Wolfgang Ischinger, former chairman of the Munich Security Conference (2008-2022), appears to be trying to pull the U.S. into the Ukraine trap that the Anglo-French-led “Coalition of the Willing” is trying to set. He told Politico in an interview that he would “totally warn against a military hardware presence of European NATO troops in Ukraine” without U.S. involvement. Politico notes that the U.K. and France have proposed in recent months to create a Europe-led peacekeeping force in Ukraine to (ostensibly) help end the three-year war with Russia. “I don’t think that the Russians would ever, ever agree to that under any circumstances. But even if they agreed, I think we would need to insist that the United States is really involved in this,” he said.
Without a U.S. backstop, “the next thing that could happen would be that the Russian side would test, and would claim that Ukrainians have started some kind of shooting war, and they need to respond to that,” he claimed. “And therefore the Europeans in Ukraine would possibly be shot at, and would need to reply, to engage without the United States on their side,” he said. “Quite frankly, that would be the end of NATO as we know it.”
