“US munitions and defense production help rather than deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific,” wrote Michael Waltz in The Economist on the eve of Trump’s triumph. His appointment as National Security Advisor to the president-elect sends chills through . The foreign policy of the new American government has a direction — and the new compass points to a reversal of course in Ukraine.
Waltz’s article, co-authored with Matthew Kroenig, is a critique of the superpower’s dispersion of strategic resources in Ukraine and the Middle East. The USA, he rightly diagnoses, no longer exercises the global hegemony that it enjoyed at the time of the implosion of the USSR and, in an alarmist way, maintains that China is on the threshold of surpassing American power. It concludes, from these premises, that it is necessary to interpret the rivalry with the Asian power as a new Cold War, concentrating resources on containing China.
During the election campaign, Trump claimed that he would not invade Ukraine if he were in the White House. The authors offer what would pass as a theoretical basis for the president-elect’s boast, attributing the war to the Biden administration’s demonstrations of weakness and vacillations. Their remedy: a speedy Carthaginian peace.
Rome and Carthage fought three wars between 264 and 146 BC. The second Carthaginian defeat produced a draconian treaty, signed in 201 BC. Carthage lost its colonies, paid huge indemnities, demilitarized and was prohibited from going to war without Roman authorization.
These are, in general terms, Putin’s demands in his imperial war: in addition to the annexation of at least a fifth of Ukraine, he aims to reduce its military power to almost nothing and obtain its neutralization, vetoing its entry into the European Union and in NATO. China, with active support from the Brazilian government, designs a peace proposal along these lines, formulating it through easily decipherable diplomatic passwords.
Carthage bowed to devastating peace after a decisive defeat on the battlefield. Russia has the initiative across the entire arc of the warfront, but nothing suggests a coming Ukrainian military collapse. However, Ukraine depends on a regular flow of foreign military aid, especially from the US. Carthaginian peace would emanate from the interruption of this flow — that is, in practice, from the will of Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress.
“End the war and stop the killing” — Trump’s proclaimed goal seems, on the surface, quite reasonable. The invasion has already killed around 80,000 Ukrainian soldiers (something like twice that among Russian forces) and more than 12,000 civilians. Ukraine could prosper even if territorially amputated, like Finland in the post-war period. However, demilitarized, outside NATO and the EU, it would be defenseless against the next Russian invasion.
Putin wrote that Ukraine has no right to sovereignty: it must be part of Great Russia. The third Punic War began when Carthage tried to defend itself from an attack by the kingdom of Numidia, which served as a pretext for the Roman invasion ended by the destruction of the city and the enslavement of its inhabitants. The Carthaginian peace preached by the sanctimonious “pacifists” would herald yet another war — and more slaughter.
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