Some observers in the lead-up to last week’s meeting between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage Alaska hoped that a dialogue might be established where the broader issue of creating a new European security model that would reduce tensions and make it unlikely that a conflict like Russia-Ukraine would be repeated. Both Trump and Putin came away from the three-hour plus meeting with positive remarks though little of substance, at least in terms of what they were prepared to reveal. Trump did indicate that the idea of a ceasefire had been sidelined in favor of further discussions for a comprehensive peace plan to end the war at the next bilateral talks in Moscow, but it has been suggested by critics that he was speaking only for himself personally. If he has come around to the view that a ceasefire will not work in the current context, he is probably correct.
If there is any hope for a peace deal a sine qua non would be territorial transfers demanded by Russia on the part of Ukraine. Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly rejected any such arrangement. Predictably, Zelensky and a group of supporting “European leaders” including the Netherlands Mark Rutte, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Keir Starmer, Germany’s Friedrich Merz and Finnish President Alexander Stubb are arriving at the White House on Monday to make their case for the continuation of the war. The European delegation is headed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is a near perfect, even enthusiastic, spokesperson for the hawk sentiments prevailing in parts of Europe.
Trump’s actual sentiments continue to be somewhat enigmatic and, as always, poorly articulated. It is widely understood that President Donald Trump is actively seeking to obtain the Nobel Peace Prize, even going so far as to boast falsely that he has already earned it “four or five times.” He has reportedly even called the Norwegian Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg to ask how the polling regarding his candidacy is going, a grotesque faux pas but characteristic of what comes out of Trump’s head. Trump clearly fails to understand that seeking a peace prize while the United States is simultaneously actively supporting two major avoidable armed conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine while also removing existing restraints on development and deployment of certain weapons that are designed for nuclear war might be viewed by some as contradictory.
Those who are inclined to look to make excuses for Trump’s behavior while in the US presidency might be compelled to argue that Donald Trump doesn’t know any better and is therefore always inclined to act both impulsively and aggressively when in doubt, but the systematic withdrawal from Cold War agreements designed to make nuclear war avoidable during Trump 1 rather suggests that it is now policy de facto to make a catastrophic war easier to engage in to establish and maintain American global military dominance over adversaries like China and Russia. Total US military supremacy maintained by 850 overseas military bases to assert the national will globally is an aspect of the so-called “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the unofficial name given to the initial version of the Defense Planning Guidance drafted in 1992 under President Bill Clinton for the 1994–1999 fiscal years published by neocons US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his deputy Scooter Libby. The doctrine still dominates White House strategic thinking, particularly as Trump has surrounded himself with neocons and is taking direction from the Israel Lobby both regarding the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Based on the document, US defense strategy aimed to prevent the emergence of a global rival and asserted US primacy and unilateralism. One of it primary instruments to dominate in Europe was the expansion of NATO into the former Eastern European states that made up the Soviet Union, something that US negotiators had promised not to do during negotiations with Moscow during the Soviet collapse in 1991-2. This expansion has been the principal cause behind the current war between Russia and Ukraine as Moscow views Ukraine under NATO as a grave national security threat.
The corresponding dismantling of post-World War 2 agreements that sought to control limits on nuclear developments as well as the nature and distribution of new weapons and potential unmanned delivery systems have unfortunately dramatically increased the possibility of a devastating nuclear war taking place. The number of nuclear armed countries has grown in spite of Nuclear Non-Proliferation policies, with North Korea, China, Pakistan, India and Israel all now having nuclear arsenals. Israel even has a plan to use the nukes if it is seriously threatened called the “Samson Option.” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, located at the Keller Centre of the University of Chicago, monitors the movement of the minute and second hands on the so-called Doomsday Clock. It is now reporting that the second hand is closer to midnight than it has ever been, 89 seconds away, and moving in the “wrong” direction, towards inevitable armed conflict or even natural catastrophe. Reaching Midnight in this context could mean nuclear war, which could plausibly extinguish life on earth.
The United States is the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons against an enemy, which took place against Japan in early August 1945, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing at least 170,000 mostly civilians. My father was at that time an infantry sergeant on a troop ship located offshore of the Japanese mainland, part of a new Army corps, the Eighth Army, which was about to undertake an invasion of Japan’s main island. It promised to be bloody and the word among the troops was that Japan would put up a fierce last stand resistance. The American soldiers were consequently happy to hear that the bombs were used and the war had ended with an immediate Japanese surrender. More recently, however, historians have come around to the view that Japan was about to surrender anyway, which it did six days after the bombings, and it was a bad decision by President Harry Truman to authorize the use of the new and devastating weapon.
