Maersk, a Danish shipping company meeting the textbook definition of a multinational corporation, announced a suspension of non-essential bookings to and from Russia. Great Britain, now out of the EU, is nevertheless sending anti-tank weapons and trainers to Ukraine.įinancial sanctions are being employed as a weapon and remain on an ever-tightening trajectory. in turn providing U.S.-built aircraft to Poland. Poland is considering transferring some of their Russian fighter aircraft to Ukraine to replace their losses, with the U.S. Germany defied expectations with a massive defense increase, a reversal of prohibitions on weapons intended for Ukraine transiting through Germany, and an ending of the Nord Stream 2 Russia to Germany gas pipeline. As a result, we’re getting close to making the old aphorism “all the instruments of national power”, so beloved in the Pentagon but few other places, a reality. The decision to avoid direct contact of US and NATO forces with Russian forces brought forth many other instruments of national, and international, power to answer Putin’s naked aggression. The same was said about big business and the international corporations. This assumption had an allied corollary: that NATO and EU nations were so enamored of trade and investment relations with Russia that any unified resistance was impossible because it was not profitable.
Implicit or explicit, war as the exclusive province of the military, not the nation, was brought forward into the new century. Triumphalism reigned, with little public sacrifice required. Desert Shield/Desert Storm gave us a sense of omnipotence as our second “unipolar moment” began after the fall of the USSR (This second moment was destined to be equally short-lived). Perhaps we came to this assumption with reason. Just be sure to say, “thank you for your service”. The rest of the nation could “go shopping” as we were told at the onset of the 911-era wars. Perhaps the most welcome assumption trashed is that war is solely the business of the armed forces. If truth is the first casualty of war, our comfortable assumptions, implicit and explicit, must be the second. Rather than a short, sharp, two-medal/one-promotion war for Russia’s armed forces, Putin revitalized the West’s liberal order. The resistance of Ukraine’s armed forces and more importantly the people of Ukraine proved much tougher than expected. Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, apparently assuming continued Ukraine weakness, a disunited West, an ineffective NATO, and a conflict-averse economy-oriented European Union has foundered. Putin’s 2014 deployment of “little green men” – masked soldiers in unmarked uniforms – to annex Crimea and reinforce Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region elicited little effective response. This is the return of warfare on a scale we have not seen since the second world war, a return to state-on-state warfare, a massive premeditated, merciless (sic) and cruel assault by an aging, isolated, nuclear-armed autocrat determined to re-establish Russian power in the former Soviet empire and to bend their populations to his will. The world that we knew before February 24 , in which the rights of sovereign states to live in peace was guaranteed by a respect for international law without armed force, has gone forever. Russia’s unprovoked attack on its democratic neighbor is nothing less than the return of what Otto von Bismarck called: “the politics of iron and blood” to Europe.
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Means Deterrence Must Be Strengthened in Europe Now: Retired British General, and former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe Richard Shirreff, said it best in the 25 February Financial Times:Īt a single stroke, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has announced a new era for Europe. “If the lamps are to remain lit across Europe, action this day is needed.”Īrticle originally published at 19fortyfive. By Myrthe Doedens Posted 7 March 2022 | Current Events, Insights, Russia TRG Senior Advisor, LtGen Chip Gregson (USMC, ret.) shares his insights with 19fortyfive.
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