Chatham House calls for WWIII and gets ready for the next

Chatham House is a “International Affairs think-tank” in London. Who funds it?

As a non-profit institute without government subsidy or significant endowment, Chatham House has relied principally on membership subscriptions and research grants from foundations, companies and government departments to achieve its mission…. [1]

This appears to be a list from 2015/16. [2] It includes the UK Foreign Office, Black Sea Trust, German Marshall Fund of the United States, BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Ltd, BMT Group Ltd and Boeing UK.

So, as expected, some US equity companies, US/UK government ‘departments’, Western corporations and weapons companies. The Black Sea Trust seems to be linked to the German Marshall Fund of the United States and also to US AID. [3] US Aid is a government agency. I suspect that Chatham House is more directly funded by government than it cares to admit. (At any event I am struggling to square “without government subsidy” and “grants from government departments”).

Let’s turn now to their call for WWIII in today’s Guardian. The author is James Nixey, who apparently leads the Russia-Eurasia programme at Chatham House. If this is the standard of analysis/thinking in think-tank world the US government’s support is not being well-directed. My attention was caught by the sub-heading:

The policy of the US and Europe remains the same: drip-feeding resources while never giving Ukraine the chance to push Russia out

I agree with this. This is indeed the policy. And I share with the author the view that this is a terrible policy. Until his recent last-gasp act of folly to authorise the ATACMS and Storm Shadow strikes inside Russia Biden had been careful to avoid provoking Russia. Not escalating the war, was, until now, the one sensible thing which Biden did. It is a terrible policy because it is doomed to cause Ukraine to lose, slowly. To win a war you have to attack the other side; their bases, their supply lines, their military-industrial centres, their missile launch sites, airstrips, centres of political decision making, and so on. If Ukraine is not enabled to do that and do so in a significant way then it was always predictable that they would lose. On this point, I agree with the author.

Where I part company with the author is the conclusion I would draw from this observation. This is what he wants to do:

These include using Russia’s stranded $300bn in reserves; tightening sanctions (especially against Russia’s shadow fleet transporting oil); sending existing stocks of equipment and munitions (especially air defence systems); investing in European member states’ defence industries with the specific aim of supplying Ukraine; removing any still-existing restrictions on weapons usage for the targeting of Russian troops, supplies, supply lines or infrastructure inside Russia; destroying Russian missiles over Ukrainian territory as is done for Israel; deploying Nato troops in western and central Ukraine to assist with logistics, supplies and training to ease pressure on Ukraine’s own military; and drawing up a membership plan for Nato accession for future security.

I would draw the oppositive conclusion. I think that, because Ukraine cannot win it would be better not to support them at all. There is no path to victory and people are needlessly dying. There are two problems with the author’s suggestion. Firstly, it won’t work. It still won’t be enough! Ukraine does not have enough men to fire all these weapons, even if they were available to be donated. By all accounts; they are not. The last Patriot the US sent they were only able to send by cancelling promised deliveries to other countries around the world. As far as I can see Europe just does not have a lot more air defence systems to spare. The UK definitely doesn’t. Even if they were given dozens more air defence systems it still wouldn’t stop Russian missiles hitting targets in Ukraine. The Israeli “Iron Dome” works because 90% of the missiles it has to deal with are little more than fireworks. A total missile shield is just not possible. Secondly; as far as sanctions go, what exactly is the author planning to do against Russia’s oil tanker fleet? They have opted out of the Western insurance market. What, exactly, can be done to stop these ships sailing from Russian ports to India and China? And, by the way, is he going to tell the EU to stop buying Russian gas and LNG [4]? I get the impression the Germans don’t want to freeze. (You can wrap yourself in a Ukrainian flag, but, ultimately, that doesn’t keep you warm). What weapons would have to be provided to enable Ukraine to disable Russian military-industrial infrastructure beyond the Urals? Think about it. So; even if this plan were possible, it still wouldn’t work. Does the author even know that Russia extends beyond the Urals?

