He defines World War III as a country “want[ing] to impose on the world a different way of life and change the lives people have chosen for themselves”, which doesn’t describe what Russia did in 2022, but what the US has been doing from 1991 till Trump’s return to office last year.
Andrew Korybko
Zelensky told the BBC right before the four-year anniversary of Russia’s special operation
that “I believe that Putin has already started [World War III]. The
question is how much territory he will be able to seize and how to stop
him...Russia wants to impose on the world a different way of life and
change the lives people have chosen for themselves.” This rhetoric
appeals to the West’s most ideologically driven anti-Russian hawks who
want to indefinitely perpetuate the conflict but is completely divorced
from reality.
It’s not Russia that “wants to impose on the
world a different way of life and change the lives people have chosen
for themselves”, but the US’ post-Old Cold War liberal-globalist duopoly
that ruled the country from then till Trump’s return to office, and
they set out to do this right after the USSR dissolved. To that end,
they attached corresponding political strings to foreign aid, flooded
other societies with “NGOs”, and weaponized the US’ cultural exports to
push their preferred version of “the end of history”.
Marco
Rubio candidly admitted his country’s grossly misguided and ultimately
failed 35-year-long campaign to change the world according to this model
in his speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference that was
analyzed here.
He didn’t frame it as World War III, however, but this aligns with
Zelensky’s definition thereof about how one state (Russia in his view
but actually the US) “want[ed] to impose on the world a different way of
life and change the lives people have chosen for themselves.”
The
World War III model can be expanded beyond the ideological realm to the
military one for even more compellingly arguing that it’s the US that
already started this in 1991. The First Gulf War was a show of
unprecedented force for deterring potential rivals in accordance with
what soon after became known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine for maintaining the US’ superpower status. Brzezinski’s identity-centric divide-and-rule stratagem was then applied across Afro-Eurasia to keep Russia, China, and Iran apart.
This took the form of the US bombing Yugoslavia, invading Afghanistan and Iraq, unleashing Color Revolutions
across the former Soviet Union, toppling Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya,
orchestrating the theater-wide Color Revolution known as the Arab
Spring, and provoking the Ukrainian Conflict,
et al. To elaborate on the last example that’s most relevant to this
analysis, the US calculated that crossing the Kremlin’s red lines in
Ukraine would lead to a swift proxy war that deals a strategic defeat to
Russia.
That didn’t happen since Russia’s pivotal role in
the global resource industry (e.g. energy, agriculture, minerals) was
why the non-West defied the sanctions in pursuit of their own interests
while Russia’s armed forces impressively adapted to cutting-edge warfare
trends. Society also remained stable and rallied behind the state
despite Prigozhin’s summer 2024 mutiny. The end effect was that Russia
survived this onslaught and ended the first phase of the Third World War
that the US unleashed in 1991.
That said, World War III in
the sense of a hot NATO-Russian war like most imagine it to be
(including with the risk of going nuclear) could still break out so long
as the Ukrainian Conflict continues, but the point is that Zelensky’s
definition thereof implicates the US in this and not Russia. It was also
crucial to show how the special operation that Russia felt forced to
wage ultimately got the US to prioritize China’s containment over
Russia’s as the second phase of the Third World War that’s only just now beginning.