Author and political analyst Patrick Lawrence issued a strong warning to the West titled “Russia’s Red Line” in Consortium News on Jan. 25. Lawrence pointed out that if America, the British, and Western European allies were to succeed in expanding NATO eastward to Russia, they would find “our planet now has a brand-new red line etched across it…. A new security order in Europe is essential if we are to achieve a sustainably stable world order in our time.” The Ukraine crisis and the Taiwan Strait crisis are not the same, but comparable: “Russia does not want to ‘invade’ Ukraine any more than China wants to reassert its legitimate sovereignty over Taiwan by force. Beijing’s red line on any suggestion of independence for Taiwan is in my view the severest red line any nation has drawn in our time.”
As Lawrence puts it, “The last thing the Kremlin wants is to assert sovereignty over the corrupt, crawling-with-Nazis scene in Ukraine. But Moscow has made it plain just in the last month or so that its red line is no more negotiable than China’s in the Taiwan case.” Yet Biden and Blinken, he says, make it clear they will never consider a declaration limiting NATO’s expansion. Lawrence goes on: “Now we can judge the current impasse between the Anglosphere portion of the West and Russia for what it is. … As Scott Ritter just wrote in Consortium News, and Marshall Auerback earlier argued in The Scrum, Ukraine shapes up as a provocation too far for Washington, London and Brussels. It’s Kiev as Waterloo. It’s the end of Western expansionism.” Lawrence asserts that if the U.K. and United States force a military conflict there, the Atlantic alliance will fracture – and that would be a good thing.
Lawrence hopes for Russia’s success in forcing a redrawing of the security map on its western border and into Europe. His final shot is that if sanctions suspend Russia from the SWIFT financial settlement system, that in fact would push Russia and China to accelerate plans already in motion to develop a system independent of SWIFT, and not subject to America’s geopolitical whims. He concludes: “The coalescing of non–Western powers, far from least Russia and China, is a reality well beyond the course of the Ukraine crisis and this or that sanction. The relentless campaigns against the Chinese and Russians in the two-front Cold War these past few years have done a great deal to encourage unity between the two. This will not reverse under any circumstance.” (https://consortiumnews.com/2022/01/25/patrick-lawrence-russias-red-line/ )
