“There is no consensus today to send ground troops in an official, assumed and endorsed manner. But in dynamics, nothing should be excluded. »
On Tuesday, these two sentences fell like a bomb. In 24 hours, Emmanuel Macron’s words came back to him like a boomerang and caused a real chain reaction. Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, Italy, Sweden and even Ukraine all expressed their dismay and said there was no question of the allies sending ground troops into Ukraine.
We have not finished speculating in France on the motives for such a warlike speech from the man who had until then affirmed that it was absolutely necessary not to “humiliate Russia”. Is this simply the political calculation of a president at the end of his reign who is increasingly isolated on the national and international scenes? A communication strategy intended to get out of a bad situation by “Putinizing” its adversary, the National Rally, which polls put in the lead in the European elections in just three months? We can believe it.
But this verbal escalation illustrates above all how the discourse on the Russian threat in Europe has become hysterical in certain circles of power. We would think we were back in 1981, when the right asserted without laughing that the election of François Mitterrand would see Russian tanks parade on the Champs-Élysées. Didn’t Prime Minister Gabriel Attal affirm that Russia represented “a direct and immediate threat to France”?
Who can, however, imagine Russia, already bloodless and out of breath economically and militarily, attacking a NATO country tomorrow? She would have neither the strength nor the means anyway. Such reactions demonstrate the incomprehension of the causes of this war, which have nothing to do with the eternal fight for democracy that the Americans bring to us each time, slavishly imitated by their European emulators. It’s not 1939!
We can only wage a war successfully if we understand its causes. If in Ukraine the aggressor is undeniably Vladimir Putin – who there is no question of excusing – the aim of this aggression has never been to restore the specter of the USSR and its domination over Europe. ballast. A perfectly ridiculous statement given Russia’s current strengths.
As the eminent political scientist John J. Mearsheimer, a supporter of the so-called “realist” school of foreign policy, has shown, this war is the result of NATO’s push to Russia’s immediate borders. Exactly like in 1962, when the USSR tried to install missiles in Cuba. “Contrary to popular belief, Moscow did not invade Ukraine to take possession of it and integrate it into Greater Russia,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. She first wanted to prevent Ukraine from becoming the Western bulwark on Russia’s borders. »
For Moscow, this war is therefore a defensive war intended to protect Ukraine, with which Russia shares a border of more than 2000 kilometers through which, in history, all invasion attempts have passed. As early as 2008, American Ambassador to Moscow William Burns warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “Ukraine’s entry into NATO is the clearest of all red lines for the Russian elite [non pas seulement Poutine], he wrote. After more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players […] I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine within NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. »
If the people have every interest in stopping this war, unfortunately the same is not true for all political forces. At least for now.
For the United States, it has until now been of great economic and political benefit. Not to mention that she miraculously brought NATO back to life, an organization that in 2019 Emmanuel Macron had judged to be “brain dead”.
In Brussels, this war is a godsend. The Russian threat indeed offers a golden pretext to build the European Union by force. Especially at a time when people have never been so skeptical of it. This is evidenced by the farmers’ revolt and the polls for next June’s elections.
With elections approaching in the United States, Europe and Russia, regardless of the fate of the Ukrainians, neither Russia nor NATO can afford to lose this war today. If comparisons with the Second World War are demagogic, those with the infernal mechanics of the outbreak of the First are closer to reality. In July 1914, hadn’t the fighters left with guns blazing, convinced they would return at Christmas?
In a context where neither Russia nor the United States can afford to lose face, this means that despite the cries of horror heard these days, in the long term, the scenario of sending soldiers Americans or Europeans on the ground cannot be excluded. If only as supporting forces, at least at first. So what would Russia, which has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, do? Emmanuel Macron’s mistake was therefore, as usual, to talk too much. And above all too quickly.