The art and science of gaming is increasingly important in politics as it is in other fields. Political games are like the tabletop exercises that disaster responders use to understand what resources they need for a disaster or a threat. Then, there are also full-scale exercises. About twenty years ago while still working at my college, I was asked to chair a disaster exercise involving actors (participants) from various levels of government. It included the county sheriff’s department, three or four city police departments, a major hospital, the FBI, the Texas Department of Public Safety as well as other agencies. The exercise took a full year of planning and we met monthly during that year. We needed a large parking lot for the dozen or more firetrucks marshalled on stand-by, the Hazmat team, triage center and command post. The hospital applied moulage to numerous volunteers who pretended they were badly wounded and ambulances took them to the hospitals. It was an eye-opening experience.
This is just one way of gaming. Games allow you to discover mistakes that can be corrected before actual lives are risked in a real life scenario. Even now, political scientists and politicians are gaming the war in Europe and the odds that it could spread.
The ET Edge Insights organization compares international affairs to a game of chess. They state:
Nations, like chess players, must anticipate their opponents’ moves, consider multiple scenarios, and plan their actions accordingly. Alliances are forged and broken, pawns are sacrificed for queens, and every decision is calculated to gain an advantage. . .”
The world is never static, and neither is geopolitics. Borders shift, alliances dissolve, and new players emerge. Players must constantly adapt their strategies and be ready to respond to unexpected events, just like a chess player must react to their opponent’s moves.
The consequences of geopolitical missteps can be dire. Wars can erupt, economies can crumble, and entire regions can be destabilized. Unlike a chess game where the worst outcome is losing a piece, the stakes in geopolitics are real and far-reaching.”
This is exactly what is unfolding before our very eyes. Just today, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un:
signed an agreement Wednesday that pledges mutual aid if either country faces ‘aggression,’ a strategic pact that comes as both face escalating standoffs with the West.”
Pieces are being rapidly moved on the chess board of Europe and elsewhere. Pawns are disappearing with rapidlity, and some rooks and bishops are under attack as each side seeks to clear the board. Here are some of the recent events:
UPDATE: Ukraine attacks Russian space facility in Crimea with U.S. ATACMS missiles. Watch here.
Late last week, a Ukrainian drone flew 365 miles to strike a target deep in the heart of Russia. The target was a Su-57 bomber. Carrying cruise missiles that could be tipped with nuclear warheads, the Su-57 can be viewed as a nonstrategic but tactical nuclear strike aircraft. In other words, it cannot “nuke” the U.S., but it can deliver nuclear missiles to other countries in Europe (those within its range.) Last month, another drone destroyed an Armavir radar station in the Krasnodar border region. For most Western media outlets, this was just the most recent example of an audacious Ukrainian attack against targets on Russian soil. Besides, both the Su-57 and the radar station were supporting Russian aggression in Ukraine. However, this installation and the Su-57 bomber also perform important roles in Russia’s nuclear capability (either offensive roles, defensive roles or both.) Were further such targets attacked, Russia might easily see an existential threat to its security, as the Ukrainians “nibble” at the fringes of the only credible card Russia has to play. In the aftermath of these recent attacks, Moscow upped its nuclear threats against NATO and the U.S.
It’s ninety seconds to midnight! Time to wake up!
But . . .
Another point worth considering is that for the first time since World War II, Russia, Russian cities, Russian factories, fuel depots, railroad, communication centers and military bases are under attack from another country (Ukraine.) To make things even worrisome for the Russian government, missiles made in America and directed by American spy satellites are among the Ukrainian missiles crossing into Russia (and this with U.S. approval and expertise.) This would be like Russian missiles in Cuba being launched in the direction of Key West and Miami, FL. Russia might say that Cuba did it, but would that explanation wash with the American public? I can imagine the outrage in our country if that happened.
DON’T FEEL SORRY FOR RUSSIA
This is only happening because Russia has waged war against Ukraine twice in the last decade. So, while it is hard to feel sorry for Russia since they released this genie in the first place, it should be understandable that Russia is feeling more and more threatened by NATO. The accession of Finland and Sweden into NATO adds 850 miles of NATO presence to Russian borders. Without the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden likely would not have joined the alliance. Also, many NATO governments have committed to budgeting even more of their GDP on weapons of war than before. So, this is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. NATO would be smaller, the Russians would still have a Black Sea fleet, European countries would look for excuses to keep expensive military forces to a minimum and so on had they not started this adventure.
