AU CONTRAIRE
The Rising Danger of Regional Confrontation
Photo by Edwin Hooper
With every passing day, the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are taking on a larger regional cast and threatening to meld. The mindless nature of the growing confrontation points to more friction on the horizon.
There is a linkage between the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and its surrogates. Last week, Ukraine struck an Iranian commercial cargo ship in the Caspian Sea that was reportedly taking military equipment from Iran to Russia. It took diplomatic calls to defuse the crisis and to dissuade Iran from striking back.
This incident was inevitable in view of Iran’s increasing supply of military aid, particularly Shahed drones, to Russia. In addition to drones, Iran has sent drone trainers to Crimea to assist Russian military forces. The Russians, in turn, are improving the drone technology and sending newer drone versions to Iran for use against U.S. facilities in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain.
U.S. intelligence is involved in Ukrainian targeting of Russian forces, and the Trump administration assumes that Russia is involved in similar activity on behalf of Iran. The United States, moreover, claims that Iran has provided ballistic missiles to Russia for use against Ukraine, but this has not been confirmed.
The U.S.-Israeli invasion of Israel was planned as a short war, but it is turning into an unmitigated, gale-force cock-up. Fighting continues in the sixth month and as many as 17 nations may be involved. Iran launched attacks on U.S. military facilities in Kuwait last week, and an Egyptian port near the Suez Canal was hit as well. Two ships were hit, including a U.S. gas storage tanker. These attacks threaten Saudi Arabia’s use of the Red Sea, needed to gain access to the canal. This was necessitated by the Houthis attacks to close down the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb that connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.
Israel learned nothing from its failed invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that led to the formation of Hezbollah. Israel didn’t withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon two decades later. In destroying much of the leadership of Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has taken a greater role in Hezbollah’s efforts to maintain pressure on Israel.
There are danger signs in Europe as well. Last week, a Russian cruise missile violated Polish air space and exploded in a rural field in eastern Poland. Russia has been waging a multi-front “shadow war” against NATO members for the past year. Romania destroyed three Russian Shahed-type drones last month, and Moldova has reported Russian penetrations. There have been cyber attacks on European infrastructure as well as Russian involvement in cutting undersea data cables in the Baltic and North Seas.
Meanwhile, there is increasing collaboration of nations in Europe and Asia that no longer have confidence in U.S. credibility. In the Indo-Pacific, Japan has strengthened defense ties with Australia, the Philippines, and India as well as with South Korea. Australia has concluded new agreements with several Pacific Island nations in order to deal with increased Chinese activity in the region. In Europe, there is greater collaboration between Britain, France, and Germany as well as between the eastern and western members of NATO. These arrangements could be difficult to manage, and could foster Russian and Chinese challenges to protect their interests.
Warfare has its own culture, and it often damages the very civil societies that support the use of it. When elements of nationalism and fears of existential threats are introduced, the expansion of force becomes more likely. Self-defense is typically the justification for going to war, but the actions of Russia against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, and the United States against Iran are excessive. When wars are designed for political gain, it becomes more difficult to accept negotiation and compromise.
The New Big Three
Reprinted from The Realist Review.
“The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms…”
Such was the view of the English novelist Evelyn Waugh’s finest fictional creation, Guy Crouchback, in the days following the announcement of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The parallels between Crouchback’s time and our own are as unmistakable as they are uncomfortable – not least because this time Washington is on the wrong side of history.
This, at any rate, is the view from the world beyond Washington. Surveying the devastation wrought by the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the Nigerian writer and former secretary general of African workers, Owei Lakemfa, concludes that “humanity is moving back to the pre-World War era when there were no agreed universal rules, might was right.” Today, writes Lakemfa, “strongmen, and nations roam around as terrorists and bandits playing God. The strongest is the Zelensky, Netanyahu, and Trump triumvirate.”[1]
This is how the world outside of NATO and Tel Aviv sees things. This might spur a normal country run by normal people to question the wisdom of its current course. Needless to say, in 2026, the US is no such country.
That Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli warlord Benjamin Netanyahu paid a visit to their principal military and financial patron, US President Donald J. Trump, on the same day last week, July 28, is perhaps a coincidence occasioned by the funeral of the late US Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham – but the coincidence was an ominous portent all the same.
Together, the new Big Three of Trump, Netanyahu, and Zelensky represent more than just a threat to global peace and stability; taken together, their wars of choice[2] are the death rattle of the old order of which Washington’s global politico-military primacy was the primary manifestation. This new, tragic-comic triumvirate’s shared mission is to do everything within their collective power to stand in the way of the emerging post-American world order – a world order that prizes the principles of sovereignty, non-interference, and reciprocity. The new order is a direct challenge to the collapsing US-led “rules-based international order” whose goal was nothing short of perfect security for Washington and its allies in Europe and Tel Aviv – at the expense of everybody else.
Zelensky and Netanyahu’s joint descent on Washington came as the former sought, via a missile strike against an Iranian cargo ship on the Caspian Sea, to link his war with Israel’s. Naturally, there are suspicions Ukraine had help. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it:
…A significant portion of the support provided to Vladimir Zelensky (from the West) comes from the United States. This is not only because the Americans sell weapons to the EU, which then transfers them to Ukraine, but also because the United States provides intelligence and reconnaissance, Starlink remains operational, and advanced technologies that require specialist expertise on the battlefield do not find their way there by accident. That is the way things are.”
