It beggars belief that there are people who are taking bets on a nuclear war taking place by 2025. While gambling addiction has its own dynamic, how does anyone placing one of these bets think they might be in a position to collect their winnings if it does?

The justified fear that the Ukraine war is heading in that direction is one of the factors in driving majorities in both North America and Europe to favour a ceasefire and negotiated peace over continued escalation.

A recent survey by the Institute for Global Affairs showed that more than twice as many people in Europe and the US supported NATO pushing for a ceasfire as opposed it.

The IGA notes that

• In responding to Russia’s invasion, avoiding escalation with Russia is a top priority — especially among Europeans. Results suggest transatlantic support for a cautious response.
• More support a negotiated settlement to end the war, with a plurality of Americans and Western Europeans citing the loss of life and casualties as a primary reason.

This is a broadly humane response that is the opposite of the course being taken by the G7 and NATO leaderships. It is perhaps no accident that all of the leaders at the G7 had a negative approval rating; ranging from Georgia Meloni on -10, through Joe Biden on -19 and Justin Tudeau on -33, Olaf Schultz and Rishi Sunak on – 44 to rock bottom Emmanuel Macron on – 52%. Even after just winning the UK General Election, as he arrives at the NATO summit in Washington, Keir Starmer’s rating is -3.

In fact, the same logic on the part of NATO that led to the war in Ukraine in 2022 is the logic that is heading inexorably over nuclear red lines, possibly before the Autumn. The problem with a nuclear balance of terror is that it only works until it doesn’t. And the calculated games of chicken only have to be got wrong once, and its the end for all of us.

It seems clear that the calculation in NATO in the Winter of 2021 that they did not have to take Russia’s attempts to end the smouldering Ukrainian civil war, and defang NATOs eastward expansion, with a

• mutual security pact that would have guaranteed autonomy for the Russian speaking Donbass within Ukraine,
• made Ukrainian neutrality permanent
• and kicked negotiations about the status of Crimea into a possibly interminable negotiation process

seriously because they believed that either

• Russian military threats were a bluff that could be called, or
• that if Russia did intervene, that would be the opportunity they wanted for sanctions that would rapidly bring the Russian economy to its knees, creating domestic turmoil through which the well oiled processes of a colour revolution could lead to a “regime change” favourable to the US

were a complete miscalculation in both respects.

With the sanctions only supported by direct US allies,and largely blowing back on them, the Russian economy is doing fine, growing 5.4% in the first quarter of 2024 (compared with 0.6% in the UK, 0.4% for the US and 0.2% for Germany). And the military tide is turning slowly, remorselessly Russian, as the Ukrainian government is forced to resort to press ganging increasingly reluctant conscripts, sending them up to the line half trained, and suffering losses in soldiers and material that they can’t replace.

Faced with the prospect of defeat, the G7 and NATO are trying to up the military ante, rather than do what their populations want and seek a negotiated peace.

This is heading into very dangerous territory. Mark Rutte was confirmed as the incoming NATO Secretary General only after he assured Hungary that no Hungarian finance would be used for, or military personnel deployed to, Ukraine. That implies that other NATO forces will be, threatening the direct clash that could be a tipping point beyond the control of its instigators.

The decisions now being made at the NATO summit, with a dedicated NATO HQ being set up, promising an “irreversible path” to membership, cranked up arms spending, a no fly zone on the Western and Southern Ukrainian border, a green light for Ukraine to try to knock out Russian nuclear early warning systems that cover areas well away from Ukraine – a terrifying piece of irresponsible brinkmanship, as this makes a nervous nuclear armed power unable to tell if it is under fire or not in a context in which it is afraid it might be – deployment of NATO “instructors” within the theatre of conflict, and ever widening permissions given to fire NATO produced munitions into Russia are all edging towards catastrophe.

A letter to the FT by a number of academics and former diplomats, including Lord Skidelsky and Anatole Lieven, calling for a negotiated settlement to allow the world to be “pulled back from the very dangerous brink at which it currently stands” is a sign that the consensus at the top in favour of escalation is beginning to crack. This is likely to grow as the situation becomes more intractable and dangerous.

In this context, its important that positions taken in the Labour Movement do not rest too heavily on myths. A recent letter, Time to help Ukraine to win, signed, among others, by John McDonnell, Clive Lewis and Nadia Whittome, argued that failure on the battlefield has been down to inadequate supplies of munitions from the US and its allies, calling for the UK to “take a leading role” in supplying “all the weapons needed to free the entire country” and that, in the short term, this should take the form of obsolete MOD equipment being gifted instead of sold off, for a war crimes tribunal directed solely against the Russians and for Russian assets to be seized (stolen) by Western Banks.