This post is a continuation and update to my previous posts on the war in Europe. Last year, I wondered not whether the next world war was approaching, but whether or not it has already begun. In the two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, we have slowly–but surely–moved in the direction of a broader conflict, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which maintains the Doomsday Clock has reflected this in their announcement earlier this year. As they see it, we are ninety second from midnight, the closest we have ever been to a global war since 1947 when it was first displayed.
POLAND
One sign that the conflict is spreading deals with the thought-to-be “sabotage” the different NATO countries are reporting. The most recent comes from Poland (yesterday.) According to the Kyiv Post:
An explosion took place at the Mesko arms plant in Poland that produces the kinds of weapons and munitions in use with the Ukrainian military on Monday, June 10, with casualties reported.
The incident, which killed a 59-year-old man and injured another man, took place at the factory’s rocket fuel center, the plant’s president Elżbieta Śreniawska told Polish news outlet RMF FM.“
The plant is located in Skarżysko Kamienna, a city located halfway between Warsaw and Krakow. Officially, the investigation into the cause of the explosion is underway and sabotage has neither been ruled in or ruled out as yet.
FRANCE
Around the same time this was happening in Poland, there was an explosion in a hotel near the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, France. A person with both Ukrainian and Russian citizenship was substantially burned in his hotel room. Le Monde notes that the 26-year-old former Russian soldier who fought in Donbas against Ukraine, was burned and was then arrested for having in his possession a number of explosive devices, one of which detonated and caused his burns. The French anti-terrorism authorities are investigating. Whether he was planning an attack on an arms facility, or the D-Day ceremonies or the Summer Olympic activities is not presently known.
. . .a warehouse in east London being used to supply aid to Ukraine burned down.
Weeks later, an Ikea in Vilnius, Lithuania, mysteriously caught Fre. Swedish investigators were already looking into the possibility that several railway derailments could have been caused by a state-backed saboteur.
Then [another] inferno engulfed the largest shopping centre in Warsaw, Poland’s capital.
It was Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, who began joining the dots to suggest the West was under attack by Russian espionage. ‘We are examining the threads – they are quite likely – that the Russian services had something to do with the Marywilska Fre,’ he said last month.
His claims were further bolstered when a former Russian soldier was arrested north of Paris this week after explosives detonated in his hotel room. Warnings from European intelligence agencies that Russia is plotting acts of sabotage on the Continent in its escalation of the stand-off with the NATO military alliance have been thrust into the limelight.”
Czech prime minister Petr Fiala said on Monday that Russia may have been behind an attempted arson attack on Prague city buses last week. Meanwhile, Russia has been jamming GPS signals eastward in Europe from Germany. These are satellite signals that commercial aircraft as well as military planes need to safely navigate from city to city and beyond.
SWEDEN
Russia also signaled (perhaps by accident) that it is unhappy with its border with Sweden and Finland as it hungrily eyes the Swedish island of Gotland. Gotland, the largest island that Sweden has, is comparable in size to the U.S. state of Rhode Island, and it occupies a strategic approach to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. A Russian attack on this island would invoke Article V[1] of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s founding document, dragging NATO countries willingly or unwillingly into a broader and direct military conflict with Russia.
ESTONIA
Even as Russia has hinted that the border with Sweden and Finland must be reconfigured to Russia’s advantage, there is a current low-level dispute since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine between Russia and Estonia, which deals with navigational rights and the boundary between these two countries.
Earlier this month, representatives from eleven NATO member states that either border Russia or which were previously under Russian control during the Cold War met in Latvia. They concluded their conference with a statement which read (in part):
We are deeply concerned about Russia’s recent malign hybrid activities on Allied territory, which constitute a threat to Allied security. These incidents are part of an intensifying campaign of activities which Russia continues to carry out across the Euro–Atlantic area, includingsabotage, acts of violence, cyber and electronic interference, provocations related to Allied borders, disinformation campaigns and other hybrid operations.”
Newsweek reports “Vladimir Solovyov, a Russian propagandist and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, vowed that two capital cities in member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in due course ‘will also be ours[2].’”
Solovyov recently argued on his Russian TV show that “the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv is Russian territory and so is Poland’s Warsaw and Finland’s Helsinki.”
Solovyov is to Putin as certain conservative broadcast personalities in the U.S. are to Trump. These media personalities are unelected opinion leaders that, at least in some cases, spread pro-Russian propaganda. As far as they are concerned, Russian can do any damned thing they want to the countries in Europe.
