April 3, 2024 (EIRNS)—Antongiulio de’ Robertis, Vice President of the Italian branch of the Atlantic Treaty Association (Comitato Atlantico Italiano), wrote a long article in which he compared the current strategic situation to the one that led to World War I, drawing from Christopher Clark’s famous book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.
Even after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Josef in Sarajevo 1914, everybody believed that the war would not start. Only after Vienna’s ultimatum to Serbia, European monarchs and heads of state interrupted their vacation. Today, we are dangerously underestimating the possibility that a new war—a nuclear war—could occur.
In the Ukrainian conflict, the West has progressively lifted the threshold of belligerency, up to eliminating any limitation to militarily assisting Kyiv.
“Assuming the absence of limits in assisting Ukraine to prevent its defeat, and complacency in the resulting strategic ambiguity, implies adopting a similar attitude of the other side, whose panoply also includes the nuclear weapon. There cannot but be, therefore, a concern to avoid the initiation of the same unstoppable mechanism of 1914 that drove European leaders to enter the war as somnambulists.
“The hypothesis of inserting military units from Atlantic countries into the Ukrainian theater of war would accentuate this risk, adding yet another piece to that piecemeal world war denounced by the Roman Pontiff, and would unhappily risk causing those pieces to weld together into an open global conflict.
