AUDIO: Stephen Cohen: Impossible to Overstate the Dangers

It’s difficult to know what the neocons running US foreign policy are trying to achieve. Obviously dumb as rat turds as far as military strategy is concerned, magnifying Europe’s importance to the extent they have is the military equilvalent of looking through at the continent through a microscope. Europe isn’t the biggest problem for Russia, the US is.
As an ally, Europe’s strategic importance to the US is limited by its geographical restraints. Despite all the shouting, it is rather small, when all’s said and done. Embracing more of Eastern Europe is not going to make it that much bigger in global terms, yet any war fought on its soil will tie up NATO forces to breaking. Added to that, the difficulties NATO has encountered fighting ground wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan make nuclear war an inevitability, in the event Russia decides to respond to US provocations.
The question is not so much whether any conflict will go nuclear but who will go first. In a situation where going second could prove far more damaging to Russia than the US, it will play out sooner rather than later. For Europe the results of nuclear conflagration will prove suicidal either way. That is something Poland and the Baltic States should start to think very hard about, as they are offering themselves up as prime first targets.
If US military might prevails, and Russia falls, it might not turn out to be quite the happy result the neocons imagine. With NATO forces fighting on fronts the entire length of Europe, it is highly likely elements in the Middle east and North Africa are going to seize the opportunity to pursue their own agendas. Starting a war on Europe’s Eastern flank doesn’t mean aggrieved Muslim elements elsewhere in the world are going to put their wars against the West on hold; far from it.
And while we’re about it, let’s not forget China. With NATO and other Western allied forces tied up in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa the Western flank of the US is going to look temptingly open from a Chinese perspective. After all, the Chinese are hardly going to allow the U.S. rampage right across Russia in order to set up camp on its borders without a fight. Rather than fight a war alongside Russia, one tempting response to such a threat would be for China to open up a war on the US’s western flank by attacking California, the most populous US state. Taking the war to the US mainland is something Americans don’t seem able to imagine. In this particular case, it is rocket science.
However improbable these scenarios may seem to some, it must be remembered that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan didn’t start off thinking they would lose any of the wars they began.