War Begins Before The First Shot Is Fired

by

        M. Richard Maxson 

              and Sean Davis

      A lot of people seem plagued with a misconception that wars start when the first gun is fired. This belief generally leads to the assumption that the first to fire is the bad guy and the first to get hit is always the good guy.

      This is not true, and actually could not be more false. Combat starts when guns are fired and borders are crossed. But wars are started long before anything ever gets to that point. And preventing wars from happening requires an understanding of the factors and events that often culminate in military combat.

      World War I didn’t start with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. A long and complicated chain of events leading to global military conflict was set in motion long before that. World War Il didn’t start with Germany’s invasion of Poland. It started with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. WWIII may start because of the aggressive nature of NATO, the western elites war machine.

      The U.S. understood for a time that post-Cold War NATO expansion in eastern Europe was a major red line for Russia, especially regarding Ukraine. As a result, tensions eased. Until NATO started expanding again in the mid-2000s, that is. Seven new nations, including Black Sea neighbors Romania and Bulgaria, were added in 2004. Ukraine began intensified dialog to join NATO in 2005. Georgia, which also borders Russia along the Black Sea, began serious talks to be added to NATO in 2006. At this point, the only two Russian Black Sea neighbors outside of NATO were Georgia and Ukraine.

      To truly understand how we came to be where we are, however, you have to go back to the end of the Cold War, when the U.S.S.R. was broken up and redivided, and new countries were given geographical borders that often seemed completely arbitrary.

      Russia unsurprisingly intervened in Georgia just two years later defending Russian speaking peoples stating that country boundaries should have been adjusted to reflect the reality of the late twentieth century NOT pre- WWII boundaries. The west ignored Russian concerns and in 2009, nearly 30 years after the end of the Cold War, two more countries were added to NATO.

      As university professor and former U.S. Pentagon official Mario Loyola noted, “When [Ukraine’s Soviet] borders suddenly became ‘real’ in 1991, a midst the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kiev found itself in control of a nuclear arsenal, the Black Sea fleet, Russia’s most important commercial and naval ports in the world (Odessa and Sevastopol), and tens of millions of Russians. U.S. diplomats realized the situation was dangerously untenable, and quickly pressed Kiev to return the nuclear arsenal and Black Sea fleet to Russia. Unfortunately, the adjustments stopped there, leaving Ukraine with a bigger bite of Russia than it could safely chew.”
      
      Which brings us to Ukraine. The war with Russia didn’t start in 2022 when Russia invaded eastern Ukraine. It didn’t start with the Crimean invasion in 2014. The
most recent proximate cause of that war was the Western-instigated Maidan revolution (which precipitated the
Crimean invasion) and the failure to fully implement the Minsk agreements that followed.

      But even that is probably short-sighted, as you could look back even further to the 1997 Moscow-Kiev lease agreement regarding Russian military bases on the
Black Sea in Sevastopol as being a major contributor to geographic tensions between the two countries.
   

      This was the CIA coup when the West instigated the Maidan revolution in early 2014. And how did Russia immediately respond? By taking Crimea. That doesn’t seem so random or unprovoked anymore, does it?

      Then comes Biden’s election in 2021, immediately followed by new Ukrainian demands to join NATO which Biden explicitly blessed. (recall that Biden was the U.S. government’s point man on Ukraine policy in 2014) Biden then allowed the Ukrainian militarily to attack it’s own citizens, Russian speaking (no borders were adjusted) to stop them from speaking their own language and worshiping their own religion. Russia then invaded Ukraine in early 2022 as it had no choice but to defend it’s ethnic citizenry.

      Does all this historical context make Russia the good guy? Does it make Ukraine the bad guy? There are no heroes and no villains, no good guys and no bad guys. There are no permanent allies and no permanent enemies. There are just nations and leaders with competing interests driven by their elites whims and desires. Sometimes national interests align, and sometimes they are in direct conflict with each other. The reality of war is that it begins long before anyone ever fires a bullet.