A few days ago, in an unusual Saturday session of the US House of Representatives, the Republican opposition that controls that chamber, surprisingly supported the Democratic ruling party’s initiative for aid extraordinary 61 billion dollars destined for Ukraine. A victory for Joe Biden that the extreme right-wingers of that party in the middle of the campaign could not stop.
This proposal had been dormant for six months due to the pressure exerted by Donald Trump who, towards the tribune, described the aid to the battered European country as a “waste” and, more intimately, revealed irresponsible sympathy towards the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.
It is the first time that a Republican sector breaks with that isolationist line whose vigor has depended on the political strength of the former president, who marches with great chances of returning to the White House in the November general elections. For this reason, it is not a total paradigm shift. The vast majority of Republicans voted against the project.
But the portion that did, influenced by the liberal wing of the old conservative party, offered with that gesture a vision about how the American establishment really processes the meaning of Ukrainian drama, far from ideologies or fanaticisms. A very eloquent curiosity about the height of the concern is that the person who operated for that result was one of the magnate’s main bishops, Mike Johnson, the head of the House, now threatened by impeachment due to that behavior, a fate that would not allow his boss.
Monetary aid is so urgent that these six months of parsimony are those of the Ukraine’s visible military decline in the two-year war, a considerable advance in the Russian offensive against that country and the consolidation of the notion of a Moscow victory supposedly in the not too distant future. Why is this scenario so serious?
Not just a regional war
As this column has already pointed out, what is happening in Ukraine is not just a confrontation between an ambitious regional power and a victimized Eastern European country. The survival of kyiv, its protection, in a broad sense, is key in the global balance. The threshold towards what Henry Kissinger defined as detente so that the clash with the Kremlin remains within a line that should not be crossed.
On the other side of that line there is the unpredictable at any level you want to imagine the concept, especially if you notice the alliances that champion Moscow in this adventure. Particularly China, which sentences Taiwan like Russia with Ukraine without the right to exist.
It is interesting that in Saturday’s debate, the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, Texas representative Michael McCaul, a man close to Trump, but also with his own ideas about Ukraine, warned about this threatening unity of the rivals. from the USA. And he finished with a somewhat theatrical but significant call: “¿Somos Churchill o Chamberlain?”.
He alluded to the historic British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who in September 1938 agreed with Adolf Hitler to hand over the region of the Sudetes Germanophiles from Czechoslovakia in exchange for a commitment to peace. That little piece of paper from the call Munich Agreement It lasted a moment. In September 1939, the Third Reich invaded Poland. starting the Second World Warl.
Chamberlain paid for his naivety by being replaced by Winston Churchill. The new British Prime Minister led the war against the Nazis for a long time in solitude with the telephone broken with Washington who, as now with the same Trump slogans, proclaimed USA first (America First) warning that that war did not belong to him. European thing. A deformation fueled by a leadership of the time that largely sympathized with the Nazis like the magnate and his comrades from the Alt-right world (ie Victor Orban) do it with Putin.
To follow McCaul’s idea, there would be Chamberlains crowd today, particularly in Europe that will emerge more clearly in the parliamentary elections next June, and that, like that failed British leader, assume that there are pieces of paper that can commit Putin going forward so that he will comply with what he has taken militarily from Ukraine .
A global change
The process that exposes the Republican turn by reviving the delayed aid of 61 billion dollars to Ukraine, in a package close to one hundred billion that also supplies to a lesser extent Israel and Taiwan, intersects with the global change which he recently pointed out in Clarion Carlos Pérez Llana. A mutation that is reflected in the very dynamic alliance between China and Russia that aims to reduce or extinguish Western influence in planetary design.
Aid to kyiv seems like a large number, although insignificant in the North American potential, as Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman warns when denying Trump who claims, with the script from the middle of the last century, that Europe is the one that should take care of it. But European aid has been much superior to the American one.
However, outside and above that debate, what should be noted is that blocking aid to Ukraine would guarantee its defeat, consolidating that axis between Putin and Xi Jinping that includes Iran and North Korea. A brotherhood that, by accumulating more green lights, will escape the containment that North American hegemony maintains until now.
The British historian Nial Ferguson recalls in Foreign Affairs that Kissinger held that notion of a detente against the Soviet power of the time, not in search of a friendship that he considered impossible and was not interested in, but as a point of unstable but that will avoid the leap into the void of a nuclear Armageddon. The scene today is assimilated to the new East-West tension with Ukraine as a bridge to Taiwan. If one falls, the other should fall.
Kissinger postulated with Richard Nixon the doctrine of “strategic ambiguity”, which responded to the calculating idea of taking advantage of that meager China at the beginning of the 70s bloodthirsty fought with powerful Soviet Russia.
The division of the communist front implied the recognition of one China and two systems, the Single People’s Republic and Taiwan under one umbrella. A double deterrence rather, as political scientist Joseph Nye points out, with the purpose of preventing the island from declaring independence and China from advancing on it. A shelf that will be dismantled if kyiv Hill falls into Russian hands.
Nye, a moderate scholar, who created the categories of soft power of seduction and hard power of coercion from the combination of which arises smart powerhelps gauge the gravity of the moment by advising that Taiwan should receive immediate protection of extraordinary size.
“Given that an island of 24 million people will never be able to militarily defeat a country of more than a billion,” he says, “Taiwan must be able to mount a resistance strong enough to change Xi’s calculations. He must be made to understand that it is not possible for him to consecrate a fait accompli. To this end, Taiwan needs not only advanced aircraft and submarines, but also missiles against ships that can be hidden in tunnels to resist a first Chinese attack. It must become a porcupine that no power can quickly swallow.”
Nye alludes to a real risk of war and unpredictability on the global stage. A warning to Trump and the European extreme right that not everything is as it seems. He remembers that in 1950, US Chancellor Dean Archeson stated definitively that “Korea was outside our defense perimeter, However, within a year, Chinese and Americans were killing each other on the Korean peninsula.”.
Ferguson, in turn, provides even more resounding historical data of this lability. Kissinger defended detente as a moral imperative because the two powers would self-destruct and with them, the planet. So that balance had to be maintained, but it did not rule out coercion. Kissinger was not a pacifist.
In 1974 he asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to formulate a limited nuclear response against the Soviet Union if it invaded Iran, which was then – like Taiwan today with its chips – a desirable pro-Western deposit of energy supplies for the British and Americans. History never repeats itself, but it rhymes, Mark Twain rightly observed.