If the United States had not entered the Second World War, I would likely not have been born.
My father and mother participated in the war. My father was in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. My mother was a nurse in London. It is likely one or both would have been killed without the security afforded Britain by the U.S. At best, Britain would have become a vassal state of a pan-European Nazi empire. At worst, Britain would have been razed.
Plus ça change.
If the allies continue to watch from the sidelines, it is likely Ukraine will either be subjugated or razed by Russia.
Ukraine is presently engaged in a bloody, fighting retreat, its forces overwhelmed by hordes of Russian conscripts – cannon fodder – backed by murderous munitions such as glide bombs and hypersonic missiles. While Ukraine’s exhausted troops fight tenaciously enough, they lack the numbers and matériel to kill sufficient numbers of Russians to affect the course of the war.
In my opinion, Ukraine has been betrayed by a duplicitous West that has intentionally provided the country matériel sufficient to hurt the Russians but insufficient to expel them. What the West says and what it does are two entirely different things. The West says it wants Ukraine to prevail while providing it with just enough training, equipment and money to stay in the fight.
The West’s hypocrisy is shameful. The public goes along with it, unwilling to sacrifice its comfortable lifestyle in defence of principle. Those few who call out Western hypocrisy are ostracised, defamed or worse.
Which brings me to a letter I penned to Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, on Oct. 29. The letter, copied to academics, editors and parliamentarians, is reproduced below:
Dear Prime Minister,
I trust you are well.
North Korean troops are deploying to Kursk Oblast to support Russian forces in their efforts to expel Ukrainian forces.
This development can be framed in several ways.
For example, as the rekindling of an alliance that flourished during the Korean War, when the USSR provided North Korea significant military and diplomatic support.
More pertinently, perhaps, it can be framed as the globalisation of what has been, to date, a parochial conflict, essentially a dispute between two Slavic states.
If we assume the second framing to be the more accurate and relevant, it is pertinent to ask whether we are in the foothills of a third world war.
If we assume we are navigating those foothills, we could, with justification, respond to Russia’s North Korea gambit by deploying British troops to Ukraine. If Russia can invite North Korea to fight for it, why can’t Ukraine invite Britain to fight for it? A bilateral deployment would circumvent NATO’s objections. Other countries, France, for example, could follow suit. Deploying Western troops to Ukraine’s international border with Belarus would allow Kyiv to redeploy troops to the Donbas, where exhausted and demoralised units are engaged in a bloody, slow-motion fighting retreat. The logistics hub of Pokrovsk will soon be lost.
Russia has created a precedent with its North Korea gambit. We should exploit it and help save Ukraine from a slow and bloody dismemberment.
No more prevarication, please. It is time to join battle.
I trust you find these comments useful.
This is a watershed moment. Russia’s use of North Korean troops – to the extent that it internationalizes a conflict that has been, to date, a dispute between two Slavic peoples – provides the West justification for a declaration of war. If Russia can invite North Korean troops to fight for it, why can’t Ukraine invite British, French, Polish, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Romanian and Czech troops to fight for it?
As to Putin’s threat of nuclear reprisal, why would he irradiate that which he covets – Ukraine’s agricultural and mineral wealth? Why would he risk contaminating his beloved Mother Russia with fallout? Putin is a windbag. So, too, are his accomplices, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev.
Why stop Putin?
If the West fails to stop Putin in Ukraine, it will have to stop him in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Moldova or Poland. Have we learned nothing from Europe’s past? Appeasement produced the Third Reich, which produced a world war, the consequences of which we live with to this day.
The problem, I think, is that few of the West’s leaders have any experience of war or understanding of how to fight one. The majority are university-educated middle-class political careerists. And, as far as the Russia-Ukraine War is concerned, most are voyeurs, happy to cheer from the sidelines but too self-absorbed to commit.
Yes, they visit Kyiv, but only to spout platitudes, such as ‘We’re in it for as long as it takes.’ Given the West’s refusal to commit, such visits as German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s Nov. 4 visit to Kyiv are mere political theatre, disingenuous and cruel.
President-elect Donald Trump, who habitually puts his own interests before principle, is likely to cut or stop aid to Ukraine. Before the election, Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, warned that aid to Ukraine was ‘toast’ if America re-elected the arch transactionalist.
Ukraine will be saved from a slow and bloody dismemberment only if European nations send troops to that beleaguered land. Failure to do so will rebound catastrophically.
There will be a Third World War.
Dr. Simon Bennett directs the Civil Safety and Security Unit at the University of Leicester. He’s interested in the organizational, social, economic and political origins of risk. He has worked with the Royal Air Force and U.K. National Police Air Service on human factors issues. His latest book, , was published by Libri Publishing Ltd. in 2023.
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