We will be impoverished or die as our countries are pulling into unwinnable wars by wanton warmongers.
Ian Proud was a member of His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. He served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019. He recently published his memoir, “A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019,” and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute.
Cross-posted from Ian’s Substack “The Peacemaker”
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The only way to rid ourselves or war is to rid ourselves of war mongers.
Donald Trump shares something in common with Keir Starmer, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ursula von der Leyen and other European leaders.
They are all determined to sustain wars, for Trump against Iran, and for the Europeans, in Ukraine.
They are resolutely opposed to peace and diplomacy.
Even though they are losing those wars and cannot win, they continue because the alternative is a personal political catastrophe.
Ending wars will force on them a requirement to admit to their publics that they gambled the house and lost. And this will destroy them politically.
We, ordinary citizens, have to pay the price – literally – as our standards of living plummet in the face of their failed political choices, and as we and our children become less safe as the risk of global war increases.
Yet a political reckoning will eventually come to all of our political leaders, as they keep pursuing bad wars to delay their inevitable political demise.
We should do everything in our power to remove these people through democratic means.
These same people who lecture the developing world about democracy should be removed at the ballot box.
For Europe, which has become increasingly undemocratic, this requires a radical restructure of how the institutions of Europe work, as I have argued before, to strip back their powers and return control to Member States.
Our job as citizens is to roll back the warmongering of Brussels, Berlin and London, and insist on peace, whatever the personal cost to those people who occupy positions of power.
All of these people are wealthy.
I have absolutely no interest in how much they want to retain privileged positions in government.
As far as I’m concerned, they all need to go.
The last thing they are thinking about is you or me.
They really don’t care about us.
But they are endangering all of us through their actions.
We need to rise up to promote a new form of democracy in which our leaders are held to account and are forced to promote peace even if that means they are forced out of office.
For wars are a choice.
Donald Trump’s war in Iran is a war of choice.
The continuance of the war in Ukraine is a choice.
On Iran, there was no imperative for Trump to go to war.
Iran nuclear weapons are just the modern day equivalent of Iraq weapons of mass destruction, or Russia’s apparently imminent invasion of Europe which we have been threatened with for far too long.
These tropes are a complete fiction to manufacture consent for a war that ordinary people don’t want.
The mainstream media drugs our citizens, sedating them into accepting the inevitability of war with enemies we did not choose.
I don’t have any enemies in any nation.
If you are nice to someone of a different nationality it is my experience that they will in most cases be nice to you.
Whatever the colour of their skin.
Whatever their religion.
Whatever their political views.
Iranian people aren’t my enemies, neither are Israelis or, for that matter, Americans.
Russian people aren’t my enemies, neither are Ukrainians or, for that matter, people of any European nations.
The only enemies I see are the western warmongering politicians who lead us into unwinnable wars that make us poorer and less safe.
And I am furious about this because the consequences of war, whether that is in Iran or in Ukraine have been obvious and predictable from the very beginning.
They were obvious and predictable from the start in Ukraine.
They have been obvious and predictable since the start of Trump’s war against Iran.
The US under Biden wanted to weaken and diminish Russia and now Europe has picked up that baton.
The US under Trump, with Israel wants to weaken and diminish Iran.
Yet in both cases that task is impossible.
It is impossible because the warmongers are unable to commit to all out war, and so immiserate us all with aggressive incrementalism.
No western power wants to commit to a complete all out war because of the poor track record of doing that in modern history, and also, in the case of Ukraine, because of the obvious point that Russia has a sizeable nuclear arsenal.
So, the strategy has involved economic bullying and incremental warfare, or, in the case of Ukraine, proxy war.
But neither war by increments in Iran or by proxy in Ukraine has any chance of success.
Russia is not going to back down.
Iran is not going to back down.
And the more obvious it becomes that the US and its European vassals can’t succeed, the more determined our political leaders will become not to back down.
Yet, in the process, Iran and Russia will continue to receive support from the developing world.
And the western hegemony will continue to fade.
For Iran and Russia, merely staying in the fight and maintaining a stalemate can do far more damaging to the west than having a straight on fight with an uncertain outcome.
Stalemate in Iran will be as devasting for the US as stalemate in Ukraine has been for Europe and Ukraine.
It’s devastating precisely because having committed to military aggression, people like Trump, Zelensky, von der Leyen and others tie their political futures to impossible victory.
Yet when it becomes apparent that victory is impossible, stalemate become more appealing than accepting defeat them too.
Stalemate allows for the continued narrative control in the west
“The enemy is breaking.”
“If we keep doing what we are doing, we will win in the end.”
And the mainstream media gets on board with fake news to prop up the notion in the minds of ordinary people that victory is indeed possible and likely.
And that we just need to stay the course.
The newspapers and TV stations continue to lull our citizens into a stupor of ignorant acceptance that we have to do this, and they have to pay the price.
Yet the certainty never goes away.
Victory is impossible.
And one day people like Trump will have to accept that.
Zelensky will have to accept this.
Starmer will have to accept this.
Von der Leyen will have to accept this.
Merz will have to accept this.
If they refuse to accept this then the only solution is at the very earliest opportunity to remove them from political office, so they have to face up to having themselves and their cronies unelectable in future as citizens see that they are liars and hypocrites who endanger and impoverish us all.
So that is why these people continue with unwinnable wars. Grinding stalemate is preferable to catastrophic political failure.
Yet, our so-called enemies, in Iran and in Russia, know this as well.
Failure doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Russia and Iran are fighting us because we have tried to weaken them.
