By Independent News Roundup
Zelensky told the BBC right before the four-year anniversary of Russia’s special operation that “I believe that Putin has already started [World War III]. The question is how much territory he will be able to seize and how to stop him...Russia wants to impose on the world a different way of life and change the lives people have chosen for themselves.” This rhetoric appeals to the West’s most ideologically driven anti-Russian hawks who want to indefinitely perpetuate the conflict but is completely divorced from reality.
It’s not Russia that “wants to impose on the world a different way of life and change the lives people have chosen for themselves”, but the US’ post-Old Cold War liberal-globalist duopoly that ruled the country from then till Trump’s return to office, and they set out to do this right after the USSR dissolved. To that end, they attached corresponding political strings to foreign aid, flooded other societies with “NGOs”, and weaponized the US’ cultural exports to push their preferred version of “the end of history”.
Marco Rubio candidly admitted his country’s grossly misguided and ultimately failed 35-year-long campaign to change the world according to this model in his speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference that was analyzed here. He didn’t frame it as World War III, however, but this aligns with Zelensky’s definition thereof about how one state (Russia in his view but actually the US) “want[ed] to impose on the world a different way of life and change the lives people have chosen for themselves.”
The World War III model can be expanded beyond the ideological realm to the military one for even more compellingly arguing that it’s the US that already started this in 1991. The First Gulf War was a show of unprecedented force for deterring potential rivals in accordance with what soon after became known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine for maintaining the US’ superpower status. Brzezinski’s identity-centric divide-and-rule stratagem was then applied across Afro-Eurasia to keep Russia, China, and Iran apart.
This took the form of the US bombing Yugoslavia, invading Afghanistan and Iraq, unleashing Color Revolutions across the former Soviet Union, toppling Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya, orchestrating the theater-wide Color Revolution known as the Arab Spring, and provoking the Ukrainian Conflict, et al. To elaborate on the last example that’s most relevant to this analysis, the US calculated that crossing the Kremlin’s red lines in Ukraine would lead to a swift proxy war that deals a strategic defeat to Russia.
That didn’t happen since Russia’s pivotal role in the global resource industry (e.g. energy, agriculture, minerals) was why the non-West defied the sanctions in pursuit of their own interests while Russia’s armed forces impressively adapted to cutting-edge warfare trends. Society also remained stable and rallied behind the state despite Prigozhin’s summer 2024 mutiny. The end effect was that Russia survived this onslaught and ended the first phase of the Third World War that the US unleashed in 1991.
That said, World War III in the sense of a hot NATO-Russian war like most imagine it to be (including with the risk of going nuclear) could still break out so long as the Ukrainian Conflict continues, but the point is that Zelensky’s definition thereof implicates the US in this and not Russia. It was also crucial to show how the special operation that Russia felt forced to wage ultimately got the US to prioritize China’s containment over Russia’s as the second phase of the Third World War that’s only just now beginning.
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