Opinion | Why US arrogance, not the Russia-China relationship, is the biggest barrier to peace in Ukraine
- Peace pleas directed at the Kremlin must be extended to Washington: its ‘mission creep’ tendencies and hostility towards Beijing – whose influence with Moscow might have made all the difference – threaten to extinguish hopes of a near-term diplomatic solution in Europe
It’s just possible that a favourable diplomatic wind is forming that could alter the trajectory of the storm of war raging over Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe.
Pushing this war out to sea might help clear the gathering clouds of world economic collapse. It could energise the humanitarian obligation to get Ukraine back on its feet and its exiled millions repatriated. And it could affirm not just within Kremlin circles but among the elite everywhere that military aggression is always an exceedingly poor choice – especially when someone, somewhere might prove desperate enough to consider nuclear war.
Of all involved players, the one most capable of further fuelling the war is Washington. Like a moth to an old-fashioned light bulb, the US is prone to pull failure from the jaws of victory by the time-honoured, self-destructive process of “mission creep”. Even candid US military studies now admit to a long pattern of overreach, whether in Iraq, Libya or Vietnam.
In retrospect, even the Korean war makes the mission-creep list: the original mission was to save South Korea from communism but, no, that was not enough; the brave US military had to stomp north into Chinese territory to unite all Korea.
