The successes of the Russians in Ukraine has led to a rift within the NATO North-Atlantic Alliance

The United States and its allies have poured about $200 billion in weapons and cash into the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine over the past 22 months, with little to show for it apart from accelerating the rise of a multipolar world order, says former senior State Department official Chas Freeman.

“I know that the façade of NATO unity that existed earlier has cracked. We now have NATO members openly dissenting from the vision of continuing this war. And of course the international, global majority is not on the side of the West in this battle, but has chosen to sit this fight out, and sees this battle as yet another example of Western warmongering and threat-making,”

“What has been accomplished? Maybe the discrediting of NATO’s military prowess, because the Russians have learned to counter the best weapons NATO has. It certainly has not succeeded in the stated objective, which was to weaken and isolate Russia. Russia is not weaker, its economy has grown, it is now larger than Germany, which has been contracting due to the crisis produced by the loss of access to Russian energy exports. It has not been isolated.{loadmoduleid 377} It has been reoriented toward the east, toward the south, toward the Middle East, toward Africa,” Freeman said.

The proxy war against Russia has been lost by Kiev and its allies, Freeman believes, but the West has continued to pump resources into the conflict because of the “theory of sunk costs,” the idea that “since we have spent a lot of money doing something, we can’t afford to stop doing it.”

“But if the thing you are doing is stupid and counterproductive, if you do more of it, you just build up more problems. You don’t solve anything,” he said. The Russians tell us that they are capturing Ukrainian female soldiers who are pregnant. When you are reduced to keeping pregnant women in the armed forces, you are really near the end. So I think the reality is beginning to sink in that this war has not been won by NATO or the United States. It’s not yet been decisively won by Russia but it has been lost by Ukraine,” the veteran US DoD official and diplomat summarized.

 

Charles "Chas" W. Freeman Jr. is an American retired diplomat and writer. He served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years. Most notably, being fluent in Mandarin, he was the main interpreter for Richard Nixon during his 1972 China visit and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992, where he dealt with the Persian Gulf War.{loadmoduleid 378}