A truly toxic combination of militant nationalism and liberal opposition to chemical weapons is driving the world seemingly inexorably towards world war. We know who the militant nationalists are - people including Trump and Putin but, amazingly, the memory of World War One and the anti-chemical weapons institutions that it spawned are leading liberal opinion into a coalition of the mad hurtling towards our own collective destruction.
The horrors of gas attacks in the First War War and the desperate need to avoid them are etched in the political psychologies of western liberal opinion. The efforts to combat chemical weapons were launched through the 'idealism' of the League of Nations and the Geneva Convention which banned use of chemical weapons n 1925. More recently, we are governed by the Chemical Weapons Convention signed in 1993.
It is one of paradoxes of liberalism that it appears pacific and noble in its ideals but will plunge into self-destruction in supposed defence of the ideals that it defends. The present Syrian crisis, and those probably even worse to come, expose the paradox of liberalism. It is aggressive in support of its ideals which are supposed to oppose barbarity yet often the consequences of the actions it supports result in much worse barbarities than those which its actions are meant to defend. Such is the myopia driving much opinion towards war with Russia.
Now by hammering away at liberal idiocies I don't mean to minimise the contribution of militant nationalism - which seems to have taken hold in large parts of the world. Few people these days seem to stop to think how the notion of putting your own country 'first' means a relative gain over another nation either by soft, or hard, power. At best this means that others suffer and maybe die, but at worst this means that if an opposing power simultaneously adopts this logic then the end product is war.
With some luck we shall avoid war in the current crisis that followed the chemical attack in Douma. Probably. But in some senses war has already started between Russia and the USA. It arguably began in February when American forces at Deir al Zor in Syria killed an unknown number of Russian irregulars who were part of a force attacking a Kurdish force that was fighting with the USA against IS.
A chilling thing about this incident was that these irregulars may not have been totally under the control of the Russian Government. But what is the Russian Government anyway? Was the Skripal poisoning organised directly on Putin's orders or was it orchestrated by a faction within the GRU/FSB? I don't know, but the possibility of a militant nationalist force which dominates Russia today being partly out of control in a dangerous confrontation with the West should really worry us to our core. Especially when matched by a militant nationalist US President who does not want to seem 'weak'. Both sets of powers (US and Russia) are driven by an ideology of militant nationalism and try to give the impression that they are unpredictable and out of control. Well, to a great extent, they are.
We may avoid a direct war in the Eastern Med with Russia this time, by some covert agreement with the Russians to tolerate some token strikes. This may pass without a war, with luck. But what happens if, probably when, there is another chemical attack by Assad's forces?
The Syrian civil war is far from over. An incident like Douma may well occur again. That may be the point when the world plunges into the abyss. With Trump we are heading towards a trade war with China and a World War with Russia. The great liberal irony is that liberalism is helping this process along, ostensibly to avoid horrors of the First War War, but in reality triggering an armageddon that could prove even worse.
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