DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .
Un artículo por Andy Robinson* en CTXT Contexto y Acción (non-comercial use)
While Western leaders were trivializing the nuclear threat over caipirinhas, Brazil was seeking consensus in the face of the risk of World War III
There can be no tougher test for the G20 sherpas – the diplomats in charge of achieving consensus at meetings of the most powerful countries in the world – than the news of the preamble to a possible Third World War.
But something similar happened at the beginning of the Rio summit last week, when the still president of the United States, Joe Biden, gave the green light to Ukraine to fire long-range ATACMS missiles at targets in Russia. Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the obedient United Kingdom, a junior partner, would soon follow suit with British Storm Shadow missiles.
The news reached the Copacabana and Ipanema hotels, where the heads of state of dozens of countries were staying – led by Xi Jinping, Joe Biden, Shigeru Ishiba, the prime minister of Japan; Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and the host and mediator, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Ukraine launched the first ATACMS missile against Russia during the opening of the summit, after a heavy Russian offensive the day before. To further tense the atmosphere in Rio, Russia announced the same day that it had modified its defence protocols to allow the use of nuclear weapons against a conventional offensive.
To anyone in Rio who had seen Doctor Strangelove or read Annie Jacobsen’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, it all seemed like a dangerous provocation from one nuclear superpower to another. Even thoughtful columnists like David Sanger, a nuclear strategy expert for the New York Times, recalled that “until this weekend, President Biden had refused to allow these attacks (…) for fear that they could provoke World War III.” Newsweek headlined: “Will Biden’s decision regarding ATACMS missiles provoke World War III? Our experts give their answer.”
Despite the routine tone used to talk about the end of humanity, the news made a dent in the bars of Rio de Janeiro. “Você entendeu o que eu entiende?” said a Carioca as the news was reported on GloboNews. Even evangelicals with apocalyptic convictions, who attended Sunday mass on the eve of the G20, seemed somewhat uneasy.
When they finally had to comment, Western leaders assumed that Putin’s warnings about a possible nuclear response were one of the Machiavellian Russian leader’s bluffs. NATO missile strikes on Russia would serve as a final lesson before Trump takes office. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticized all of us who worry about the possibility of a Third World War: “irresponsibility.”
But European and American leaders and their advisers were enjoying the city of wonders and caipirinhas. Emmanuel Macron strolled through Copacabana and allowed himself to be photographed. Keir Starmer played football with a local children’s team and tried to convince the little ones that his team, Arsenal, is “the best in the world”. Biden’s daughter was photographed in front of the enormous Samauma tree in the Botanical Garden.
Curiously, there was no official announcement about the decision to authorise the attacks. When the news broke, Biden was in Manaus, and it was hard not to wonder whether the octogenarian president, lost in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, had heard that the decision had been taken to take the first step towards catastrophe. The deep state in Washington seemed to be in charge, perhaps in order to make life difficult for Donald Trump, who has promised to “end the war in 24 hours” once in the White House. Not even Kubrick would have imagined such a staging.
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Can the peace movement help stop the war in the Ukraine?
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When they finally had to comment, Western leaders took Putin’s warnings about a possible nuclear response as one of the Machiavellian Russian leader’s bluffs. NATO missile strikes on Russia would serve as a final lesson before Trump takes office. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticised all of us who worry about the possibility of a Third World War as “irresponsible”.
In the face of the attitude of Western leaders in Rio, I could only recall what Jeffrey Sachs, the veteran economist at Columbia University, had told me. Sachs negotiated an economic rescue plan for the USSR (Russia) in 1990 with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, which was sabotaged by the then administration of George Bush Sr., bent on weakening Russia and expanding NATO as far as possible.
Authorizing long-range missiles against Russia, he explained to me, “could lead to escalation, and eventually to nuclear war. It is part of the continuing recklessness and arrogance of the US deep state, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and the arms contractors. It is also part of the UK’s continuing destructive role in the world system, which of course goes back to the British empire.” (The entire interview, with parts still unpublished, will be available to read shortly on my new Substack account.)
To quote Yanis Varoufakis, the Brazilian diplomats and Lula seemed “the only adults in the room” at the avant-garde Museum of Modern Art, where the summit was held. When the European and American delegations pressed for Russia to be explicitly condemned in the final communiqué, Lula refused. Aware that any hardening of neutral language would raise hackles in delegations from China and much of the global south, he opted for “a more moderate tone,” Celso Amorim, Lula’s veteran foreign policy adviser who met Putin in April last year, told me. In the end, the statement simply says: “The G20 condemns the war in Ukraine and its impacts on the global economy and supply chains.”
Lula has tried since the start of the war in Ukraine to seek a negotiated multilateral solution – meeting Zelensky in New York, but also holding talks with Putin – and has always criticised NATO expansion. Biden’s decision “is a dangerous escalation,” said Guilherme Casarões, of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo. “Brazil has not specifically spoken out on the issue, but its position is to defend respect for international law, (…) and the principle of nuclear disarmament.”
European leaders lashed out at the final statement. “Disappointing,” Starmer said. “Insufficient,” agreed Olaf Scholz. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, on the other hand, praised him for “calling for an honest and reasonable conversation about a peace based on realistic criteria.”
But Lula knew that “any different formulation could harm the consensus,” said Casarões. Brazilian diplomacy “always tries to build bridges,” summed up Olicer Stuenkel, another expert from the Getulio Vargas Foundation.
However, there may be a paradox in the dramatic story of the G20 in Rio de Janeiro. Because it is not only NATO that plays with reckless frivolity in the game of roulette that could end with the end of the world. Putin, of course, is a player as reckless as the neocons of the deep state in Washington: “Lula and Amorim wanted to put on the table the idea of a broader, more multilateral negotiation to get out of the impasse in Ukraine,” said Rodrigues. “And that Russian offensive was, I believe, a tactic to undermine that possibility of seeking peace. Putin is no longer interested in negotiating anything; he is on the offensive and has a United States with Donald Trump at the helm that is going to offer him interesting things.”
*Andy Robinson is a correspondent for ‘La Vanguardia’ and a contributor to Ctxt since its founding. In addition, he belongs to the Editorial Board of this media. His latest book is ‘Oro, gasolina y aguacates: Las nuevas venas abiertas de América Latina’ (Arpa 2020)
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