It's time to call this World War III — if we don't wake up, we will lose.

An abridged version of a post by Claire Berlinski

This is an abridged version of a post by Claire Berlinski, Editor-in-Chief of The Cosmopolitan Globalist.

Take a moment to watch this interesting interview with H.R. McMaster, broadcast recently by Germany’s Deutsche Welle.... I’ll transcribe some of the key parts below, but take the time to watch the full interview if you can.

H.R. McMaster discusses the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration’s fundamental misunderstanding of Putin and power, our failure to deter the invasion, Biden’s subsequent (and related) mistakes, what Ukraine now needs to win, why Ukraine must win, why Ukraine can win, Putin’s weakness, Trump’s relationship with Putin, the stakes of the conflict, and the utterly unforced and idiotic mistakes Trump is poised to make. [Indented quotations are from Berlinski’s transcript]

President Trump and some of those people around him are still laboring under the delusion that Putin can somehow be conciliated and that there can somehow be some kind of entente with him. The only thing that stops Putin is strength.... He’s not going to stop until he is stopped by a concerted military, diplomatic, and economic effort.... I think that’s what is at stake right now: World War III.

Because it’s not just Russia, it’s this axis of aggressors. You could also think about Russia’s war against Ukraine as China’s proxy war against the West. Using Russia. Because China is also helping to underwrite what Iran is doing across the greater Middle East.... China, I believe, is helping to orchestrate this axis of aggressors which includes Iran and North Korea, as well as these two revanchist powers on the Eurasian landmass.

What McMaster is saying should be obvious to anyone who’s paid a bit of attention to the news in this century—by which I mean … any guy who looks at a newspaper once a week, maybe on Sunday mornings. A growingly integrated axis of the world’s most brutal and savagely repressive states is waging a sustained, systematic attack on the liberal democratic world. This isn’t a metaphor. Russian and North Korean troops have invaded a peaceful European democracy. They’re bombing it, raping children, killing women and the elderly, threatening it with annihilation. The hordes really are at the gates. They’ve bashed right through them, in fact, and they don’t mean to stop. This is not a hybrid attack. It is war.

I cannot figure out why the immense gravity of this situation isn’t immediately obvious to policymakers and citizens alike throughout Europe and the United States—or why we don’t seem to have the instinct for self-preservation that God gave an alley cat. Americans are debating: “Should we abandon Ukraine (and all of our other allies, while we’re at it)?” I would understand if we were arguing bitterly about whether our defense spending should be doubled or quadrupled in light of this threat. But to debate that there’s a threat at all? To ask whether Russia just needs another reset?

Let’s for a moment put aside the moral disgrace and indelible shame we’re proposing to inflict upon ourselves. (Though it’s quite something to realize how many of us are prepared to live with that.) How could we be so dumb as to think that if we abandon Ukraine, it will all end there? That it will work out fine for us, and the United States will just continue on its merry way, peaceful and prosperous, just like before? The people who think this—what planet are they on?

Yet think this we do. We’ve just endured four years of an administration that stubbornly refused to understand how serious this is, stubbornly refused to act like it, stubbornly refused to explain it to Americans. And now we will have a President who thinks the solution is just to switch sides and go with the winners.

Or perhaps he’s just too stupid to grasp this. Does it matter? What matters is this: If Trump betrays Ukraine, the consequences for us will be dire. The consequences for our allies will be unthinkable. Uncontrolled nuclear proliferation is actually one of the better scenarios (assuming we get incredibly lucky and survive) because the alternative is [essentially that] “America’s major allies would fall to America’s enemies” [as Noah Smith writes, adding that] “China and Russia would not simply ignore America and let it go on its merry way. The specter of a US revival would haunt them. They would therefore do everything they could to weaken America.”

I think it’s important for President Trump—for everybody—to understand: Russia is at war with us, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.... Russia is already at war with us, and will continue to push until the Kremlin meets stiff resistance.

