....To allow horrible abuses of a civilian population because we fear...whatever, is intolerable for most people with the slightest bit of a conscience.
What to do to stop some of the worst humanitarian abuses in history?
The ideal scenario is having a fair and widely-agreed on set of laws enforceable by
an unbiased 'police' force. Probably the second best opportunity to create something like that were the decisions made during and immediately following WW2 about the forthcoming international order, negotiations in which the United States had the greatest say and success in implementing its ideas: But instead of an unbiased police force (eg. democratic international coalitions), America proposed
four nationalist police states which later morphed into the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Far from ensuring world peace and preventing humanitarian abuses, this power has (rather predictably) made those countries the world's biggest makers and sellers of arms, with the unilateral power to veto any resolution which might get in the way of business or their own ambitions. Probably the
best opportunity to fix that disaster came in the 1990s and 2000s after four decades of Cold War and nuclear buildup: Now the world's only real superpower and knowing the threat of global extinction and all the Cold War horrors committed by both sides under the current 'order,' the United States now held even greater opportunity to fix that disastrous 'balance of terror' model. What did we see instead? Scarcely a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union the USA decided it was time to really flex its muscles with a wildly illegal invasion of a sovereign nation on the opposite side of the world under the laughable pretext of 'defense,' followed less than two years later by - amazingly - an even more egregious invasion of yet another country! Rather than promoting democracy and justice internationally, the United States of America along with its allies such as the United Kingdom and Australia chose to not only maintain but dramatically underscore a brazen might-makes-right world order.
It seems we're not gonna get a fair and unbiased police force to keep world peace, thanks largely to America. What's the next best option?
The next best option is to
try non-violent/de-escalation means of reining in rogue states, most obviously economic sanctions. That doesn't seem to be working against Russia, so far at least, perhaps in large part because Russia's oil and gas exports have scarcely been touched. By a curious irony, it's the United States which arguably bears primary responsibility for perpetuating the global dependency on fossil fuels by essentially
scuppering the Kyoto Protocol in 1997; in more than three decades since the first report of the IPCC, greenhouse gas emissions and dependency on fossil fuels have only continued to increase in almost every single year.
We can still hope that sanctions and Ukrainian resistance will eventually wear out the patience of Russia's oligarchs and intelligence/military communities. But what's plan C? Seems pretty obvious that it should be
proportionate/non-escalating use of force. Direct, defensive military support for Ukraine from other European countries should be under discussion as a contingency, but
not France and the UK and sure as hell not the USA! During forty years of the Cold War the Soviet Union and America managed to avoid direct engagement with each other, and for damn good reason, but it seems suddenly far too many people have forgotten what that reason was. Conflict between nuclear powers is quite simply and obviously a bloody stupid idea. It would be a dumb idea even in the best of circumstances; but when we're talking about one of the world's biggest bullies coming along pretending to be a policeman to save Ukraine from a slightly smaller bully following in the bigger bully's footsteps, it's sheer -ing idiocy!
Finally, and even more optimistically, let's return to point number one; let's get back to pushing for
democratization of the United Nations and nuclear de-escalation starting with the USA and Russia. It may be too late now that it would more heavily depend on the co-operation of the rising superpower China which is starting to enjoy flexing its own muscles, and an increasingly antagonistic Russia. We may well be stuck with the might-makes-right world order which we chose to maintain and dramatically underscore, in a world where we aren't quite as mighty any more. But we still have to try: Anyone who refuses to do so, who upholds the current UN model or, even worse, American militarism as an acceptable status quo for humanity has no business whatsoever complaining about the inevitable abuses and wars it perpetuates.
