In the run-up to President Joe Biden’s meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy today, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson demanded that Biden stop flinching. BoJo was particularly distressed at the lack of enthusiasm of some in the U.S. military leadership and their role in keeping Biden from joining with Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer on July 13 on an immediate thermonuclear confrontation with Russia, prompted by London and Washington approving Kiev’s use of long-range Western missiles deep into Russia.
In a Sept. 21 article in The Spectator weekly magazine, BoJo writes that he was in Kiev talking to wounded Ukrainian soldiers the day that Biden turned down Starmer: “Now the U.S.-U.K. talks have apparently ended in failure—at least for the present…. What’s the hold-up with Storm Shadow...? Can we please all stop babbling this tired old rubbish about ‘escalation’ and the so-called fear of provoking Putin. That argument has been mounted at every stage in the past three years, and at every stage it has been disproved by events…. Putin’s bluster and saber-rattling turned out to be nonsense….”
The real fear of escalation would be “if Ukraine loses this war…. Ukraine won’t lose but if it did, we would have the risk of escalation across the whole periphery of the former Soviet empire, including the border with Poland, wherever Putin thought that aggression would pay off. We would probably see escalation in the South China seas and in the Middle East. We would see a general escalation of global tension and violence because ... it would mean the global collapse of western credibility…. Above all, a defeat for Ukraine would be—let us not mince our words—a catastrophic defeat for NATO…. We need to get serious and to get real, and the first step to sanity is to understand that there is no honorable compromise to be made with Putin.”
Further, the Ukrainians won’t “do a deal…. [N]o Ukrainian leader could do such a deal and remain in office…. There is only one alternative, and it happens to be the morally right course of action. That is to pursue a three-fold plan for Ukrainian victory of the kind that I believe President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will outline in the U.S. in the next few days…. We need to get it done and get it won ... first by giving the Ukrainians the right to use the weapons they already possess…. Second, we need to produce a package of loans on the scale of Lend-Lease: half a trillion dollars, as suggested by ... Pompeo, or even a trillion. Third ... we need ... to get Ukraine into NATO now, and I mean now.”
The message to Russia is: “That’s it. It’s over. You don’t have an empire any more. You don’t have a ‘near abroad’ or a ‘sphere of influence.’” It all “depends on us, on NATO, and above all on America. It means that we would all have to commit to the defense of that Ukrainian territory, and of course that will mean anxiety and resistance. Pentagon strategists will point at the map, the sheer size of Ukraine, and they will dwell on the risk and the expense.”
BoJo, famous for blowing up the April 2022 Istanbul peace agreement between Kiev and Moscow, concludes now that we can “end the war” on Zelenskyy’s “Victory Plan.” “I also believe, frankly, that there is no alternative.”
