The surest path to a new world war
Europe feels more pre-war than postwar. Euro states are increasing their war spending and mothers worry that their sons will be conscripted. EU Foreign Minister Josef Borrell warns: “A high-intensity, conventional war in Europe is no longer a fantasy.” The Danish defence minister echoes World War I poets: “The Berlin Wall has been replaced with a ring of fires around us.”
Putin recruits thousands more “peacekeepers” from prisons, including a Satanist convicted of the ritualistic killing of four teenagers. Calling a murderer a “peacekeeper” has the internal cynicism of “gourmet burger”, “social media” and “sports personality”.
3000 kilometres from Europe, Iran's shadow war with Israel has turned into missiles in an attempt to divide Arab governments. Houthi gangs in Yemen attack ships. Just one Austrian Archduke aboard, and we know how that story ends. This must be how 1913 and 1938 felt. But catastrophe needs complacency, good people doing nothing.
The choice for the West is not between war and peace. It is between tough prevention now and a passive, handwringing slide into global war.
Finally, enough House of Representatives Republicans performed the u-turn of a wobbly shopping trolley, and passed a USD$61 billion military aid package for Ukraine.
Delay had a deadly cost. Ukraine lost territory, lives and vital infrastructure. People killed by Russia's daily bombardments of Odessa over the last six months would be alive.
To channel Churchill, Americans always do the right thing - after exhausting all the other possibilities.
Ukraine gains a psychological advantage. Blundering dictator Putin will not have a quick victory.
Even if the EU shifts right in its June elections and Russia’s man, Donald Trump, wins the White House, vital support will remain.
Other autocrats and thugs will observe there are consequences for using force against their neighbours.
The politics of liberal democracies are polarised and ugly, but we can act when the stakes are high.
We have other advantages that didn’t exist when the world previously slipped into war.
Military planners have instant information that 1913 or 1938 lacked. Mistakes are less likely. US intelligence warned Israel that Hamas was about to attack before October 7. Tragically they ignored the intel.
Had 1914 learned that a 19-year-old Serbian nationalist planned to assassinate the Archduke, the 20th century would have been different.
Our biggest risk is complacency. New Zealand has pledged about $100 million to Ukraine since 2022, having ignored the invasion of Crimea in 2014. Subsequent governments hoped the money and a strongly worded press release would suffice for a shorter war.
Nearly 15 million Ukrainians now depend on aid to survive. 30,000 civilians have been killed or wounded.
Australia has given about $960 million, Canada $4 billion. If we cared as much, our contribution per head of population would be $400 million more to match Australia, or $600 million more to match Canada.
They’re large sums of money, yet much smaller than the costs to us of war spreading.
It was complacency, not muscular defence of freedom, that released the dogs of the 20th century’s wars.
British prime minister Neville Chamberlain referred to Hitler’s ambition to take Czechoslovakia in 1938, as “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”.
At the time his comments were popular. Despite the blood and bombs of WWII showing that distance and culture cannot be weighed against how much to involve ourselves, the view that it’s not our fight remains common and wrong.
At an event this week hosted by the charity where I work, ChildFund, Ukrainian ambassador Vasyl Myroshnychenko reminded us that this is not only a European war. Russia has Pacific ports and a large naval fleet. Victory in Ukraine would embolden Putin in the Pacific.
The war will be over when Putin is defeated in Ukraine. His goal has never been limited to territory, and claims that he is reacting to Nato expansion has always been a lie. He wants the elimination of liberal, free nations on his border because his greatest threat is democratisation of Russian society.
It is time to recalibrate the West’s strategy for Ukraine. European allies have frozen $300 billion of Russian assets. The money should be sent to Ukraine now because Russia’s violation of international law should have international consequences.
Sanctions have been skirted, mainly by India and China. It’s no coincidence that authoritarian ethnic nationalists rule those countries.
Author Anne Applebaum has written that if the West were serious about sanctions we would have thousands of people working with banks of screens at a central command centre, updating intelligence about sanctions-busting.
Yesterday we remembered the loss of our heroes in world war. Kiwi mums whose kids are tripping around the bierfests in Europe today do not want a world where they could be sent to another.
Failure to fend off the invaders now, says President Volodymyr Zelensky, is what could spiral into confrontation with Nato, and inevitably, a third world war.
Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular opinion contributor. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.