Putin and Solovyov Credit: Kremlin.ru, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
One might think that the Poles and the Finns might have some say in all of this, but not according to Solovyov, and if President Putin has his way. More than likely, the tiny independent nation of Moldova which lies on the southwestern border of Ukraine would be conquered first. Already, Russian soldiers are in that country stirring up resistance to the government.
There are other “flash points” across the globe, but Russia is still the “primary pathway” to World War Three, Dr Luigi Scazzieri, of the Centre for European Reform think tank, told Sky News. If it prevails in Ukraine, an emboldened Putin may be tempted to strike a NATO nation, which would demand a coordinated response. The likelihood increases if Donald Trump wins the US presidential election this Fall and further undermines the alliance or limits U.S. military aid to Ukraine as he seems to be promising. But then, he has a certain admiration for Mr. Putin and a disdain towards Ukraine for not helping Mr. Trump get re-elected, and withholding aid to Ukraine until they did. So this shouldn’t come as a surprize if it occurs.
As far as the other flash points, we have the war between Israel and the terrorist groups Hamas and Hizbollah. Last night, the leader of Hizbollah threatened the friendly nation of Cyprus with war if they allowed Israeli planes to land there. According to Hamas, more than 35,000 Palestinians killed since last October suggest to the leadership of Hamas that the war is going well for Hamas, given the vital role that dead Palestinian women and children play in their bloody ideology. They seem almost pleased with all the attention and support they are getting from the mass demonstrations in the West, according to leaked transcripts first published this week in the Wall Street Journal. Also, in this conflict earlier this year, Iran launched several hundred missiles towards Israel. The U.S. and American allies intercepted many of these rockets before they arrived, and those that did reach Israel did very little damage. This was Iran’s first such attack on Israel. Under tremendous pressure from the U.S., the Israeli military response to Iran was generally muted.
China continues on its belligerent path not only towards Taiwan, but towards its neighbors such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia with its “Nine-Dash Line.”
Many tend to view each of these conflicts separately, when in fact, they might properly be seen as a single problem. Eliot A. Cohen writing in The Atlantic about the current threats in Asia, and wars in the Middle-East, and in Europe is reminded of the immediate years before World War II. He notes:
In the mid-1930s, it was a mistake to treat the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War, the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, and Japan’s launching of war in China in 1937 as a set of unique and unconnected events. Rather, they represented one big problem.”
In our own hemisphere, the government of Argentina is being closely watched by the United Kingdom as it orders modernized weaponry, including amphibious assault ships. The concern in London is that Buenos Aires and attack the Falkland Islands as they did in 1982.
Hitler’s German Anschluss (“joining or connecting”) with Austria took place in March 1938. His goal in grabbing that territory was to create a “Greater Germany.” He was obsessed with the glorious days of bygone years.
After World War I, the Sudetenland became part of Czechoslovakia. About quarter of the population in this region was German, and Hitler appointed himself to be the protector of these Germans. As usual, Hitler mentioned threats against German citizens living in Sudetenland, that Sudetenland destiny is to be part of the Third Reich and so on. Hitler never asked for anything. He just took it.
Hitler, in a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin, claimed that the Sudetenland was ‘the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe’ and gave Czechoslovakia a deadline of 28 September 1938 at 2:00 p.m. to cede the Sudetenland to Germany or face war.”
Afterwards (in March 1939), he declared Bohemia and Moravia to be under Reich protection, another chunk of Czechoslovakia swallowed up. This is very similar to what Putin is doing in Ukraine today. For example, yesterday President Putin address to the Meeting of Foreign Ministry Officials. He told them according to the transcript on President Putin’s website:
. . . Kiev should guarantee servitude, as they call it, a legally formalized right of access for Russia to the Crimean Peninsula via Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. This is a critical political decision. And, of course, in its final version, it would not be adopted unilaterally but only after consultations with the Security Council, with other institutions, of course, after discussion with citizens, the public of our country and, above all, with residents of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.
In the end, that is what we did: we asked the opinion of the people themselves and held referendums. And we did what the people decided, including in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, in the Donetsk and Lugansk peoples’ republics. . .
Now, as I have already said, the situation has fundamentally changed. The residents of Kherson and Zaporozhye have expressed their position in referendums, and Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, as well as the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, have become part of the Russian Federation. And there can be no talk of disturbing our state unity. The people’s will to be with Russia shall be inviolable. This matter is closed forever and is no longer a matter for discussion.”
