Trendism in activism can prove blinding & shortsighted. As the Russian Invasion of Ukraine continues, few bother raising critical questions that escape trending headlines. We learn by raising questions. It is not uncommon to walk away with more questions than answers when pushing the limits of our knowledge on issues once recognized as fringe topics best left for the eggheads. Many parallels from World War Two have been used to compare the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
Those parallels are made without raising penetrating questions such as: does a defiant & valiant Ukraine reserve the right to plunge humanity into World War Three? How will a nuclear armed Ukraine deter future Russian aggressions against Kyiv? How can the Russo-Ukrainian War be used as a new watershed moment to restore relevance & urgency to the cause of nuclear disarmament? For perspective, the “citizen historian” is more interested in how wars end rather than how they began.
However, the analysis of the citizen historian is almost always predisposed to prejudicial biases becoming the vindictive narratives of history locked in time. This begs an unresolved curiosity: does the average American struggle to identify when the United States entered World War Two? Many Americans will erroneously identify 1941 as the start of the war. As history informs, that is the year the United States entered the war. By 1941, Europe had already been fighting World War Two for approximately 2 years after the German Invasion of western Poland in 1939.
When coming to terms with the indisputable facts, we realize history is not relative which is why it cannot afford to be subjective. How will parallels made between the Russian Invasion of Ukraine & World War Two deny arguments made for the inevitability of World War Three? Ukrainian activists would have us believe the Third World War started once the Russian invasion began, but are the same body of activists prepared to negotiate with Russia? How will Ukrainian membership in NATO & the European Union deny the possibility of World War Three at the doorstep of a resurgent Russia?
Has the eastward expansion of NATO saved the security, stability, & prosperity of Europe? In practice, little changed in Western attitudes toward Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, particularly the United States. Washington sought to take maximum advantage of the turbulent 1990s in Russia. The thinking was an increasingly weakened Russia would devolve into a demoralized image of its former glory rendering revanchism impossible. Only the opposite occurred further accelerated by the rise of Vladimir Putin beginning in 1999.
The smell of victory is intoxicating. This is especially true when it means becoming the world’s sole superpower as the undisputed winner of the Cold War by presumed default. Our “on top of the world syndrome” is becoming extinct with resurgent nations like Russia reentering the world stage. One Cold War ended & another is beginning, but if we are truly interested in averting World War Three as a people, it will become necessary to detach ourselves from vindictive narratives of history.
Should nations like Ukraine sitting on the geopolitical periphery of World War Three be allowed to join polarizing military alliances like NATO or Russia’s Collective Security Treaty Organization? The independence of such nations should fall under an unwavering commitment to geopolitical neutrality. Why have we failed to imagine the possibility of forming a new alliance of nations on the same geopolitical periphery as Ukraine through concerted diplomatic action with Russia using a foreign policy of checks & balances?
This could mark a new era of detente with Russia, but to achieve that, it would first be necessary to reimagine what such an alliance could achieve in terms of mending & ideally reforming relations between east & west with priority given to nuclear disarmament. The New Start Treaty dedicated to nuclear arms reduction was signed by the Obama administration in 2010 & expired on February 3, 2021. Threats of World War Three should provide ample motivation to eliminate & recycle nuclear weapons for good through collaborative actions of two nuclear powers. Each “peripheral power” in this new alliance must pledge to have a foreign policy dedicated to decommissioning nuclear arsenals as the existential basis of their neutrality.
As Millennials & Zoomers, our legacy this century should be the elimination of nuclear war, not World War Three.
“Shall we play a game…”