By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
The talks between the US and its allies on the one hand, and Russia on the other, are even more important in themselves than their already very important agenda. They are taking place at a very critical juncture, a juncture which may evolve either towards the deepening of an already disastrous cold war, which could turn into a hot one and the destruction of humanity, or towards a defusing of tensions and the establishment of a process of applying the brake to and controlling the tension between the two nuclear superpowers and, subsequently, establishing a positive dynamic for improving relations between Russia and the West.
The direction in which US-Russian (and Euro-Russian) relations will move will have a great influence on all other “fronts” of our world. It will also influence very much the balance of power between, on the one hand, the reformist forces at the centre of the capitalist system, i.e. the group around Biden, and, on the other hand, the party of Fascism and war, i.e. the party of Trump, Netanyahu, Modi and Bolsonaro, whose predominance in the US and the “wider West” will sharply increase the chances of global catastrophe. (When we refer to Fascism, we certainly do not mean the mechanical repetition of the Hitler’s and Mussolini’s paradigms of the interwar period, but a phenomenon with many differences of course, but which comes to perform the same historical function in the final analysis. That is to appropriate the justified rebellion against the establishment and put it at the service of the more extremist tendencies of this same establishment, by the large-scale use of methods of deception).
That is an important reason why the US-Russian talks must end only with winners and with no losers.
The world after 1945
In the post-1945 world there is no possibility of winning a world conflict. Even the Cold War is a luxury, because the existential threats humanity is facing, unprecedented in history, not only nuclear ones, but also climate change, the biological threats, the threats from artificial intelligence and the collapse of biodiversity, and a host of others, require much greater global cooperation to deal effectively with them.
After 1945, humanity no longer has the ability acquired, developed and exercised from the Neolithic Revolution to the present day, namely the ability to play perpetual games of domination of one over another. The point is that the political leaders on the planet understand this today even less than they did 60 years ago, when Kennedy and Khrushchev had the courage to save us from disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis, one probably paying for it with his life, the other probably with his job.
Then the military were ready to drop the bomb, but were held back by politicians and public pressure. Now public opinion has forgotten the terrifying dangers of nuclear weapons , with the help of totalitarian media and bought “intellectuals”, and politicians around the world prefer to deal with “current problems” instead of seeking difficult, painful solutions to the top issues of humanity, such as the dangers of nuclear weapons and also (black, not green!) nuclear energy, climate change and many others.
In contrast, today the military part of the global elites is more aware of the dangers threatening humanity, and is more serious in the way it addresses the problems. Perhaps this is so, because armies are more connected to societies and to the roots of the states created by the bourgeois (England, American, French etc.) and by the socialist (Russian, Chinese, etc.) revolutions, and to the historical rationality that permeated these revolutions, and are opposed to the global domination of financial Capital even over the most powerful states (‘globalisation’).
We saw this when the American military applied the brakes to the neo-conservative’s hysteria in the Middle East and especially Trump’s enthusiasm when he was planning the bombing of Syria and threatening North Korea. In contrast, the increasingly psychiatric cases of politicians, appointed to their posts by financial capital that is now increasingly cut off from production and society, understand neither the world they live in nor the issues they talk about.
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