I asked myself whether any news outlet in the United States had recently offered HR McMaster—or anyone else, for that matter—a half hour in which to make this case to the American public. I looked, but it doesn’t seem they have. I suspect the Left has no use for him because he served in Trump’s administration and criticizes Biden’s record; the right has no use for him because Trump fired him and now calls him a loser and a disgruntled employee. (He was fired after he told the Munich Security Forum there was “incontrovertible” evidence Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.)

But McMaster is right about all of this. His diagnosis is lucid. He’s also right—of course he’s right—about the Biden Administration’s maddening eagerness to deter itself, and its insistence upon telling our enemies what we won’t do....

What drives Vladimir Putin is his aspiration to restore Russia to national greatness and his effort to reestablish the Russian Empire.... So what did the Biden Administration do? They met with Putin in Geneva, laid out all of their red lines, which sounds like to Putin, “Well I have a green light for everything else.” Then we pulled our ships out of the Black Sea. We suspended lethal assistance to the Ukrainians. We listed all of the things we would not do to support the Ukrainians if they came under attack, and then we evacuated our Embassy and all of our advisers.… What’s important for all of us to recognize is what provoked Putin is the perception of weakness.

McMaster is describing a mistake we’ve made over and over again since Putin came to power and from which we seem simply unable to learn. In Putin we are dealing with a man who cannot be placated and who does not have a legitimate gripe and who does not want what we would want in his place. Putin wants a vast, immiserated empire and he wants our destruction. This, we must not give him. The only thing that stops Putin is strength....

Ten thousand North Korean troops have now been deployed to Kursk. I feel so sorry for them. They grew up with hunger, terror, deprivation, and total isolation, with no access to or knowledge of the external world. Now they’ve been dumped in a killing field half a world away, hearing a language they can’t understand, fighting a war that makes no sense, against a people they never knew existed. I hope Ukraine finds some way to persuade them to surrender, eat three hot meals a day, and watch all the porn they want. (I don’t know what they’d do with North Korean prisoners of war: I assume you can’t give them back, because Kim would kill them—not just for surrendering, but because they would know too much about Kursk, the paradise beyond.)

Zelensky has read the memo (because every foreign leader has) that the way to manipulate Trump is with flattery. He is telling the media that Trump can bring peace because “he is much more stronger than Putin.” It’s painful that a genuinely strong man is obliged to flatter our president, the Whirling Vortex of Emotional Need, in this manner. No one who is not in the cult thinks Trump is strong at all, no less stronger than Putin. But Zelensky is right to say it: What choice does he have?...

What drives me insane—what makes me bonkers, almost uncontrollably furious—is seeing Americans obediently repeat the [Russian] narrative of the day, utterly blind to its provenance. How can they be so gullible? Why doesn’t anyone notice that David Sacks’ Twitter feed [1M followers] is synced to all of the other Kremlin organs? Or that like the Kremlin, he issues hysterical warnings about the imminence of nuclear war every time Biden transfers a new weapons system?

And why do we not even try to fight back? Why haven’t we tried, for example, to make educational public service ads, the way Europe does, and run them nonstop on social media? Such ads could explain that Russian propaganda is very real and our social media is saturated with it. They could teach people how to recognize it. It’s not hard.

Why do we supinely allow a power that is at war with us to make fools of our citizens and turn them into ventriloquists for their blood-soaked regime? Is it because Trump has insisted that Russia, Russia, Russia is a hoax, hoax, hoax so many times that everyone in the US government is afraid even to try to explain this to the American people? Do they fear it will anger him and they will suffer McMaster’s fate?...

Ukraine is fighting Russia so NATO doesn’t have to and fighting North Korea so Japan and South Korea don’t have to. But the world can’t decide whether to keep sending Ukraine only enough weapons to survive—but not to win—or perhaps just pull the plug and let Russia and Hungary rape and dismember it....

