“It is very important that the NATO allies have the technological advantage on the future battlefield”, said Swedish Defence Minister Pål Jonsson in Svenska Dagbladet last autumn. The future battlefield, in definite form, as if it were a matter of course. And the Folk och Försvar (People and Defence) conference in January was just as inflammatory.
”There could be a war in Sweden,” said Minister for Civil Defence Carl-Oskar Bohlin. ”Russia’s war is a step, not an end goal,” said Commander-in-Chief Micael Bydén. ”War in Europe, with the possibility of further escalation in a short time, is today a reality”, said Thomas Nilsson from MUST (Military Intelligence Bureau).
Most alarmed is Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of NATO’s military committee, who urges the people of NATO to be ready for a major war at any time; ”we must be prepared for anything to happen at any time”.
Now they hardly believe that Russia will attack us. Russia has had great difficulty dealing with Ukraine, a country with a third of Russia’s population and a quarter of its economic capacity. So far the war has cost Russia 60-120,000 deaths. Does anyone seriously believe that it will immediately attack the NATO countries, which have eight times the population of Russia and 25 times its economic capacity? When the current war also shows that defence is now much stronger than attack?
Conversely, do the NATO admiral, the Swedish commander-in-chief and the Swedish ministers think that NATO is just waiting to pounce on Russia? That sounds equally far-fetched. Admittedly, I have no great respect for the wisdom of the ruling class, but they probably understand as well as you and I that this would easily trigger a nuclear war that would wreak such havoc in the NATO countries that their own existence would be jeopardised.
So what is it all about?
Personally, I think it is about the need for an external enemy to blame. Throughout the North Atlantic world, the ruling class is deeply unpopular after 30, 40, 50 years of economic and social mismanagement, allowing capitalists to ”outsource” productive capacity to Asia under the slogan ”the market can never be wrong”. This has led to unemployment, misery and political divisions almost as large as in the 1930s.
A cold war may then seem attractive, preferably with a few small hot wars in the periphery to make the threat credible.
However, the initiative is said to have come from the NATO bureaucracy, which could not bear to be dismissed as unnecessary. At least that’s what George F Kennan, the legendary connoisseur of the last Cold War, thought.
Keeping a cold war going is all about brinkmanship. That is, stepping as far out on the cliff as you dare without falling down. Otherwise the threat cannot be sustained. But this of course involves a risk. You can step wrong. The last Cold War repeatedly risked being derailed into a hot one, resulting in mutual annihilation. The most serious was the so-called ’nuclear false alarm incident’ in 1983, when the Soviet missile warning system warned of an attack from NATO. They had 30 minutes to check the alarm, and discovered that it was about sun reflections in high-flying clouds. Next time they may not have that time.
Not to mention that too much quarrel is also destructive for other reasons. For example, the world has an immediate need for climate change, and cooperation and trust would be an advantage. And the rest of the world’s trust in NATO countries is rapidly falling to zero, says the editor-in-chief of Le Monde Diplomatique. Their support for the massacre in Gaza shows that their respect for international laws and agreements is zero, and therefore not to be trusted.
And as Kishore Mahbubani argued five years ago, there can be no respect for states that demand to rule the world when their resources to do so are rapidly diminishing.
We are indeed on a dangerous path!
Activists for Peace 