The enemies we have created are playing the long game
It was always obvious that the Iranians would pursue an asymmetric response aimed at survival and playing a long game to bring the weight of global economic collapse onto the Americans who would struggle to sustain a war long term. The attritional factors would catch up with the military in terms of available munitions. They would face such political pressure from other nations that they would be forced to back down. Longer term they would raise costs for regional partners who have over-relied on US military coverage for too long.
The war in Ukraine is also a war of choice. It was always obvious that Ukraine joining NATO was a red red line for Russia. It was always obvious that once the Biden Administration indulged Zelensky’s demand for NATO membership, that Russia would go to war if push came to shove. A whole host of nations pressured Russia to accept that taking NATO was not possible.
Whether you agree with his actions or not, Putin chose to back the line he had always taken on NATO membership and risk everything with a war.
Having failed to predict this, or simply having ignored the risk, given a misplaced belief that the combined size of Europe and the US would prevail over Russia, our leaders have spent four years drugging us with propaganda that eventual victory is assured. When, most assuredly, it is not.
Yet it has also been clear that Europe did not want to fight for Ukraine and was happy for Zelensky to fight to the last Ukrainian, which shows the utter moral poverty of our position.
Whoever you blame for the war in Ukraine starting, it is the case that the war could and should have finished by mid-April 2022. That the war continued after that was a choice by Zelensky and his western sponsors, notably Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister of the UK.
You could argue, as western leaders have, that Putin should have unconditionally ended the war, but seen from his perspective, why was he ever going to do that?
Western leaders refused all dialogue with him and insisted on demands for troop withdrawal and war reparations that he was never going to make at a time when he had the strategic advantage on the battlefield.
Having rejected a diplomatic solution in April 2022, Europe and Britain have rejected diplomacy ever since that time and continue to do so today.
Engaging in diplomacy now is also a recognition of failure, but engage we must, as increasing numbers of Europeans leaders are starting, timidly, to point out. Letting more people die in Ukraine can’t be an acceptable alternative to diplomacy.
Why is the Iran war not winnable?
For the US, victory means regime change, and ending of nuclear aspirations and an end to ballistic missile programs.
This is unachievable.
The US would only – theoretically – be able to take on this task with a massive general war. Most likely, this would produce an even more catastrophic military entanglement than what happened in Iraq. In any case, it would take at least six months for the Americans to build up the military forces to even contemplate this, during which time the global economy would shatter and the Republicans would lose control in DC at the midterms.
Everything the US is doing short of this is military incrementalism. And you can’t win wars by increments.
Iran is far more immune to the global economic consequences than the US because it has been economically strangled by sanctions for so long that its population is used to living in hardship. The US population and the populations of Europe are not so immune.
There is no evidence that, despite the targeted assassinations of Iranian leaders, there aren’t more people waiting in the wings to replace senior people who are killed.
The nature of assassinations and the existential nature of the war for Iran means that new leaders will simply be more emboldened to avenge the loss of people before them.
There is no evidence that Iran can’t continue to shutter the strait of Hormuz using nothing more than drones and missiles.
Bringing Yemen into the fight simply puts more pressure on Israel and Gulf States to deal with continual missile bombardments that they will increasingly be less able to defend against as they deplete missile interceptor stocks.
The global pressure on Trump is only going to increase.
America has never looked like it can win this war and will not win this war.
Why is the Ukraine war not winnable?
The Ukraine war is not winnable because Ukraine will never be able to generate sufficient forces to mount a serious challenge to Russia that led to a complete recapture of lost land.
Drone technology has levelled the battlefield playing field so much that subject to a catastrophic collapse of the frontline, much talked about but never really apparent, stalemate has been the norm.
So the emphasis has always been on who can sustain the fight economically so that they can sue for peace with a stronger hand of cards in negotiations.
Ukraine is bankrupt and literally running out of money as Europe struggles to agree new loans.
Spats with Hungary may play well for Zelensky in Brussels but do nothing to keep the money flowing into Kyiv.
And even if another 90 billion is agreed, that money will run out and Ukraine will face an even greater challenge to obtain new money when the latest grift cheque runs out.
The economic hardship unleashed by the war in Iran will place even greater economic hardship on European citizens shattering support for providing more money to Ukraine.
So Ukraine will always have to remain on economic life support for as long as the war continues. And when war ends, Ukraine will emerge an economically failed state trying to join a European Union that can’t afford to let it in.
Russia has always been in a massively better position economically to sustain an attritional war.
It has continually generated huge trade surpluses throughout the war and will gain bumper earnings from oil sales for as long as the war in Iran continues.
The war in Iran will simply accentuate its huge economic advantage.
The war is being sold on the idea that Russia’s economy is falling apart which has always been a lie which will grow increasingly obvious as a lie for as long as the war in Iran continues.
Ramping up sanctions, boarding the occasional shadow fleet tanker will do nothing to change that. Rather it will simply divert effort.
Ukraine cannot win the war. Ukraine has never been able to win the war and will never be able to win the war.
Continuing both wars – against Iran and in Ukraine – is a choice.
It is a choice by Trump, Zelensky and Europeans leaders who are knees deep in the proxy war.
It is a choice they want to force on us to evade the personal consequences of failure and their loss of political office.
The longer we wait to remove them from office, the more likely will be impoverished or die as our countries are pulling into unwinnable wars by wanton warmongers.
It is for that reason that we should all rise up and do everything in our democratic power to remove these warmongers from political office and let voters regard them as completely unelectable in future.
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