Ukraine Conflict Has Lit Fuse for Third World War

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Russia is an inward-looking, fearful autocracy, still coming to terms with its late-20th century defeats. Unlike the predecessor Soviet Union, it harbours no fantasies about being a shining inspiration to the world, nor does anyone see it any differently.

Ukraine is a nationalistic kleptocracy run by oligarchs, like most ex-Soviet states. There should be no illusions about it, either. 

Russia is having a harder time in Ukraine than Moscow anticipated. This is increasingly the result of NATO waging an undeclared war against Russia — economically, financially, and militarily, via massive arms shipments and other support to Ukraine.

The United States is in an undeclared war against Russia on behalf of a country with which it has no defence treaty. They no doubt have “advisers” there, as was the case in Vietnam. Pentagon commanders have provided critical intelligence that has allowed Ukraine to target Russian troops on land and at sea.

Since March, the U.S. Congress has approved $53 billion in aid to Ukraine. Washington has involved the U.S. in a gratuitous military intervention with a nuclear-powered Russia that has no end date and no specific end goals. 

So is the United States a force for good, attempting to bring democracy to the old Soviet sphere? Or is it an imperial power trying to weaken an adversary to gain more power and wealth?

Andrei Soldatov is an expert on the Russian intelligence bureaucracy and the functioning of its security state. In an interview with Isaac Chotiner, a staff writer at the New Yorker, published May 24, Soldatov points to the fact that the Ukrainian army is being given the best weapons that the West can provide.

“And this weaponry is tested against the Russians and the Russians are not in position to inflict any damage on NATO,” he remarked.

Unless Russian President Vladimir Putin loses power to those willing to abandon the war — and I don’t see that happening, if it means giving up Crimea and the Donbas region, something which the West would insist upon — this is bound to become a larger conflict. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has raised the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons if Moscow is not successful with conventional weaponry. The West has not taken this threat very seriously, at least publicly.  

If the resulting radioactive fallout drifted into NATO territory, would this be considered an incursion triggering Article 5, which commits each member state to consider an armed attack against one member state to be an armed attack against them all? Such a widening of the war could have NATO’s three nuclear powers responding in kind.

With Europe in a state of total war, might China take the opportunity to launch an invasion of Taiwan? U.S. President Joe Biden has made it clear the U.S. will respond, and perhaps with nuclear weapons there as well. Japan and Australia may get involved in this Asian theatre. At that point, it would become a world war.

Russia and China are economically stronger than appears at first glance. The war in Ukraine “has made us realize that the Russian economy is considerably more important than what we thought,” French economist Jacques Sapir explained recently.

If you compare Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) by simply converting it from rubles into U.S. dollars, you get an economy the size of Spain’s. But such a comparison makes no sense without adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP), which accounts for productivity and standards of living, and thus per capita welfare and resource use.

And when you measure Russia’s GDP based on PPP, it’s clear that Russia’s economy is actually more like the size of Germany’s, about $4.4 trillion for Russia vs. $4.6 trillion for Germany.

Sapir notes that Russia is, in many respects, a linchpin of the globalized production chain. It is the world’s largest exporter of oil to global markets. It also controls 19.5 per cent of global wheat exports, 20.4 per cent of nickel, and 16.6 per cent of platinum.

If we consider the Chinese economy based on exchange rates, by simply converting China’s GDP from Chinese yuan to U.S. dollars, it is valued at about $17.7 trillion, compared to $23 trillion for the United States and $17 trillion for the European Union.

But if we adjust for PPP, we see that the Chinese economy reached almost $27.21 trillion in 2021, compared with $20.5 trillion for the EU and $23 trillion for the United States. And virtually everything found at chains like Walmart and discount stores comes from China.

David Malpass, the head of the World Bank, has warned that the war could cause a global recession as the price of food, energy and fertilizer jump.

Also, the NATO-EU countries only account for about 13 per cent of the world’s population, while China and Russia together make up about 20 per cent. That leaves about two-thirds of humanity “non-aligned,” a position that most of them would like to maintain.

Countries as significant as India have been particularly vocal in their refusal to take sides in the conflict in Ukraine. If we force them to choose, we may be surprised by the results. Most of South Asia, Africa and Latin America, by staying out of this conflagration, will be the beneficiaries of what’s left of human civilization.