My only disagreement with McMaster is his nomenclature. This is already a world war, by any rational definition. We should start saying so. When we discuss “World War III” in the future tense, it confuses Americans who want to believe these events are far away and of no significance to them. It suggests that what is in fact happening is a possibility, not a reality.

Russia is invading Europe with China’s money, Iran’s weapons, and North Korea’s troops. Chinese ships captained by Russians are destroying undersea natural gas pipelines and telecom cables in the Baltic Sea. Russian weapons used in Ukraine are built with Chinese components. Russia is causing mayhem on the streets of the UK. Their mercenaries have been raping and plundering their way through Africa and using the proceeds to finance the war in Ukraine. Iran, supported by China, has encircled Israel with its proxies and set the better part of the Middle East—and key shipping lanes—alight. Putin regularly threatens us with nuclear weapons. What could this be if not a world war? If it’s not, what’s the rule—it’s not official until the Peruvians arrive?...

Putin has said (yet again) that the use of missiles made by the US and the UK means Russia is at war with NATO. He’s right! Why shrink from the truth? We don’t want to be, but he is determined. He started it, but if we could only be roused from our apathy and slumber long enough to concentrate, we could finish it. You-hoo! Wakey-wakey, Sleeping Giant!

Ukraine is only asking us to give it the tools so it can finish the job. They’re not asking us to die for them. If we don’t stop this axis now, though, we will have to die. In massive numbers, too. We can end this now, before it gets completely out of hand—before it destroys us—but someone has to keep Trump from surrendering.

Postscript [by Clair Berlinski]: Please also read what Robert Zubrin has to say about this:

… Were Trump to cut off American arms aid to Ukraine, the following consequences would likely ensue:

Russia would conquer Ukraine. This would remove the largest land army in Europe from the West’s order of battle, greatly strengthen Russia economically and technically, eliminate a strategic weakness along Russia’s southwest border that would otherwise constrain Putin’s aggressive plans, and advance Russian armies to the borders of NATO allies Poland and Romania.

Russia would seize the Baltic states. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has stated his intention to restore the Russian empire, which included these countries, as well as Finland and much of Poland. But so long as Ukraine remains free, strong, and in the fight, swarming the Baltics would be an unattractive course of action. The West could counter such a swarming by giving the Ukrainian armed forces all the weapons they need to win. However, with Ukraine gone, NATO would have no effective counter move to a Russian seizure of the Baltics.

Putin knows that we are not going to nuclear war to save Estonia, and that NATO lacks the 500,000-man expeditionary force that would be needed to expel his troops from the Baltic states after he seizes them. So he would take them, with the fact that they are NATO members proving no deterrent whatsoever. On the contrary, their NATO membership would make them all the more enticing to take, as doing so would expose the impotence of that alliance.

Russia would carry out widespread massacres and mass deportations from Ukraine and the Baltic states. This would be done to crush resistances and effect ethnic cleansing to make those lands permanently Russian. Russia has already has done this before, removing the native Tatar population from Crimea and German population of Prussia. And it is doing this right now in Mariupol, where it is replacing Russian-speaking Ukrainians with Russians.

(Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not Russians, any more than Irish are English. Whether they speak Ukrainian, Russian, or Surzhyk, a mixture of the two languages, Ukrainians have an entirely different, far more western mentality than Russians, rooted in a different history and the fact that in czarist times, Ukrainian peasants farmed their plots independently, whereas Russian serfs worked their owner’s land as village collectives.)

In addition, however, by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Balts, Russia would also send millions of them fleeing as refugees into Western Europe, stoking the fortunes of an array of anti-immigrant parties aligned with Moscow.

With NATO humiliated, and a more accommodationist stance toward Russia becoming increasingly popular in many of its key members, the Atlantic alliance would disintegrate. Furthermore, with America discredited as an ally, smaller countries everywhere, notably including Taiwan, would feel pressure to accept domination by the China-Russia Axis. Meanwhile, medium-sized powers like South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Germany would rush to develop their own nuclear arsenals. This will make nuclear war far more likely.