NATO, I have a feeling, is being found out in Ukraine.
It’s one thing to bomb unarmed civilians in Libya or an Afghanistan and quite another to square up to an enemy with chutzpah in the game.
For three generations, NATO meant obeisance by the world – the respect a wolf has in a henhouse.
Now no less than a Wall Street Journal says Europe is running out of weapons.
US anyway wasn’t producing the tanks or planes, battleships or aircraft carriers at home but was outsourcing them to its minion nations.
So it is with putting its own boots on the ground, such as in Vietnam, Syria or Afghanistan, where the experience has not often been pleasant.
Often the US looks for a proxy — be it Ukraine or a Taiwan or Jihadis for that matter—to cut inconvenient regimes down to size.
And so it is with funding and arming Ukraine to the teeth: Trading the proxy regime’s manhood in a bid to cripple Russia gravely.
Yet10 months on, all we see is that Russia could bomb its targets at will in Ukraine.
Ukraine doesn’t have the air defense capability to deter the Russians; its general Valery Zaluzhny is asking for 300 tanks, 700 infantry fighting vehicles, 500 Howitzers more to “beat this enemy.”
Now all this Wishlist is much bigger than the total armoured forces of most European armies.
As for Zaluzhny, nobody is asking him: Sir, you had similarly predicted a similar outcome with a much larger armed forces and weaponry at your command in early summer. Why do you think we should take you seriously now?
Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, are relentlessly being drawn into a meat-grinder by the Russians on frontlines of thousands of miles.
Russia’s tactics is to double down at different nodes of frontlines. It brings out the enemy’s second line of defense from the hiding who are then minced in pieces to the other world.
Russia, deliberately, isn’t attacking Ukraine’s third line of defence which is their command centre, for it doesn’t need to.
Russia, the masters in attritional warfare, is using minimum of its men, weapons and resources to suck its enemy—Ukraine and NATO—dry.
NATO being worked inside out
The tactics are also allowing Russian generals and military intelligence to work NATO inside out, as Putin observed the other day.
So Putin isn’t keen on winning in the strictest sense of the term; the West too has no better aim than to cripple Russia and the war is meandering along till one or the other can no longer keep standing.
Meanwhile the West, from time to time, keeps preening; lauding or inviting Zelensky on its lawns and stuffing his pockets with whatever it could.
The pretence would drop once Bakhmut falls in the Donbass region, and a desperate West tries to hurt Russia deep enough for the latter to launch its prized weapons.
For this is what we heard Putin saying the other day in Eurasia Economic Council: “I assure you, after the early warning system receives a signal of a missile attack, hundreds of our missiles are in the air (…) It is impossible to stop them (…) There will be nothing left of the enemy, because it is impossible to intercept a hundred missiles.”
Pepe Escobar, the noted geoanalyst, says: “Russia can knock out all NATO bridges, ports, airports as well as power stations, oil and natural gas storage, Rotterdam oil and natural gas installations, in a matter of a few hours. All energy production equipment across NATOstan would be destroyed…A dazed and confused Empire would be unable to move troops, any troops, to Europe.”
Pivotal Moment of History
If it’s really how things are as I have espoused so far, we are looking at a cataclysmic moment of modern history.
There is a latent fear that any miscalculation could lead to an armageddon where there are no winners or losers left.
But if it’s Father Time the two antagonists are playing out, NATO could irretrievably be hollowed out.
NATO began as a security alliance of Western nations before it spread its tentacles to most of Europe and then diversified to Asia stealthily for its Charter doesn’t allow it to go beyond the Old Continent.
But the truth is, after the break up of Soviet Union, NATO formed an informal connection with Japan in 1992. This has spread likewise to similar arrangement with other Asia-Pacific nations such as South Korea, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
When NATO waded into Afghanistan, it drew Central Asia in its ambit who were forced to offer assistance for transit and other purposes such as overflight and basing rights.
No less than eight non-NATO nations presently have troops in Kosovo; 14 non-NATO nations had their military forces in Afghanistan till the other day. NATO has a military-to-military relationship with Pakistan. (India of course won’t touch it with a barge pole.)
But now its world is in tumult.
The humanity has a wool drawn across its eyes by the shameless Media who ought to have been alerting that we are no better than sacrificial lambs in this deadly game.
And that if Western citizens wake up even now, there is still some hope it could deter its notorious elites.
