Susan Watkins, New Left Review:

In March, Kiev’s position at the Istanbul peace talks was for (hyper-guaranteed) neutrality and the retreat of Moscow’s forces to pre-invasion lines. In April, the us pulled the rug out from under the Russian–Ukrainian talks, delivering the message that, for the West, Putin would not be a negotiating partner.²¹ Today, Kiev demands the full Ukrainianization of Crimea. Moscow wanted a treaty with nato and has ended up in an all-consuming war. Washington aimed for the painless extension of its hegemony across Eastern Europe and instead has had to grapple with inflationary fuel prices, as key congressional elections loom. Looking at the abstentions and no-votes on Ukraine at the un this October, Brzezinski could have pointed out that Washington is precisely losing support in Eurasia—India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as well as the Central Asian republics, China, Iran, Vietnam and Laos—and two-thirds of Africa, from Algeria, the Sudans and Ethiopia to the dcr, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The us was left with the nato and asean states, plus (most of) Latin America.

The result of the escalatory dynamic has been, firstly, a disastrous deepening of the Ukrainian civil conflict.

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Unless there are dramatic new developments before the winter, Russia’s war of territorial conquest seems set to freeze into one of defensive attrition that will eventually take a high economic toll. At the same time, unless the us radically changes its game, Ukraine does not appear to have a military strategy to recover the lost fifth of its territory. If, as Zelensky now claims, its aim is the reconquest of Crimea, Kiev’s war will take on a neo-imperial character too, subduing rebel regions. So far, the Biden Administration’s only tactic for achieving regime change in Russia is to drag out the war. Meanwhile, nato’s truly chilling 2022 ‘Strategic Concept’ document brigades its thirty-odd member states behind Washington in the stand-off against Beijing.

In theory, the major European states could have balanced with Russia against the us after the end of the Cold War, insisting on a more accommodating, globally multiculturalist frame­work that would have made room for rising powers, as some American strategists were suggesting. Blocking that outcome was not just the conviction of the us foreign-policy elite that the alternative to its rule was global chaos. After fifty years of sapped sovereignty, European states lack the material and imaginative resources for a counter-hegemonic project. Germany in particular has been further shackled to Atlanticism with each new crisis: Yugoslavia, the financial crash, Ukraine. ‘Sleepwalkers’ was the indelible term coined by Christopher Clark for the descent of the great powers into World War One. In the 2020s, the Europeans are wide awake, smiling and cheering, exulting in their ‘strategic autonomy’ as they are frogmarched towards the next global conflict for us primacy.