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    Simon Tisdall in the Guardian pleading for WW3 Archived Message

    Posted by John Monro on July 8, 2023, 11:16 pm

    Just when you think that Simon Tisdall can get no worse, he publishes this opinion piece.

    Defeat for Ukraine would be a global disaster. Nato must finally step in to stop Russia

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/jul/08/ukraine-nato-must-step-in-to-stop-russia

    I am sending him now this e-mail. I doubt he'll read it, but perhaps you'd like to.

    Mr Simon Tisdall
    Guardian Foreign Editor
    The Guardian
    London UK


    Dear Simon,

    I read your most recent opinion piece with dismay. You write “NATO must finally step in to stop Russia”. Your attitude to this war all along has been, to this observer and many others much more expert and distinguished than me, one of abject and thoughtless Russophobic bellicosity. This is exactly the sort of attitude that in the "neo-cons” (Victoria Nuland and her ilk and President Biden himself) in the US and their acolytes in the UK and Europe that directly and probably deliberately provoked Russia’s military action in the first place.

    From the very beginning of this war, Russia has retained “escalatory dominance” over Ukraine, as predicted by President Obama a few years ago. In a published letter to our capital newspaper not long after the war started, I have urged negotiation to stop this war, the disbandment of NATO and the construction of a European security umbrella, which must include Russia. The US should withdraw from Europe entirely, following their own Monroe doctrine of 1823 which which promised non-interference in domestic European affairs (a quid pro quo for the US insisting on non-European interference in the western hemisphere.) Europeans must for their own survival shake off the yoke of the US military-industrial complex, and hold the US to this doctrine.

    Basically, to defeat Russia and push it back to its pre-war border, will require NATO countries going in to full war mode, re-organising and re-equipping whatever heavy industry remains in NATO to armament production, and the mobilisation of at least a million men and the ever present risk of ultimate nuclear confrontation. There is a massive irony in this idea: first, even this effort might well not succeed, but if it does it makes a nuclear confrontation almost inevitable - either way we all lose. Our western leadership seems up to now to be totally unable to recognise the military, economic and reality hole they’ve dug themselves into, and even perhaps as recognition starts to dawn, as to how to climb out of it - the so-called “off ramp". Furthermore, the west’s crumbling economies might not survive this major assault on its functioning.

    The promise to Ukraine of membership of NATO was the cause of this war, the continued promise is totally absurd, dangerous in the extreme, and guarantees Russia’s continued actions in Ukraine, and the destruction of Ukraine's people and places. Perhaps you’d gain some insight from this article in the most recent edition of the US publication “Foreign Affairs”?

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/dont-let-ukraine-join-nato

    If this is what you are urging the west to do, you need to be rather more honest with your readers than you evidently are. I see nothing in your writing that even begins to recognise the true consequences of what you yourself are urging, which basically comes to this, WW3 and possible nuclear catastrophe. You regularly claim that Putin and Russia are bluffing and we should call his bluff. Yet you provide no evidence for this; to my way of thinking Putin never bluffs, he plays his hand straight, and you are guilty here of a dangerous self-delusion - which has characterised the west’s attitude to Putin and Russia all along. .

    I write as an expatriate now living in New Zealand, but with four daughters and a grandchild living in the UK presently and other family of baby boomer age. I have a personal and profound interest in the UK’s involvement in this appalling war, when common sense, an abandonment of Anglo-Saxon sense of exceptionalism and a re-discovery of the art of diplomacy would almost certainly have avoided in the first place. I find it beyond belief that an otherwise and intelligent fellow UK citizen such as yourself should be so cavalier about the realities and threats of this continued and escalating war (how many “red lines” has NATO crossed so far in supporting Ukraine?) and so intransigent and bellicose as to put his own country and people at increasing imperilment - not just of military destruction, but of the west’s own social collapse. Because, contrary to your and too many others’ mistaken beliefs, our economies and societies are likely rather more vulnerable than Russia's.

    I wish you no harm, Simon, you are as entitled to your opinion as anyone, but unfortunately being published in such a prestigious media outlet as The Guardian and designed purposefully to influence the British public’s opinion, carries a weight and substance which it patently does not deserve.

    Shame on you, Simon.



    Yours faithfully,


    Dr John K Monro

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