Karaganov: How Russia can Win the New World War
By Professor Sergey Karaganov
Moscow must sharpen nuclear deterrence, revise doctrine and defeat Kiev to avert a wider war with the West and NATO powers.
The accelerating flow of events, each overlapping and contradicting the other, is bewildering and makes it difficult to grasp the essence of what is happening. I shall attempt to interpret the course of history, drawing on my own experience and knowledge, as well as on the fact that over the past 35 years I have never been significantly wrong in my assessments and forecasts. Sometimes I was a little
behind, but more often I was several years, or even a couple of decades, ahead of the expert community.
A full-scale world war has already begun. Its roots go back to 1917, when Soviet Russia broke away from the capitalist system. First, the interventionists were set upon us; then Nazi Germany and almost all of Western Europe, but the latter lost. The second round began in the 1950s, when the peoples of the USSR, at the cost of enormous hardship and in their quest to secure sovereignty and security, created the nuclear bomb and subsequently achieved nuclear parity with the United States. By doing so, without realizing it at the time, we knocked the foundations out from under five centuries of Western dominance in the ideological sphere, which had allowed them to plunder the rest of the world and subjugate even the most advanced civilizations. That foundation was military superiority, upon which the system of exploitation of all humanity was built.
From the mid-1950s onwards, the West began to suffer one military defeat after another. A wave of national liberation swept across the globe, accompanied by the nationalization of resources that had been seized by Western countries and their corporations. The global balance of power began to shift in favor of the non-Western world.
The United States first attempted to regain the upper hand under Reagan, with a rapid surge in military spending aimed at restoring its dominance, and the launch of the “Star Wars” program. It intervened in the tiny, defenseless nation of Grenada to demonstrate that the Americans were still capable of victory.
And here, the West was fortunate. For internal reasons, due to the erosion of its ideological core and the refusal to reform a national economy that was becoming increasingly inefficient, the Soviet Union collapsed. The global capitalist system, which had itself been in crisis, received a massive injection of energy in the form of a multitude of hungry consumers and cheap labor.
It seemed as though history had turned back. A period of euphoria began, but it didn’t last long. Dazed by its victory, the West made a number of spectacular geostrategic blunders, and then Russia began to revive, primarily through its military might.
The immediate roots of the current world war came to the surface in the late 2000s. Even under Obama, the policy later branded “America First” began to take shape as a revival of US power. Military spending started to rise, and a wave of anti-Russian propaganda surged. Moscow tried, by reclaiming Crimea, to halt the West’s latest attempt at revenge, but this only sent the West into a frenzy. We failed to capitalize on this success because we clung to hopes of “reaching an agreement,” dithered over the “Minsk process,” and refused to see how, on Ukrainian territory, the army and the population were being prepared for war with Russia.
New waves of sanctions followed, and an economic war began even during Trump’s first term. We were all waiting for something. Then came the distraction of Covid, which was most likely one of the fronts in the war that had already begun, but which turned against the West itself.
We were slow to respond to attempts at retaliation. When we finally did so in 2022, we made several mistakes. Among them was underestimating the West’s intention to crush Russia as the cause of its historical failure, so that it could then turn its attention to China and once again subjugate the global majority, the Third World, the Global South, that had been liberated by the USSR. We underestimated the Kiev regime’s readiness for war and the extent to which the Ukrainian population had been conditioned. We hoped that “our people” were there, although west of the Dnepr there were few of them to begin with, and their numbers were dwindling.
Another mistake was that we began fighting the Kiev regime without recognizing that the main adversary and source of the threat was the collective West – particularly the European elites, who sought to divert attention from their own failures and, ideally, to take revenge for the historical defeats of the 20th century, chief among them the defeat of the overwhelming majority of Europeans who marched against the USSR under Hitler’s banners.
Our main mistake, however, was the underutilization of the most important weapon in our arsenal , one for which we paid with malnutrition and even starvation in the 1940s and 1950s, nuclear deterrence.
We have been drawn into a conflict dubbed a “special military operation,” effectively accepting the imposed rules of the game, a war of attrition, given the enemy’s superior economic and demographic potential. The war has taken on a trench-like character, albeit with a 21st-century technological dimension. In 2023 and 2024, we did, however, step up our nuclear deterrence, sending several military-technical signals and modernizing our doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons.
The Americans, who under no circumstances intended to fight for Europe, especially when there was a risk of escalation to the nuclear level, and thus the spread of the conflict to US territory, began to withdraw from direct confrontation even under Biden, continuing to profit from the war while effectively plundering the Europeans in the process. Trump, amid talk of peacemaking, continued along the same line, profiting from the war while avoiding the risk of direct confrontation with Russia.
The world war currently has two main, converging flashpoints, the European one, centered on Ukraine, and the Middle Eastern one, where the United States and its junior ally Israel are attempting to destabilize the entire Near and Middle East. South Asia may be next. Venezuela has already been crushed; Cuba is being squeezed.
A new policy is needed.
First. We must understand that the deep-seated contradictions in the existing global economic system, which undermine the very foundations of human development, threaten the destruction of mankind. At
the same time, the continuation of our current half-measured policy in Ukraine risks exhausting the country and undermining the strength and spirit of Russia that have only recently begun to revive.
Second. In the military-political sphere, we can discuss a ceasefire and even speak of a “spirit of Alaska.” But at the same time, we must clearly understand the essence of what is happening: long-term
peace and the development of our country, as well as of humanity as a whole, are impossible without thwarting the West’s attempt at military-political revenge, with Europe once again at its forefront.
To prevent this revenge, it is necessary to destroy the Kiev regime and liberate the southern and eastern territories of the quasi-state “Ukraine” that are vital to Russia’s security. Our brave fighters and field commanders can and must continue to advance. But we must understand that a modernized trench war will not bring victory. We could lose, or at the very least squander, hundreds of thousands more of our finest men, who are needed for the struggle and victories in the coming, extremely dangerous and difficult period of history, one that is almost certain to involve a broader clash.
Third. It is impossible to bring the current conflict in Ukraine to a victorious conclusion, let alone prevent it from escalating into a global thermonuclear war, without significantly strengthening the policy of relying on nuclear deterrence. To achieve this, we must stop talking about “arms control.” The issue of a new START treaty must be closed. At the same time, agreements on the joint management of nuclear deterrence and strategic stability may remain useful and even necessary. We must intensify the build-up of missiles and other medium- and strategic-range delivery systems in order to deter the West from attempting to regain its superiority. Our adversaries must understand that superiority and impunity are unattainable.
When deployed in optimal numbers and guided by the right doctrine, nuclear weapons render non-nuclear superiority impossible and reduce the need for excessive military expenditure. Systems such as Burevestnik, Oreshnik, and other hypersonic delivery platforms must convince the enemy of this reality.
We must prepare the next generation so that American elites understand in advance that their dreams of restoring supremacy and imposing their will by force are unrealistic. Read Full Article – Click Here
Original source: https://www.rt.com/russia/639440-karaganov-how-russia-can-win/