There are four problems with this approach.

Myth 1. To “free the whole country” would actually be a reconquest of the Russian speaking areas that rebelled against the pro Western coup in 2014 and have been fighting it ever since, at a cost of thousands of dead from 2014 onwards; and, far from being a liberation, would constitute an occupation of those areas. This would not be pretty. Kyrill Budanov, head of Ukrainian military intelligence, has stated that this would require the mass reeducation of people “with a completely different mindset” and the “physical elimination” of some of them. Given what has happened in areas that Ukraine took back at the high point of its military efforts in autumn 2021, this does not have to be imagined.

Myth 2. McDonnell et al seem to assume that the taps can just be turned on from an infinite supply of military hardware. It can’t. The paradox of the NATO military Industrial Complex is that although it outspends the Russians 11 to 1, it characteristically produces immensely expensive and complex pieces of kit that require lengthy training, high levels of maintenance and can only be produced in relatively low numbers; and once they are used, at great expense, they are gone. This is highly profitable for the arms companies and is designed for short sharp wars against Global South countries, not long term grinding wars of attrition with near peers. Stocks are now run down, the obsolete equipment, like Leopard I and 2 tanks, Bradley AFVs and so on have been deployed and destroyed in large numbers. F16s – an aircraft first deployed in 1978 – are the next installment and will fare no better. Plans to increase production of, say, Patriot missiles, can only be incremental – from about 500 to 650 a year. That is why this position is a fantasy. The supplies sent to Ukraine have been the maximum that NATO could scrape together. The only way to shift this would be to completely retool arms manufacture, which would require massive investment over several years; and politically set a trajectory for war that would be very hard to stop. No one on the Left should support this.

Myth 3. The barrel has already been scraped for obsolete equipment. The MOD website Army Surplus Store section notes that as of May 2024 “There is currently no MOD surplus inventory for sale.”

Myth 4. McDonnell et al’s argument that “Ukraine deserves a just and socially progressive reconstruction in which trade unions and civil society can democratically participate. International support should help to restore and expand universal healthcare, education, rebuild affordable housing and public infrastructure, ensuring decent jobs and working conditions. No more advisors from the UK Government should be used to assist in retrogressive reforms of trade union and labour rights” is also, sadly, wishful thinking. The “reconstruction” of Ukraine will be a massive asset stripping fire sale, as its Western “backers” come for their loans like a flock of vultures. It has already been agreed between Western creditors and the oligarchs who have run the war, embezzled a good proportion of the “aid” and siphoned quite a bit of arms supplied into the international black market, that the “reconstruction” will be managed by Blackrock; whose priorities are not those of John McDonnell. Blackrock would, no doubt, wish for a succesful UAF offensive into the Donbass that would allow them to get their hands on the $12 Trillion worth or rare earths that are sitting below the surface there. Such an offensive is even less plausible now than when it was tried in 2022 and the UAF suffered terrible casuaklties to make marginal territorial gains of no strategic significance.

Myth 5. In this context, any notion that Ukraine’s debts will be cancelled is similarly wishful thinking. Its as if NATO powers aren’t in this conflict for themselves. As if it is some genuine genuflection to – a partially applied – principle of national self determintion. The West, will want its pound of flesh. One reason for the Ukrainian oligarchy to keep a hopeless war going is to postpone the time that the aid stops flowing and the debts come due. For NATO countries to unilaterally sieze Russian assets would be another nail in the coffin for any pretence at upholding a “rules based international order”, rule out any serious possibility of peace negotiations and be seen in the Global South as on a par with the appropriation of Venezuela’s assets by the same imperial powers.

Sections of the Left often put forward spurious – slightly fantasised – arguments in order to cover an accomodation to their imperatives of their own ruling class. The paradox of this is that the ruling class itself is more hard nosed. The section of the US ruling class that backs Trump wants to cut its losses, try to impose even more financially ruinous military spending on its European subordinate allies, so that, with or without a ceasefire in Ukraine, the US can concentrate on launching and even more ruinous war in the South China Sea.

That is where the US ruling class is heading. It is why a candidate like Trump, convicted felon and epic shyster, keeps afloat on a sea of money; and now looks like he is going to win, with all the “unpredictable violence” that Boris Johnson thinks is just what “the West needs”. This strategic shift is not because Trump is in some way “Putin’s patsy” but its actually a statement of weakness that the US no longer believes itself capable of fighting two and a half wars at once and prevailing in all of them. They have to concentrate on the biggest target, and if that causes problems for its subordinate imperial allies, so be it. To deal with the twists and turns of all this the section of the Left that finds itself cheerleading for NATO escalation will need to burn its delusions.