers, including its erstwhile allies, all battered and weakened,
Through all that time the United States has had little experience with or interest in the art of negotiation.
This preference for war and for the use of force to have its way around the world was only reinforced when both World Wars ended with the unconditional surrender of the losing side. These two unusual conclusions to wars led to an assumption in Washington and among the broader public that all conflicts should end that way.
The Korean War should have disabused America of that notion. In that incredibly bloody conflict, three million Koreans — mostly civilians — and 38,000 US soldiers died and yet there was never any peace treaty. This was thanks to the stubbornness by the US, Rather than seek peace once US and UN forces had pushed North Korean Forces out of the South, America instead pressed on toward the Chinese border, leading the new Chinese Communist government to send its own war-tested People’s Liberation Army flooding into battle, which led to a stalemate on the Korean Peninsula that has endured now for three-quarters of a century.
Vietnam is another example of where the US slaughtered millions of civilians because it was unwilling to allow the people of a small country, Vietnam, that had struggled to free itself of French colonial rule, to be an independent country. Even though, during WWII, Vietnam’s Viet Minh peasant army had helped the US and its wartime allies defeat the Japanese in the Indochina theater of WWII. they were prevented from choosing their own path to independence.
The world thankfully has changed significantly since Wold War II. Not only is the US no longer the pre-eminent military power in the world, losing its war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but unable to win the war in Afghanistan, but the proliferation of nuclear weapons to eight other nations means that even a relatively small power like North Korea can stand up against US or international pressure by simply threatening to use its nuclear weapons.
And when It comes to the big powers — those with large military forces and nuclear stockpiles that could totally wipe out a rival or lead to global destruction — the idea that military force is the answer to conflicts, and that negotiation is weakness is nothing short of madness.
Far too many of our leaders in the US and of late in Europe, don’t get this though (They are, that is to say, certifiably mad.)
In the US, the country with the most powerful and globe-encircling military the world has ever known, promotes the idea of itself as a noble nation of Spartan “warriors” able to defeat any enemy (despite all the contrary evidence that no amount of military might can defeat even a ragtag irregular force of fighters armed with assault rifles, homemade mines and a willingness to die for a cause). They also dream that American technology will eventually create a military so overpowering and perhaps automated, that Washington will be able to dictate the terms of its rivals’ submission.
And so we have Donald Trump’s upcoming $50-million military parade spectacle in front of the White House next week to celebrate his 79th birthday and America’s military might, and we also have his hair-brained call for a hugely expensive “Golden Dome” of orbiting anti-missile weapons, to protect America from any and all nuclear threats.
At the same time, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is boasting about his country’s development of new hypersonic nuclear missiles. Instead of flying to targets thousands of miles away following easily predictable and perhaps intercept-able ballistic arcs, his new missiles autonomously hug the ground and are able to maneuver to avoid defenses or even switch to different targets, all while moving at speeds in excess of 15,000 miles per hour.
As the risk of big-power nuclear war rises to a level not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War in the late 1950s to 1970s, NATO countries, including the US, are providing Ukraine with long-range missiles made by NATO nations, missiles capable of striking deep inside Russia, perhaps eventually even hitting targets in Moscow and other large cities. That is something that never happened in the last 80 years since the wartime detonation of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Sanity seems to be in short supply. This is a problem in governments and among the public at large.
The US began this new nuclear brinksmanship back when the Bush-Cheney administration pulled the US out of the........