If You Want Peace, Prepare for War
Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China, March 14, 2014
Salaroche

“Si vis pacem, para bellum” says an ancient Latin aphorism, which in English translates as “if you want peace, prepare for war”, but not many western people want to believe in the veracity of that axiom anymore and the soft Western reaction to Putin’s blatant imperialist aggression in the Ukraine clearly demonstrates so.

The wars of the twentieth century seemed to finally be having a taming effect over the Western instincts for war. WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam War appeared to have been proof enough for many a Western mind of the folly, futility and stupidity of human bellicosity.

But not everybody in the world shared in that Western mindset, in fact, not even all westerners did. The West still has occasional bursts of bellicose stupidity a la G. W. Bush, thereby showing that the war-virus has been but superficially eradicated from the body human; it obviously still plagues the human race, and will probably continue to do so for many decades, if not centuries, to come. As a result, world peace remains elusive.

“If wishes were horses beggars would ride”, goes the truthful saying; wishes, therefore, are never enough to obtain the things we need or the things we want. Actions need to follow wishes, so that the latter may have a chance to become real.

Wishing world peace won’t in and of itself make it come true; actions need to follow such wishes. It may be accurate to say that everybody in the world wants peace, but the problem is that some people want peace only in their own terms. Hitler, for example, wanted Germany to reign over a thousand-year peaceful Nazi kingdom, but only after subjugating the rest of the world and wiping from the face of the earth anyone he disliked and anyone who opposed him.

Agreeing on the right means to attain world peace is obviously not an easy task. There is no behavioral measure or command written in the sky for everyone to follow so that we can all attain some universal levels of harmony; and even if there were there would still need to be some automatic consequences for those who refused to follow them, but there aren’t any of those either.

There is no universal 911 emergency services phone number that countries in the world can call when some other government decides to invade them or attack them. All we have at this point in time in the International system is a series of treaties and associations between different groups of nations that somehow provide a certain sense of peace and stability among the members, all of it based in the hope that no one in the group will want to disrupt the agreed-upon order because of fear of being punished or ultimately being thrown out of the group.

But what happens when we’re dealing with a lunatic who decides to go it alone and blatantly flaunts everyone and every rule in pursuit of his own imperial designs? What happens when an autocratic egomaniac decides that the West is just a cluster of peacenik ninnies too busy trying to get out of their own self-inflicted financial problems to give a single hoot about him taking over any of his neighboring countries?

And if to that we add the fact that Westerners may now be increasinly perceived as being so war-weary that they’re basically ready to appease aggression of the Ukraine/Crimean kind in the name of their own peace-loving selfish little hearts?

After handing the Sudetenland to Hitler on a silver platter in September of 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned to London quoting Benjamin Disraeli, claiming to have attained “peace with honor” and “peace for our time”, and we all know what happened after. “I looked in his eyes and saw his soul”, G. W. Bush said after meeting face to face with Putin in 2001, only to have Putin wage war on Georgia in so-called defense of Russian residents in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August of 2008.

Is that the kind of deal we would like to cut with Putin regarding the Crimean situation? There’s no way of looking into that guy’s “soul” now, nor was there ever any. KGB once, KGB forever. Putin’s motto these days seems to be “his idea of Russia first and last and to hell with the West” and that’s what he apparently wants the whole world to understand.

I’m not a warmonger, but I’m not an appeaser of the Chamberlain/Daladier kind either. I just believe that, when facing autocratic imperialist egomaniacs of the Putin sort, wanting peace too badly can only lead to war in the long run, and to a kind of war where the other guy would initially have the upper hand, for he would have been readier earlier and would have been much more eager to go to war than you.

England and France thought in 1938 that the Sudetenland was not worth it standing up to Germany. Now, Germany, England, France, and the US behind them, are thinking that Crimea and the Ukraine are not worth it standing up to Russia either, even as Putin, by all visible signs, already considers the annexation of Crimea a fait accompli and even as he keeps amassing troops and all kinds of military hardware along the eastern Ukrainian borders. As I say, I love peace and I like harmonious environments, but not just at any price.

And make no mistake, Chinese leaders are as we speak watching very closely everything that’s taking place in the Ukraine, and they’re measuring the lengths of imperial abuse they may be able to afford to go to and the kind of Western response they might expect to get in the event of any intervention from their part in the South China Sea and beyond. If you think the Chinese Politburo is a club of peace-loving angels think again, for their long-term intentions are nothing short of world dominance.

With Putin and Xi in mind it would make sense to think that Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” has been thus far misinterpreted as a clash between the Muslim and the Christian worlds. This is increasingly looking like a clash between East and West, between Authoritarianism and Democracy, and between Conservatism of the ex-Communist kind and Liberalism of the Western kind.

Without a doubt, Western civilization presently holds the upper hand over any Eastern or Southern civilization. This is not to say that Western civilization is perfect, far from it, but when it comes to arts, economics, and social and political systems, Western practices are the ones that have produced the best examples and results over the past few decades, if not over the past couple of centuries altogether. A considerable number of Ukrainians, if not the great majority of them, are perfectly aware of this and are seriously attracted to western ways, to the point of wanting to become part of the European Union, but Putin doesn’t like that idea and refuses to let the Ukraine fall out of his area of influence.

History places northern Ukraine as one of the geographical areas where the Rus people first wandered and Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, is singled out as the seat of the first ever Rus principalities (circa 800 AD). The Ukraine, therefore, is intimately tied to Russian ancestral history. But if Putin’s ambitions are to get the Russian Empire back together again he most likely has Belarus, the Baltic States, and parts of Poland in the crosshairs. Let the annexation of Crimea go unpunished and eastern Ukraine is probably next, if not simultaneously, and let Russian boots march all over the Ukraine and what will Putin do next? The answer to that question is not difficult to infer.

In the meantime, because of its considerable reliance on Russian gas for its subsistence, Germany keeps holding the EU back, thereby subtracting weight from any EU sanctions, NATO is sending AWACS to scour Romanian and Polish skies plus a few extra F-15s to patrol Estonian airspace, while the US and the rest of the West keep asserting that no military option is on the table. In response, Putin is beefing up Russian military presence in Belarus and keeps sending troops to the Ukrainian border. And you think that giving Russia an economic slap in the hand is going to make Putin change his mind about the whole situation?

The fact is Crimea is not going back to being part of the Ukraine, or at least not in the short run. Putin is already poised to annex it with the full support of the Russian parliament and that of a considerable portion of the Russian population as well. And, careful, because that might soon be the fate of eastern Ukraine too. And what can the West do about it short of cutting Russia completely out of the Western banking system and shutting it off completely out of the Western markets? Not much that really matters.

How much more abuse will Angela Merkel and David Cameron be willing to take from the part of Putin before they decide that enough is enough? And how much more Russian military aggression will the West be willing to witness before they finally bring the military option to the table?

In the meantime, let’s just hope that I’ve totally misread Putin’s long-term intentions and that thus far he has only been taunting the West in a show of personal power and Russian military readiness and that on this coming Monday the 17th he will propose a conditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Crimean soil and that he will start talking seriously to the West regarding the future of the Ukraine as a free and independent country.

On the other hand, if you’re thinking that the content of the above paragraph is nothing but a sample of naïve wishful thinking, you’re probably more than right.

Salaroche