Similiarly, President Putin’s Anschluss of Ukraine is a work still in progress. There’s little chance that Russia will run short of manpower in its war against Ukraine, but they are recruiting mercenaries in Africa and elsewhere.
Fundamentally and perhaps without much fanfare, our present generations around the world have shifted from a post-war era to a pre-war era. In Europe, there are calls from some countries for a draft:
Several NATO countries, including Latvia, have now reintroduced a national service draft or, in the case of Sweden and Estonia, extended it to reach more people. According to former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, conscription could bring society together and help bridge social and political divisions. And, noticeably, in polling data, the young in the Baltic and Scandinavian states are far more ready to fight for their nations than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.”
Incidentally, at this very moment, a bill in the U.S. Senate is being debated over whether women in this country should have to register for the draft. This is the sort bill that never comes up in peace time.
Poland is building a “wall” between its borders and Russia’s Belarus ally. Called the “Shield-East project, the purpose of the wall would be to slow down a conventional Russian invasion of Europe. Polish prime Minister Donald Tusk said in the recent announcement:
’We are opening a great project of the construction of a safe border, including a system of fortifications and of the shaping of terrain, (of) environmental decisions that will make this border impenetrable by a potential enemy,’ Tusk said.
‘We have begun these works, to make Poland’s border a safe one in times of peace, and impenetrable for an enemy in times of war,’ he added.”
Yesterday, as the West announced new sanctions again Russia, the Moscow Stock Exchange dropped precipitously. Dmitri Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia responded:
’We should try every day to do as much damage as possible to those countries that have imposed these restrictions on our country and all our citizens,’”
‘They fear a war in space? They will get it,’ Medvedev stated, further cursing, ‘Let everything stop for them, let everything go wrong, let everything go to shit.’
‘Let’s turn their lives into an ongoing permanent nightmare,’ Medvedev concluded, referencing the Old Testament principle of ‘an eye for an eye.’”
Historically, in times of such tension, there is some isolated incident that, like a spark in tinder, spreads out of control. The leaked Hamas transcripts suggest that the attack on Israel (October 7, 2023) which killed more than 1,000 people while another 250 were kidnapped and dragged back to Gaza got out of control. Undisciplined Palestinians with possible ties to gangs or other terrorist groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, took advantage of the Hamas border breech, poured into Israel and tortured, raped, kidnapped or killed as many Jews as they could.
’Things went out of control,’ [Hamas’ Gaza chief Yahya] Sinwar said in one of his messages, according to the WSJ, adding he was referring to gangs taking civilian women and children as hostages.
‘People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened,’ Sinwar said, according to the WSJ.”
And therein lies the danger. There is a risk that things don’t go exactly as planned for Russia, for North Korea, for Hamas, even the U.S. and events quickly spin out of control. This is called the law of unintended consequences.
With Russian spy planes flying in close proximity to NATO planes as Russia probes the borders of this countries, a collision between opposing aircraft is certainly possible, as is a Russian missile aimed at Ukraine but landing by accident in a Polish city with a large loss of life. Maybe the Russians will shoot down another passenger airliner flying near Ukraine and try to blame it on the Ukrainians as they did to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17/MAS17) in July 2014. North Korea is as hostile and unpredictable as ever while it adds to its nuclear arsenal annually. The possible scenarios are endless.
Hrabovo, Donetsk region / Ukraine – 07.23.2014 Crash site on July 17, 2014 of the Boeing-777 of Malaysia airlines, flight MH17 near Hrabovo village. Plane fragments in the field. All that’s left of 298 passengers who fell from 20,505 feet in a matter of seconds. Photo credit: Alexander Gafarro.
AFTERWARDS
The U.S. must keep engaged in world affairs. I used to hear complaints from isolationists that said “We can’t be the world’s policeman.” But think of what the world would become without justice, structure, benevolence and all that the U.S. has to offer? Nor should we live in fear. We should make responsible political choices this fall based on which people running for public office have the best possible solutions. If you are sort of person who prays, a little prayer certainly wouldn’t hurt here, either.
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
[2] “Solovyov added: “’Whose is it? Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities. Take the old lady back to her Motherland. The Ukronazis came here…I think that in another five minutes, Warsaw and Helsinki will also be ours, Russian. And historically, it’s all true.’” Ibid, Newsweek.
