ROBERT VAUGHAN interviews Salim Mansur
“The collective West has brought us to the precipice of a nuclear Armageddon.” So says our guest professor Salim Mansur.
Those seeking peace are searching the West in vain for any among its leaders, media, or intelligentsia calling for peace. All seem blinded by an irrational and unjustified Russophobia. The result is a general populace duped into thinking that this is a “just war” and Ukraine must win despite the threat of a nuclear conclusion.
“There can be no just war in the nuclear age,” notes Professor Mansur. “There has to be an immediate ceasefire, an armistice, and then we talk and engage with what will be the position of Ukraine and meeting the interests of Russia and the interests of other European countries.”
There are historic precedents for the situation the West finds itself in. During the stalemate of WWI and after the loss of 15 to 22 million lives there came the realization that the only way to end the bloodshed was an armistice—not a surrender but an acknowledgment that nothing further could be gained by either side in continuing the conflict. And on November 11, 1918, an armistice was signed and at 11:00 am that day the guns went silent.
The same awareness came about during the war in Vietnam when Walter Cronkite went on the air in a rare opinion piece and said, “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems to be the only realistic if unsatisfactory conclusion. It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.” President Johnson was reported to have said “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Such was the power of the media then and, although considerably weakened, such is the power of the media today.
So too, in this conflict involving nuclear combatants, there must come the understanding that all hostilities must cease and negotiations for the partition of Ukraine begin. A continuation of the conflict may only lead to the unthinkable.
This conversation with Salim Mansur was a very refreshing call to reality. Sadly, there is no appetite for such rational inspections of the facts or consequences of the rash and emotional motivations which have led to our current circumstances – emotional motivations which are still instructing the halls of power around the world. I am also not certain whether the Russians would actually, accede to the call for an armistice should such a call be made by the West.
The recent confessions by the leaders of the West that the Minsk Accords being nothing more than a ruse to rearm, resupply and better train the NATO backed Ukrainian army, was in fact the result of an armistice, albeit one which was violated in nearly the very hour in which the armistice was struck. Given this fact, and that Russia has nothing to lose by continuing the fight, I believe that Russia would only negotiate terms while the war continues, much as was done during Istanbul.
It should also be noted that if Putin did negotiate a peace with the West, and that peace was violated or that the attempted negotiations came at the price of a serious setback on the battlefield, it would be the greatest threat to Putin’s growing popularity in his own nation. In fact, it is the greatest source of irony that the best possibility of the Russians overthrowing Putin, as has always been the objective of the West, would come at the price of Putin finding himself having to explain to his nation why he chose to end the war prematurely without the public’s support to do so.
Salim Mansur is a Canadian professor who spoke at my conference in 2017. He hails from Pakistan.