“Do you also want us to take away our soldiers buried in Normandy?” he asked. Dean Rusk to the government of General de Gaulle when in 1966 he removed France from the military council of the NATOshutting down US bases and moving its headquarters from Paris to Brussels. The irony of Lindon Johnson’s Secretary of State denounced ingratitude towards the role of EUnited States in the liberation of France.
De Gaulle he did not want to break with the Atlantic alliance or get closer to the USSR, but rather to recover sovereignty against the powerful American partner that ten years earlier had forced the French to cease the war for the Suez Canal.
The shadow of those tensions hangs over Europe. in the antethat of the ballotage, Marine Le Pen said that, if she won the presidency, she would promote a Eurasian security alliance with Russia. For the leader of the French extreme right, Europe and Russia must join forces as soon as the war in Ukraine ends. The same is true of Eric Zemmour, the other exponent of the extreme right, and Jean Luc Melenchon, the leader of the hard left who despises the social democratic center-left.
What is revealing is that the same idea was expressed by Dmitry Medvedev when he spoke of a Eurasian alliance spanning from Vladivostok to Lisbon, that is, from the easternmost city of Russia, on the Pacific Ocean, to the westernmost city of continental Europe, on the Atlantic.
Medvedev is a figure closely linked to Vladimir Putin. He trusts him so much that, when he collided with the constitutional limit that prevented him from seeking re-election in 2008, the head of the Kremlin passed the presidency to him in a castling that made him prime minister until 2012, the year in which he resumed the highest position. .
During those four years, it was Putin who continued to exercise the highest leadership of power. Medvedev returned to being prime minister until in 2020 he held the vice presidency of the National Security Council.
The idea he expressed is the goal of the Kremlin, inspired by the conception of the geopolitical ultranationalist Alexander Duguin. In the Eurasian alliance that the Russian leader will promote, neither the United States nor Great Britain will enter, therefore, it aims to supplant the NATO for a continental space over which Russia will ensure its gravitation thanks to its military power and its role as the main supplier of hydrocarbons.
Le Pen did not make explicit during the campaign her desire for a continental Europe that draws closer to Moscow while moving away from Washington and London. But his proposal to withdraw France of the NATO Military Council and to change the rules of the European Union, suggests that change of strategic axis. The ultra-conservative Victor Orban would be willing to add Hungary to the group of governments and leaders that push Europe towards Russia, seeking to replace NATO and the Atlantic society with the security alliance that unites Lisbon with Vladivostok.
Washington’s worst geopolitical nightmare does not end with Russia extending the Tashkent Pact, or Collective Security Treaty, to Central and Western Europe, which it now has with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The reformulation of the global geostrategic chessboard could also impact Europe from China.
The delivery of powerful weapons from Beijing to Belgrade would go in that direction. With the HQ-22 surface-to-air missiles that China gave them, the Serbs would be in a position to restart the conflict in Kosovo to regain control over that territory with an Albanian majority.
The HQ-22 are anti-aircraft missiles equivalent to the Patriot missiles and the S-300, therefore, it would be more difficult for NATO to subdue Serbia again as it did in 1999, attacking with its might flight to Belgrade from the Adriatic Sea.
If it manages to recapture Kosovo, those surface-to-air missiles it received from China would tempt it to throw itself once again into the construction of “the Greater Serbia”, attacking Bosnia Herzegovina to resume the ethnically cleansed war that the leaders Bosnian Serbs Karadzic and Mladic carried on until NATO bombed them.
The restart of that European war would be part of the chaos that would already be justified in calling the Third World War. A situation that could have as an Asian extension a Chinese offensive against Taiwan with the aim of putting the island under Beijing’s control.
The invasion of Ukraine implies putting Europe on the way to World War III, but the much feared conflagration has not yet broken out. The Kremlin maintains that the world is already in its third great war due to the fact that Russia and NATO are indirectly confronting each other in Ukraine, given that the Atlantic alliance is assisting the Ukrainians with weapons and financing. But that has already happened in the past.
When the Soviets entered Afghanistan, the Americans and their allies armed the mujahideen who fought them, just as Moscow had armed the Vietcong during the war with United States in Vietnam.
Neither these nor other cases were considered World War III, therefore the one in Ukraine cannot still be considered that way.
That conflagration will have broken out if Serbia attacks Kosovo with the weapons that China has begun to give them in order to have their own chips on the NATO board. And it will have an Asian extension if, to take advantage of the chaos unleashed in Europe, China launches an attack on the island of Taiwan.
NATO’s nightmare is that so many fronts are opened at the same time. The Atlantic bloc is the most powerful in military and economic terms, but the Kremlin’s objective is to dispute its partnership with Europe, where it hopes to advance through the far-right and far-left leaderships that despise the liberal-democratic political model and the free-market economic model. market. The European extreme right and the Marxist left disagree on issues such as race and immigrants, but have broad agreement on economics. They promote replacing the northwestern model of capitalism with capitalisms with a greater state presence and with authoritarian regimes such as those that exist in Russia and China.
Also the national-Islamic Turkey of Erdogan he abhors the liberal-democratic model. That is why it is easy to imagine her leaving NATO to join the Eurasian security alliance with which Moscow will try to reduce the influence of the United States in Europe.
The invasion of Ukraine is aimed at this larger goal, but it may be counterproductive. It would not be the first time that Putin has failed to achieve his goals in the West. His intelligence and propaganda apparatus worked to bring about the Brexit, but London kept its alliance with Washington.
