Facing expanded war

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Donald Kirk

Facing expanded war

Posted : 2023-07-13 16:35

Updated : 2023-07-13 16:35

By Donald Kirk

LONDON ― The world descends into war by stages that might appear almost imperceptible to billions obsessed with fast-rising prices and the quest for daily survival.

For most of us, the proxy war in Ukraine remains a distant contest in which Ukrainian forces fight with foreign weapons, mostly American and British. Their Russian enemy is cumbersome, awkward, demoralized and badly led but not about to compromise or go home as long as Vladimir Putin remains in power.

On a personal level, we do not have to worry too much since no American lives, or the lives of the citizens of any of America's 30 NATO partners, are on the line. The Ukrainians are fighting for themselves.

Against this background, escalation happens one step at a time. The Americans are now training Ukrainian pilots on F16s, the "fighting falcons" deemed capable of combating Russian MiG and Sukhoi fighters.

Then just last week, President Joe Biden said, fine, we'll provide cluster bombs needed to wipe out Russian units much more efficiently than artillery shells, which might take out individual targets while those nearby dive for cover. The fact that cluster bombs were responsible for far more civilian than military casualties in both the Vietnam and Iraq wars does not seem to have impressed the American president.

Stopping off in London on the way to this week's NATO summit in Lithuania, Biden briefed Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on all that he was doing, most recently the decision for deploying cluster bombs.

Never mind how many thousands of Vietnamese were killed by unexploded bomblets sprayed around in clusters. We're still getting reports of killings by cluster bombs long after the last U.S. forces withdrew from "South" Vietnam more than half a century ago.

Escalation of the weaponry in Ukraine begs the question: will NATO, led by the United States, slip from weaponizing and financing Ukrainian forces to joining the war as a participant? Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pleaded for the U.S. Air Force to enforce a "no-fly zone" that would call for zapping Russian planes over Ukraine ― a step that would draw the U.S. inexorably into open conflict with the Russians.

Also, Zelenskyy wants NATO to accept Ukraine as a member. Were that to happen, NATO countries would have to send their own troops into Ukraine. That's because the basis of the alliance is that any attack on a single NATO nation is an attack on all of them, to which they are treaty-bound to respond.

That is the same as the response to any attack on South Korea. U.S. and South Korean troops, under the U.S.-Korea alliance, both respond to North Korean threats, and both would go to war in the event of armed aggression by North Korea and/or the North's powerful friends, China and Russia.

We have grown quite complacent about the chances of a North Korean attack on the South. Korean and American bases might make tempting targets, but somehow we do not think Kim Jong-un will make good on his persistent threats. Rhetoric from Pyongyang by Kim Jong-un and his younger sister Yo-jong is largely ignored other than as fodder for another round of headlines.

Ukraine, though, is rather different. The war has not stabilized into well-defined lines of control resembling that across the Korean Peninsula where the shooting stopped 70 years ago this month. The sense is that the lines in Ukraine are fluid and shifting. From afar, it is not clear which side is winning despite reports of offensives by either side.

Every escalatory move, however, adds to the fear that the next move will bring NATO full force into war with Russia. That's a war that no one wants, but you might not know it from the vows among NATO leaders meeting in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius to keep the fight going with more and better weapons.

It's appropriate that Vilnius should have been the setting for the latest NATO confab on elevating Ukraine's defense in a war that could go on for years.

The irony is that, while NATO leaders talked about pouring more and better arms into Ukraine, Lithuania, the host country, is less than secure. It's often said that Lithuania and the two other Baltic countries, Latvia and Estonia, might be the next targets in Russia's expansionist drive after Putin is done with Ukraine.

Putin, however, cannot let his instincts get too much the better of him while bogged down in Ukraine. It's even possible that more sensible, sober-minded figures in Moscow will rise to repress his expansionist drive. We can only pray for such a denouement rather than endless escalation of another war without end.

Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com), visiting London, writes from Washington and Seoul.