The coming war

Is it true that we are going back to war in Europe? The information we are receiving is alarming, of course. But, I insist, is it true that international security is as endangered as it seems? We are witnessing eloquent preparations for war. Time will tell whether sanity has prevailed in the end or whether we are once again faced with a conflict, even a nuclear one. For the time being, we must trust and in the meantime assume the worst.

The reality is that it seems like only yesterday that this situation was called the Cold War. We were convinced that it was over, with the fall of the USSR, but now it turns out that we were wrong. For those of us who lived through some years of that period, nothing that we hear and see now is new. Only the names of some of the protagonists have changed.

Before it was the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact and today it is Russia and Vladimir Putin, a character that inspires fear to say the least. But the daily news did not change, once it was the missiles in Cuba, another the shooting down of a passenger plane, another the wars in Korea or Vietnam, the KGB and the CIA with a long etcetera that allowed arms manufacturers to get rich.

The news now focuses on threats and warnings of the same calibre. It is surprising that at this point in time the use of warlike terms that are hard to believe are serious, but cause concern, is still being used. Seen through today's eyes, the first impression is that blood will not run to the river, but neither will we recover the ephemeral peace we thought we had achieved in those historic meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev.

Tension is high and we should never rule out the possibility that a minor incident could trigger more serious situations, although at this point everyone will think twice for what it is worth. Europe is in the middle and is not neutral. NATO members, which are the majority of countries, would not be able to stay on the sidelines if conflict were to break out.  Spain has already sent a naval unit to the Black Sea as a precautionary measure. Putin is a threat to everyone, not just Ukraine.

Everything seems to suggest that he is taking advantage of Biden's weakened image after the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the economic and social depression that the pandemic is generating in both the United States and Europe. Vladimir Putin is obsessed with reclaiming the old Soviet Union, and he may as well take Crimea as send his tanks to keep Lukashenko as perpetual dictator in Belarus or to control the situation in Kazakhstan or Nagorno-Karabakh.