The second problem with this plan, of course, is that taken as a package it will lead to a direct NATO-Russia war. There is no doubt about that at all. Does anyone think Russia would allow all the above to happen and not hit back at NATO targets inside and outside Ukraine? Given the asymmetry between NATO and Russia it is highly likely that such a war would then lead to use of nuclear weapons by Russia. That is, WWIII in a nuclear variant. Russia already considers itself at war with NATO. Does he not think they would use nuclear weapons if they faced a large-scale NATO backed attack? Their nuclear doctrine is published and describes responding to just such a scenario. Which part of it has James Nixey not read? Or, does he think that “Putin is bluffing” and “we have crossed all his redlines before and nothing happened”? The latter view, which is doing the rounds of Western “experts” is simply wrong. The redline was Ukraine joining NATO. The response to the US – Ukraine Strategic Partnership in 2021, which reinforced Ukraine in NATO, was this war. The other supposed “redlines” were not Putin’s redlines; they only exist in the not-paying-attention-minds of Western experts. Russia sees Ukraine joining NATO as an existential security threat. Short of total defeat Russia will fight tooth and nail to the end to prevent this from happening. Since Russia is a nuclear power you cannot defeat it short of mutual nuclear Armageddon. This is basic logic and not hard to think through. One would have thought. The author is, essentially, calling for WWIII and global Armageddon. Does he know that? Does it matter to him?

Worse; if he fails to provoke WWIII with Ukraine he will try with Moldova: “Ukraine is the frontline. Moldova, also once part of the Kremlin’s empire, is leaving Russia’s orbit and is surely in danger.” Here we go again! In a recent referendum on joining the EU in Moldova the results were: 50.39 for and 49.61 against. In other words; the country is split. (Many of the for votes probably came from Moldovans who have long since left the country and already live in the EU, raising questions about how representative this vote was of opinion in Moldova). Yet, the author is already glibly talking it about the country “leaving Russia’s orbit”. Do they have no learning capacity? Of course; people learn not to repeat mistakes when they suffer painful consequences as a result of their mistakes. One of the problems here is that the “analysts” in their cosy offices in London and the shareholders in arms companies rarely suffer any negative results from their errors of judgement. Indeed; even when Ukraine loses shareholders in arms companies will still have made a killing. So; do we have to go all the way until the mushroom cloud explodes over their heads for them to realise that they should have thought things through?

According to this website the author of this piece was a journalist in Russia in the 1990s and has also worked in banking. Apparently he has a degree in modern languages and international relations. Yet; in the above piece there is just no sign at all that he has analysed the situation. There is no sign that he has considered the consequences of his proposal even as far as the very next step, nor even whether it is technically feasible in logistical and military terms. He just thinks it is “immoral” not to “support” Ukraine because Ukraine is part of Europe. I doubt he has any actual knowledge of what happened after Maidan, who came to power, how Zelensky was blocked from implementing Minsk by the right-wing Azov battalion. Can he explain why it is so moral that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men die in order to force Ukraine into NATO, even though, before the war this wasn’t a big demand of Ukrainians? Is it the case that Russia “has a project to delete Ukraine?”. This is baby speak. But even if we take it seriously; Russia is not trying to destroy Ukraine. They are, though, trying to destroy the prospect of Ukraine+NATO. If you analyse Russian statements going back years they have consistently indicated that this was an existential threat for them. Even in his often mis-quoted essay on Ukraine from 2021 it is clear that Putin was quite able to live with an independent Ukraine, so long as it did not join NATO. There is no thought in this Guardian piece. No evidence of knowledge of International Relations. No evidence of any knowledge of IR theory. No evidence of knowledge of recent history. No evidence of military knowledge. It is babyish nonsense. Almost not worth taking seriously. Except Chatham house is a “respected think tank” which is used to shape media narratives.

Final speculation. The author knows his plan is crazy and unrealizable. This is just part of the positioning which is going on before the inevitable defeat of Ukraine. “Look”, they will say, “we said arm them more and if you had done that Ukraine would not have lost”. The only reason we lost this war was that we didn’t arm Ukraine enough. (The reason my plan to take LSD and become enlightened didn’t work out and I ended up a casualty in mental hospital is that I didn’t take enough LSD). Given that James Nixey can’t be that stupid to believe his plan to arm Ukraine to the max would work, I suspect that this is what is really going on here. They are already getting ready for the next war.

Notes

Chatham House calls for WWIII and gets ready for the next

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