After World War 2, the Soviet Union, benefitting from the secrets stolen by the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spies in the United States, also acquired nuclear secrets and used them to become a nuclear armed military power, joining the US and Britain. The deployment of nukes subsequently became part of the tit-for-tat maneuvering that characterized the Cold War. The crisis came when Russia declared its intention to base nuclear capable missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from the US and therefore capable of hitting targets anywhere in the US, as a deterrent of any possible moves by Washington to again invade Cuba. The move was also in response to US basing of nuclear missiles in NATO countries Italy and Turkey. It seemed that some kind of nuclear exchange was imminent when the leadership of the United States and the Soviet Union came to their senses. In 1962 President John F Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khruschev agreed that playing nuclear risk was just not worth it and the Russians declared that their missiles would not be going to Havana and the US agreed that its Jupiter missiles would also be withdrawn from Turkey.
This led to other agreements to limit the likelihood that nuclear weapons might actually be used in a war. The most important agreement was the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which was signed by President Ronald Reagan and Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 but which the US withdrew from in October 2018 during the first Trump Administration. The INF banned both nuclear and conventional land-based missile systems and missile launchers with ranges of 620–3,420 miles (“intermediate-range”) and 310–620 miles (“shorter-range”), meaning that the mobile missile systems could not be developed for deployment and possible use close to a country’s border where they might be capable of a devastating surprise first strike against the “enemy.”
Prior to the US withdrawal, there were claims from both sides that there had been violations by the other side in terms of what the treaty allowed. When Trump ordered the government to withdraw from the INF treaty, it claimed Russia was in violation through its development of a new highly sophisticated ground-launched cruise missile. Russian officials responded that the missile had a maximum range of only 298 miles, making it legal. Russia replied that there was a possible US violation of the INF treaty through its establishing its own Aegis Ashore missile defense systems that were based in NATO members Romania and Poland, close to the Russian border. The US systems use highly mobile Mk-41 vertical launchers, which can accommodate Tomahawk missiles. The US under Trump would not negotiate with Russia and there was some speculation that the reason Washington had withdrawn from the INF treaty was so it would have a free hand to deploy its intermediate-range missiles near China. Russia responded by proposing that the over the limits INF missiles be banned in Europe only, but Washington never discussed and never accepted the compromise offer.
Russia has responded to what it sees as the continuing US provocations, like the development of the new highly mobile missile launcher named the “Typhon.” The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on August 4th which declared that: “With our repeated warnings on that matter having gone ignored and the situation developing towards the de facto deployment of US-made intermediate-and shorter-range ground-based missiles in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, the Russian Foreign Ministry has to declare that any conditions for the preservation of a unilateral moratorium on the deployment of similar arms no longer exist, and it is further authorized to state that the Russian Federation does not consider itself bound by relevant self-restrictions approved earlier.” The Ministry decried how the “formation and buildup of destabilizing missile potentials in regions adjacent to Russia, [is] creating a direct, strategic threat to the security of our country… Russia’s leadership [will respond] based on an interdepartmental analysis of the scale of deployment of US and other Western ground-based INF missiles.”
To avoid a war that might become nuclear with devastating consequences should rightly be a major issue up for discussion at the next bilateral meeting in Moscow and whatever develops thereafter. The Trump Administration’s inept moves in the past to increasing US national security by discarding agreements intended to remove or at least mitigate the threat of large scale or even nuclear war should be considered in its broader context beyond Ukraine and Russia to include the Middle East where Israel is “secretly” nuclear armed. The INF Treaty could be viewed in the same fashion as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement to monitor Iran’s nuclear enrichment program to keep it from becoming a path to the acquisition of a nuclear weapon. Developments since Trump withdrew from the program in 2019 in his first term in office suggest strongly that the subsequent attacks on Iran by both Israel and the US have if anything increased the likelihood that the next Iranian government will seek to weaponize nuclear capabilities through a hidden program, only this time they will not do so while under IAEA inspection status, they will do it in secret. Hardly a good outcome, but when one is considering developments with both Russia and Iran, it is unfortunately true that what has been broken without regard for the consequences can no longer be easily mended. It would nevertheless be a gift to the human race to attempt to do so and if Donald Trump truly wants his Nobel Peace Prize a good place to start would be by ignoring the Europeans and Zelensky in the lead up to the next bilateral meeting in Moscow. Peace in Eastern Europe to include limits of weapons, possibly to establish a model that could be copied in the Middle East, would be the best “deal” that America’s president could ever make.
Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.
