“The short of the long story, therefore, is the revival of Anglo-Saxon versus Russia rivalry on the fringe of Europe. The imperial sea powers of the West would prefer to continue with the proxy conventional war in land owing to their inherent discomfiture to take a direct fight with a monstrous land power which has traditionally thrived on protracted conflict away from the water. The Anglo-Saxons may like to think that the long war on land would weaken the Slav Russia both economically and demographically, but that may not turn out to be so.”

Biden inherited the Trump legacy of the Afghan war end-game. And August 2021 is a bad dream come true for the new POTUS. The retreat after the 20-year war made Biden a bitter man. The October 2024 escalation of the present Ukraine war is the right punch for Biden to deliver as a revenge trophy to Trump, his 2021-predecessor-cum-2025-successor.

This is the taunting remark made by the then UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace on February 23, 2022, even before Russia had invaded Ukraine: “The Scots Guards kicked backside of Tsar Nicholas-I in 1853 in Crimea and we can always do it again.” He was referring to the 170-year-old Crimean War between Moscow and the tripartite forces of London, Paris and Ankara’s Ottoman Empire which defeated Russia to conclude with the Treaty of Paris in 1856. The palpable hatred of the West’s Anglo-Saxon people towards Russia is unmistakable.

Fast forward one month, to March 22, 2022, and one finds Joe Biden, President of the US (POTUS), blurting out another verbal bullet in Warsaw: “For God’s sake, this man Putin cannot remain in power.”

What message was POTUS giving to the world? Was he in charge of the regime change of Moscow and judge, jury and arbitrator, with powers of the world supercop on the prowl? Or, was he heading the sole superpower state? For a minute, however, POTUS acted like a non-state actor of a tinpot dictatorship!

True, Biden was referring to the wrong and illegal Russian invasion of the sovereign Ukraine. But, did he remember the plethora of worse wrongdoings of his own country committed in the 21st century? Again, it’s true that two wrongs cannot make one right, yet one has to be rational, restrained and reticent while uttering words to make a point on an international platform dealing with such crisis situations as the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Russia was wrong on all counts to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and under no stretch of the imagination can the Moscow aggression be defended. It’s a naked 18th -20th century imperial-type aggression by the powerful to conquer the weak. Moscow had no business to trample upon Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Nevertheless, on closer scrutiny, it is seen that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was born of a ceaseless two-decade-plus shameless US-led NATO and EU provocation, which posed a dire and direct existential threat to Moscow’s geography through her underbelly of Kiev.

Hence, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin being wrong, he had reason to be wrong, and reason to be not right. It’s the blatant West-plotted expansion towards the East that Russia couldn’t have ignored beyond a point. All the more so because the once-sovereign USSR had already been broken into 15 states in December 1991, with Russia being one of the new states.

The shrunkened and weakened Russia, thus, constituted a fresh opportunity for the traditional imperialist powers of the West to get back to their favorite pastime: Of expanding territory, controlling resources and subjugating local manpower to subservience to bolster their own economy and multiply their growth chart, the way it zoomed from the 17th to the 20th century.

Today, the Russia-Ukraine war is more than a local conflict of the Balkan-Black Sea belt. The outgoing POTUS, Biden, has suddenly escalated the war, which could be potentially disastrous for Europe if it remains just a conventional conflict. However, in the unlikely event of the use of nuclear wares, one cannot predict the conflict’s outcome.

Indeed, whatever the future course of the Ukraine war, Biden (the Anglo-Saxon who hates Russia), for sure, will go down as a would-have-been hero who fell as a tragic villain in the history of the USA in general and the history of European warfare in particular for escalating the war zone into a potential Armageddon. Ironically, the villain should have been Putin for initiating the war. But the role has been diametrically reversed as Biden seems to have taken over the mayhem mantle from the Moscow man.

Thus, Biden has perfectly fitted into Putin’s shoes by allowing US-made lethal weapons to be targeted deep into Moscow’s land. Obviously, Moscow will react and go for reprisals on the source of the weapons’ launch pads.

And the launch pads may be any country, but certainly not the US or the UK, the two Anglo-Saxon nations whose hatred for the eastern state of Russia constitutes permanent chapters of world history.

Where, then, do things go from here? The biggest puzzle at this point in time to the world in general and the West in particular is US president-designate Donald Trump, whose dislike for Biden is too conspicuous to be ignored.

Biden inherited the Trump legacy of the Afghan war end-game. And August 2021 is a bad dream come true for the new POTUS. The retreat after the 20-year war made Biden a bitter man. The October 2024 escalation of the present Ukraine war is the right punch for Biden to deliver as a revenge trophy to Trump, his 2021-predecessor-cum-2025-successor.

The short of the long story, therefore, is the revival of Anglo-Saxon versus Russia rivalry on the fringe of Europe. The imperial sea powers of the West would prefer to continue with the proxy conventional war in land owing to their inherent discomfiture to take a direct fight with a monstrous land power which has traditionally thrived on protracted conflict away from the water. The Anglo-Saxons may like to think that the long war on land would weaken the Slav Russia both economically and demographically, but that may not turn out to be so.

The dynamics of political alignments are changing rather fast, with land powers uniting to take on the comparatively smaller sea powers with diminishing demography and challenging economy.

In fact, that’s the reason the Anglo-Saxons are emphatically propounding the importance of long-range high-tech weapons to target deeper into the unending land of Moscow. Unfortunately, perhaps, it’s a tad late to be successful. The vastness of Moscow is far too much and way superior than the proximity of Europe for Putin.

The West’s hatred for Moscow has made things too complicated to be untied any time soon, it appears. Biden’s hatred for both Putin and Trump may have tied the latter’s hands to the military industrial complex of California, Texas and Kansas and the US Mid-West corporations of combat weapons for a longer-than-expected haul.
( The author is Advocate, Supreme Court of India. Defense Analyst, Ex Civil Servant)