11 March 2024
In some darkest office spaces, deep within the deepest of Deep State panels light up working numbers, plotting against maps, playing an updated version of scenario. The outside world of metal and chemical explosives, the blood curling rage of battle cries, the lament of kith and kin, the acrid smell of fouling flesh with gunpowder does not ever exist or count in these neat office spaces. For these elite men and women, the set pieces that they move and data they update are so far removed that they may be an entire universe away… It is not just one side of the Atlantic that such offices light up with such notions, the centres connect like dots, dots that stretch like a waist cord across this Pale Blue Dot, which otherwise would have been facing a existential challenge called Climate Crises.
It is now more than 24 months into the official entry of ‘hot war’ in Ukraine, more than a decade since the pieces were set in for this be brought about. The news now getting grimmer and grimier makes the gamers’ supervisors connect call. The call has always been so far to ‘up the game’. The cycle of escalation has always gone upward, and once in a while, threatening to spiral into a nuclear showdown, but such hair raising bone chilling face offs are carefully watered down and offered in ‘past tense’ to the tax payers. The drum of Freedom, of Free Will, of Choice, of Liberty and what ever else that can get rostered into this cause raises such an orchestrated din that when the frocked leader of the faithful issues a call for a White Flag of Peace, he seems quixotic and woefully out of place.
The person who today commands France as Napoleon once did, looks at dwindling supplies, drying tranches of aid, and a political logjam that seems to make the trans Atlantic Chief preoccupied and unable to offer any meaningful assistance. So he now energises his camp and talks up his peers in Europe, raising the prospect of French leading the support to Ukraine in a way that would be meaningful- Ukraine in need of manpower, would now be offered manpower. In Alternate Reality a history buff was thankful that former colonials couldn’t command their erstwhile colonies to become cannon fodder. Is France committing to extract those already in Ukraine as a case of investing more to save existing investment? Or is France hoping that by making Ukraine a battlefield for all of Europe, Russia would be deterred from pursuing what now appears to be a military possibility- physical annexation of Ukraine that would be the entire Donbas and would include the entire of coastal Ukraine including Odessa.
Promptly France’s neighbours and European partners water down the prospects. The Baltics led by Lithuania raise a fresh scare of a Russian audacity to crush the trio of Baltics and unmake Kaliningrad as an enclave. Likewise spectre of Transnistria becoming another Abkhazia or Donbas inside Moldova is raised and the French land up in Chisinau and promise to assist Moldova. No one in Paris, Berlin or Rome actually wonders if the spectre of Russian expansionism is a reflex reaction against the growing Russophobia fanned in Eastern Europe by Western Capitals, because they know…those screens that light up, they have crystal balled the Russophobia as a force multiplier that would drive the entire of Europe into the arms of NATO. So far Project Ukraine has successfully transferred Sweden and Finland which were strategic north for Russia, much against the public remonstration by Moscow.
Orientalists love Sun Tzu — after all to win a war without fighting is a magical wanding! In all their scenario screenings, their worst case was that fighting involved others, supported by elite shadow forces that could be hidden from legislative scrutiny. The Economists are happy that Europe is now Monroed moored by American schemes that are called Russia Specific Sanctions. Does the Deep Blue actually have a plan? Was this the intended outcome all along? The ever expanding contours of conflict that moved from Baltic Sea through Black Sea to Mediterranean Sea to now Red Sea?
Shelley (the better half ) wrote of Frankenstein. Of how a few Bradleys, F16s, ATACMS, HIMARS, alongside Scalps, Storm Shadows, Leopards etc would make for a composite that could be a champion. Only this hotchpotch stitched up thing ended up becoming a monster that turned up on its own maker Frankenstein! We are not even getting into the millions of small arms and munitions, drones and smart devices that flooded Ukraine and then vanished without a trace, for even if these resurface, they would cause a hiccups here and there, random acts of violence.
What would happen, if ethnic identities rose up in focus, reopening old divides that Western Democracy and American power post World Wars have papered over in Europe. We saw what happened when the Balkans ruptured after the fall of the Berlin Wall. What would happen if the same happened in Transcarpathia? In Baltics? Could fault lines reopen in Brussels? Is what prevailed in Georgia, and now visiting Ukraine a symptom of these tectonics? Are conflicts the price Europe is willing to pay once more? When will Berlin or Rome or Paris think that enough is enough of this game of polemics?
Do Western leaders need to read Mary Shelley? Or they are like the children of Hamelin marching to tune played by the Pied Pipers under whom hundreds of geeks staring into unforgiving lit up screens are clacking keys that offer a background music of their march?
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