Zelensky’s efforts to join the war on Iran also include claims (thus far unverified and unlikely) that Russia is providing Iran with satellite imagery in order to target and kill American soldiers. (In reality, Moscow has offered to broker negotiations between the parties).
That the war on Iran is unnecessary hardly needs underlining. Recent polling shows the war to be the most unpopular in American history, and the Trump administration’s shifting rationales for the adventure fail to pass the laugh test: Iran’s non-existent program and the freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz being the two most frequently invoked justifications.
That the Ukraine war is equally unnecessary is not nearly as widely accepted (if indeed it is accepted at all), thanks to the bipartisan commitment to turning Russia into a pariah state over the past twenty or so years. But what is true is true: there is no more compelling reason for propping up Ukraine than there is for our waging war and assisting in a genocide on behalf of Israel. Yet there persists the delusion that Ukraine and its Western sponsors are merely fighting a ‘defensive’, therefore ‘just’, war. Lost amid the relentless propaganda emanating out of Washington and Brussels is the fact that Zelensky is fighting a war for his own imperial ends, for control of parts of Ukraine that were never properly Ukrainian, for control of a people – the ethnic Russians of eastern and southern Ukraine – which Kiev had heretofore sought to disenfranchise and marginalize. The 2014 Maidan putsch was the second such effort by pro-EU, pro-NATO Ukrainians. The first, also successful, was the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, the large-scale street protests that resulted in the overturning of a presidential election, handing it to Washington’s preferred candidate. As The Guardian noted at the time, [3] “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing.”
A question often hurled at critics of US policy (which of course has a second purpose: to accuse the critic of ‘appeasement’) in Ukraine goes something like this: If we don’t stop the Russians in Ukraine, where will they stop? Yet Americans might more fruitfully look at the war from another angle, and instead ask, given our twenty years of interference in the region: [4] After all, Russia’s war on Ukraine was launched in response to NATO’s seemingly unlimited appetite for new territory to “protect”. But the claims made by Washington go far beyond Eastern and Western Europe and, perhaps understandably, are not seen in such a benign light in Beijing or Moscow (or, for that matter, in Lagos, in Mexico City, and on and on). Consider: US Central Command, CENTCOM, defines its Area of Responsibility (AOR) as including more than 560 million people across 4 million square miles – from Egypt in the west, across the Arabian Peninsula, east through the mountains of Central Asia, right to the doorsteps of Russia and China where, respectively, the US European Command and the US Indo-Pacific Command pick up “responsibility.” The delusion that these far-off regions are indeed ours to “protect” is a longstanding one: As early as December 2004 (the year of the aforementioned Orange Revolution), [5] that Ukraine was part of “our core zone of security.”
There is no sense in denying that war proponents usually get the better of the debate for reasons that were pointed out by President John F. Kennedy’s acerbic, brilliant ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, at the height of the Cold War. Writing from his post in New Delhi in 1961, Galbraith could hardly conceal his contempt for the arguments made by the holdover cold warriors from John Foster Dulles’s State Department. “The advocates of a hard line, so-called, are having a field day,” observed Galbraith. [6]:
…They can call for everything up to and including nuclear catastrophe rather than yield an inch. For this, they get great applause for their heroism. The President, however, must be more sensible; nuclear destruction is not likely to be popular with the average voter. So he must strike a bargain of some sort. Then the hard men can assail him for weakness. So they are unbeatable.”
And so, today, the ‘hard men’ who have never heard a shot fired in anger, such as Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, cheer as Trump trudges up the escalation ladder. The ever-present nuclear risk has now, as we have seen, been joined by the risk of a wider war.
Should it arrive, the conflagration between East and West so desired by Zelensky (the risks of which even the usually comatose New York Times now seems vaguely aware) will ultimately pit the old order against the new. The former will be buttressed by a movement now well underway by middle and small powers toward neutrality, in the manner of the non-aligned movement of the Cold War era.
The American people and their leaders remain blind to these emerging realities at their peril. As the 2028 presidential race comes into view, one measure of political maturity will be the extent to which a candidate understands the stakes in the battle between the old order and the new, and can communicate the consequences of our current position clearly and without resort to the puerile pandering of American exceptionalism that has done so much to infantilize our politics and limit our possibilities as a country.
James W. Carden, a contributing editor at The Nation, is the author of The Great Betrayal: How The Democrats Became the Party of War, which Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the USSR, Jack F. Matlock, says “Should be read by anyone who wants to understand how the U.S. failed to preserve peace in the world following the end of the Cold War.”
- Owei Lakemfa, Premium Times, July 31, 2026 ↩
- Too often ignored is the plain fact that Zelensky could have made a good faith effort toward a peaceful settlement in the years before the Russian invasion of Feb. 2022. In fact, he pledged to do so during his successful campaign for the Ukrainian presidency in 2019. Yet the option to follow through on the pledge was foreclosed by violent street protests in Kiev ↩
- See, Yves Engler, Canadian Dimension, March 17, 2022 ↩
- As early as 2006, Oxford historian Mark Almond commented, “Someone is still fighting the Cold War, but it isn’t Russia.” ↩
- Stephen F. Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, (Columbia, 2009), pp. 169. ↩
- John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), pp. 143.
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