WHO FEARS PEACE IN THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS?

by FRANCO JURI

There is no doubt that the turning point impressed on the world by US President Donald Trump is alarming. The announcement of wanting to (re)make America “great”, without immigrants, against science, intellectuals, universities, judges, and swallowing, by hook or by crook, Greenland, Panama, Canada, the Ukrainian rare earths and Gaza, cleansed of its Palestinian population, to make it a mecca for American and Israeli oligarchs and gangsters on vacation, has already created a dystopian situation unimaginable until yesterday. But to fill the jar of European fears there is above all Trump’s “pro-Russian” turn on the Ukrainian question, his bargaining with Putin. And we are at the paradox; the great American bully wants peace without ifs and buts, Europe instead calls for war for a »just peace«. While the EU has so far been more American than America, shooting itself in the foot to demonstrate its Atlantic loyalty, it now finds itself behind a more Russian America than Russia and a new international order. Or as Vlado Miheljak wrote in Mladina, “those who have Trump as an ally, do not need an enemy like Putin”.

Europe in fibrillation with panic, now does nothing but count and reassemble itself, between Macron, Starmer and the belligerent Von der Leyen and Kallas, in an attempt to close ranks, looking for a semblance of unity that somehow maintains the Atlanticist axis, continuing to satanize Russia, despite the embarrassment of Trump’s “Putinian” exits.

But let’s go in order. The war in Ukraine, the beginning of which is generally attributed to Russia’s military attack in February 2022, actually has a more complex genesis. Many analysts, not yet “embedded” in the Euro-Atlantic narrative, point to the real beginning of the military conflict in the “Maidan Square revolution” of 2014, the decidedly anti-Russian turn that followed the country’s leadership after President Yanukovych’s flight from Kiev, the clashes between opposing nationalisms with the burning and the 48 Russian militants burned alive in the House of Trade Unions in Odessa, the Russian separatist insurgency in Dombas, the massacres of the Ukrainian Azov battalion in that region, the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and the creeping war in eastern Ukraine with 14 thousand deaths in eight years. But in addition to all this chaos and the failure of the Minsk agreements, intended – according to Angela Merkel – more as a time-gaining diversion than a serious attempt at pacification, what annoyed and exploded Putin’s anger was above all the insistence on wanting to let in the former Soviet Georgia and Ukraine, the latter the historical heart of ancient Rus with a coast on the Black Sea, in NATO. An insistence sprouted and announced by Gerge Bush Jr. in 2008 in Bucharest in defiance of Western assurances given to Gorbachev and Yeltsin of a non-enlargement of NATO beyond Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The explosive mixture exploded three years ago with what Russia euphemistically called a “special military operation”, but which is, according to international law, in fact a war of invasion against a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations. Much like the Western wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Ukraine, surprising Putin and his military leaders, reacted energetically, supported militarily and politically by the US, as well as by EU and NATO countries. After three years of war of position, fortunately not degenerated (yet) into war with tactical nuclear weapons, the scenario is bleak; hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides, a country divided and brought to its knees economically and socially, an exodus of 20 million Ukrainians, an international situation in the balance with the advent of a Europe in crisis of militaristic policies in which the term peace has been banned if not combined with a generalized rearmament in an anti-Russian key. Even Pope Francis’ messages for peace have been ignored or stigmatized. Since February 2022, the European Union, led by the militant Ursula von Der Leyen and with a foreign policy entrusted to a young Estonian who is viscerally anti-Russian and has little historical-geographical competence, has set out along an unknown and mined path, cutting all bridges with the great eastern neighbor and jeopardizing the thousands of sanctions imposed on Moscow, not without anti-Russian belligerence even in the field of culture and art, especially their own economies. Not only that; at the first signs of negotiations, Europe uncritically followed the Anglo-Saxon sirens that invalidated the one attempted by Erdogan in Istanbul and in some way already endorsed by Moscow. The war thus continued, Volodimir Zelensky allowed himself to be convinced that victory over the Russians was imminent and that the reconquest of Crimea was just a few steps away. Billions of dollars and euros in weapons and ammunition have flowed into the Ukrainian battlefields, where, however, the Russians have continued to advance meter by meter, without being distracted by the now tragically failed Ukrainian raid in the Russian region of Kursk. But the real cold shower came with Trump, whose anti-Zelensky rhetoric has now surpassed even Putin’s, going so far as to interrupt military aid to Ukraine.  

And how has disoriented Europe reacted to this reversal? The first to take the field and propose himself as European nuclear leader was obviously Emmanuel Macron, a president with little legitimacy in his country, given his party’s poor electoral result in the 2024 general elections. But war, as we know, is a miraculous tonic and, if the fear of the Russian is forty, the questionable leader can turn into a revered leader. Like Napoleon. And so, by evoking an imminent Russian threat to France and Europe, it seems to be proposing, with French nuclear warheads, as a potential replacement for America in the smell of retreat. Across the Channel, he is echoed fiercely by Keir Starmer, also a nuclear prime minister, but with the mortgage of Brexit and a United Kingdom that wants to mend fences with the EU, but as a protagonist. And then there is the usual Von der Leyen who, anticipating the Council and the European Parliament, bursts out: ReArm EU! 800 billion euros to arm us. Kaja Kallas adds: 40 billion, but then settles for 5, for weapons to Ukraine!  Zelensky, grateful to the European godfathers, after the grooming suffered on live TV in the Oval Office by Trump and Vance,  and on the recommendation of NATO Secretary Mark Rutte, he is ready to return to Washington and support the American plan for a truce, the conditions of which, however, will be decided by Trump and Putin. The European Council approves the rearmament plan, but the prime ministers are worried about doing the math. Each with its own voters and the inevitable cuts in social spending. The Commission concedes a break in the tax rule; Countries can borrow beyond the limits but only for military spending. Not forgetting Rutte’s obscene burp: “If you don’t want to increase military spending, study Russian or move to New Zealand!” Everyone, however, misses one of those details in which the devil is often hidden; in Europe the extreme right is whipping like cream. Most of these are close to Trump and also to Putin. They are mounting because the liberal, popular, social democratic and even green parties have not been able to maintain either social cohesion or green transition. Now they are focusing on the military industry, mostly private, an illusory anti-crisis panacea, especially in Germanic dreams. Full of Atlanticism followed  neoliberal geopolitical directives from overseas, creating social discontent. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they gave up, thinking they would bring the Russian economy to its knees, to a cheap and quality energy source, penalizing, especially in Germany, but also in Italy, a large part of national industries. They have even swallowed the frog of the attack on Nord Stream, which has made Europeans even more dependent on alternative, more expensive and long-term unreliable supplies. And now Trump’s tariffs are also being put into it. Europe is in deep crisis, but it is responding to the global emergency in the worst possible way, focusing on militarization and the war industry, waiting for the enemy from its desert of the Tartars of Buzzatian memory and trying to exorcise him with cannons. But the renunciation of a policy of peace and social and sustainable development will increase social inequalities, fears, and the impoverishment of large sections of the population. Radical political changes dictated by anger and fear of large social strata and the instrumental demonization of immigrants are now in the palm of the hand and not only in the USA. Tomorrow, Europe, armed to the teeth, could pass democratically to new extreme right-wing governments. Is this really what we want for our continent?