Here are eight reasons the US has no interest in pushing for peace in Ukraine — RT World News

By Andrey SusentsovValdai club program director

It now appears that the United States is not even at all interested in supporting a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian conflict, preferring to see the military campaign continue. On the whole, strategic planning in Washington gives little importance to the parameters of a way out of the crisis: will Ukraine remain within its current borders, will it lose its territories or will it disappear? completely?

Despite the mounting casualties and destruction of the Ukrainian army, the appetite for military action has not diminished, neither in kyiv nor in Washington. Many international experts rightly identify the United States as the key player in a broad coalition advocating the continuation of hostilities in Ukraine. In less than a year of crisis, kyiv has exhausted its own military means and the means to replace them, and is totally dependent on external aid.

Although the United States takes the initiative to coordinate and develop strategies to support the West, it would be wrong to equate Ukrainian and American interests. While continuing to pretend to respond to kyiv’s political demands, Washington is carefully assessing the right time to begin negotiations. The need for diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict has been increasingly emphasized by US military leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. The idea continues to circulate in the British press that the American tactic is to escalate the conflict in order to then defuse it: to pressure Russia with a wave of massive deliveries of military equipment and to put kyiv in a more favorable negotiating position. position.

However, it cannot be ignored that the continuation of the military crisis in Ukraine is in line with the military and political interests of the United States. A total of eight arguments suggest that the Americans intend to prolong this conflict.

First of all, there is the relative weakening of Russia, which has had to devote considerable resources to eliminating the military threat from Ukraine, as well as to achieving its political goals of ensuring equal status in the world. post-Cold War European security architecture. The Western media narrative that Russia is on the brink of defeat, though far from reality, gives the impression that all the West needs to do is adopt a wait-and-see attitude. The absence of decisive Russian military victories gives the impression that Ukraine is winning.

Second, the United States has every interest in severing EU-Russian energy cooperation. This developed over several decades, starting with the Cold War. The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, apparently carried out with the help of another NATO state, was the culmination of a long-term US strategy aimed at dismantling the extensive ties between Moscow and the main economies of Western Europe. The Americans want to divert European energy consumption away from Russia and create a tougher environment for wider European industry, so that American products face less competition, thereby strengthening their own position.

Third, the United States wants to eliminate any impetus for strategic autonomy between EU states. The Ukraine crisis offers a golden opportunity for this, as the United States and its allies in Eastern Europe managed to create a moment of moral panic in the information space, preventing any reflection on the causes and consequences of the crisis. Strategic decisions on arms transfers are taken under pressure from the media and a radicalized section of public opinion, without any analysis of the consequences. Leaders and elites who might have thought with detachment and sobriety about the consequences of EU-Russia relations sliding into deep crisis, are now outnumbered and essentially voiceless.

Fourth, the United States does not want to see the defeat of Ukraine, in which a lot of financial, political and symbolic capital has been invested over the past year. In the eyes of the West, Ukraine is its “champion”. The old tale of European civilization struggling against the barbaric East, dating back to the days of ancient Greece and its confrontation with the Persian hordes, is played out here. Ukraine’s defeat would be a sensitive symbolic defeat for the West and would leave an “open wound” in the minds of many intellectuals.

Fifth, the United States has not shrunk from the ideological imperative to defend what it interprets as “freedom”. In the situation around Ukraine, there is a Manichean presentation of the struggle for “freedom against unfreedom”. Washington also sees this ideological imperative manifest in the domestic situation in Ukraine, which of course is only possible if you look at the political processes in Kyiv “through your fingers”. By playing with this narrative, the government of Vladimir Zelensky seeks to present itself to the West in such ideological categories.

THE sixth The American objective is to encourage Western Europe to remilitarize. Washington is aware that prolonged military competition is not possible using US forces alone. Moreover, the United States is aware of the growing threat from China and realizes that its resources will soon be diverted to a confrontation in the Pacific. In the European theatre, Washington is therefore looking for ways to bolster the EU’s military-industrial complex so that national defense budgets can be raised to at least 2% of GDP.

Seventh, the United States seeks to consolidate its European allies around a platform of struggle against its “rising” adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran. Here, the United States is trying to be resourceful in building coalitions ready to produce and sell expensive, high-tech weapons.

Eighth, the United States is also pursuing its own reindustrialization via Ukraine. The expansion of the military-industrial complex is seen as an important goal for America. After the Cold War, it was reoriented to produce a limited number of high-tech products, whereas modern conventional warfare requires large-scale production of relatively inexpensive generic artillery, tank and aircraft systems.

All of this makes the United States extremely uninterested in working for a peaceful solution to the conflict in the short term. Americans believe that time is on their side and that the eight goals listed above will be achieved. This makes their strategy rather flexible and demonstrates that their priority is containing Russia rather than securing Ukraine’s future security and prosperity.