In 1943, on the plains of Ukraine, the largest tank battle in history took place. In the prominent Kursk language, the Tiger of Hitler faced T34 from Stalin. Eighty years later, Washington and Warsaw summoned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to authorize his tank deployment. Leopard in the same place. What’s that The Third World War has begunas one important historian asserted?…
This Friday, January 20, 2023, the American base at Ramstein, near Heidelberg, became for a few hours the capital of the West at war with Russia, eleven months after Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
At the invitation of Lloyd Austin, the United States Secretary of Defense, weapons suppliers from Ukraine met at the base in response to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pressing request for heavy tanks.
Great Britain, which has extricated itself from the European Union in full submission to Washington, has promised a dozen tanks Challenger. That’s all he can do. France, whose industry and army were in disarray, could promise nothing. The United States is only slightly better placed. They are reluctant to send tanks to Ukraine Abrams citing logistical issues. Germany remains. Two thousand heavy tanks Leopard 2 furnishes the various Alliance countries but Berlin prohibits its customers from sending them to other countries without its express permission.
For now, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is rejecting this authorization and stalling for time. He asked the Americans to first send their own tanks to Ukraine… knowing that this would be impossible for them for various reasons.
The conflict between Washington and Berlin
As historian Emmanuel Todd explains, the United States had an existential need to defeat Russia and destroy it in order to consolidate its dominance vis-à-vis the rest of the planet. They know that if they eventually have to make peace with Russia, their reputation will suffer and with it the dollar, whose hegemony rests solely on the general belief in the omnipotence of the American army.
If this proxy war exists for Washington, it exists for Moscow as well. It would have been unthinkable for the Kremlin for the Russian people to cede Crimea, the land that had been essentially Russia for three centuries, a first-order strategic issue. And if Putin gives up in spite of everything, Russia will have no other alternative but to emigrate or sink into poverty, while the big American companies will get their hands on their hydrocarbon and mineral resources just like they did in the 1990s, under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. .
To win, Washington relied on the heroic sacrifice of Ukrainian soldiers as at other times on Kurdish fighters when it was a matter of fighting. Daesh in Iraq. But he also needs firm support from Europeans, in particular to overcome hostility from around the world, which is no longer in favor of American hegemony and more or less in favor of Russia.
Mr. Scholz’s Nightmare
Washington could count on unremitting support from London and Warsaw. Keep rallying Germany, which is Europe’s active heart and, by far, its main industrial pillar. But Chancellor Olaf Scholz, 64, remains true to the pacifist traditions of the Social Democrats. He was from the generation that was still immersed in historical memory and trying to resist pressure from his allies, but he had grown increasingly isolated in this regard.
In his own government, he has been opposed by his vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, 53, the economy and climate minister, who claims to be a pacifist left. it belongs Green vegetable but not to contradiction. Born in 1969, he learned nothing from the Second World War and remembers the Cold War and the fall of the Wall from his twenties. He argued passionately for the delivery of heavy tanks Leopard In Ukraine !
Within NATO, Olaf Scholz only enjoyed the ambiguous support of French President Emmanuel Macron, who, however, was weakened by the falling failures both domestically and internationally (Africa). Internationally, the Chancellor has sought to maintain dialogue with China, which has remained close to Russia to the dismay of the United States.
In October 2022, by monitoring the sabotage of the Baltic gas pipeline, the United States signaled to Germany that it could no longer rely on Russian gas for years and had no interest in delaying it.
By forcing them now to allow the delivery of heavy tanks Leopard to Ukraine, they aim to defile Germany. It is a question of him committing the irreparable act that will definitively separate him from Russia. For Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor, who are from the same generation, the entry of these tanks into the war would be extraordinary symbolic violence… Leopard do not refer to the same cat as the one in Third Reich !
The Americans know this and they know that if they bend the chancellor they will win the game. True, heavy tanks probably won’t win over Ukraine. They would allow them to better withstand the onslaught the Russians were preparing for and thereby prolong the war.
It will be the price of their blood and tears. But Washington didn’t care, and neither did Warsaw, which dreamed of revenge in Moscow as well as in Berlin. Polish leaders are already talking about making Germany pay for the mistakes they caused in World War II. Why not ? After all, the Ukrainians hope for their share of compensation from Russia for the wrongs they will do to them at the end of this war.
Since their refusal in 1991 to financially support Mikhail Gorbachev, successive American governments have shouldered heavy responsibility for escalating tensions in Europe… such as in the Middle East when they blamed their ally Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. That too in 1991.
But this was no longer the time to complain. Our countries find themselves reluctantly drawn into war. This was a bitter disappointment for the European authorities who derived their legitimacy from their ability to ensure peace on the continent. Let us pray that escalation and blindness to each other, both on the part of Russia and on the part of the West, does not lead to irreparable, which was mentioned in November 2022 by Serge Halimi, director Diplomatic worldin the excellent article that we have freely published below.
André Larane
Published or Updated on: 01-22-2023 06:59:28
