Igor Ivanov Insists, a Peaceful World Starts from Accepting That Global War Is Unwinnable

June 1, 2021 (EIRNS)—Igor Ivanov, former Russian Foreign Minister (1998-2004), now president of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), offers useful insight into the urgency of President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for the five permanent leaders of the UN Security Council to meet as soon as possible, and the essential condition for such a meeting to succeed in bringing the world back from the brink of global military catastrophe.

As of now, probably “as many as 600 diplomats have been expelled from their host countries” in the ongoing “ambassadorial war” between the West and Russia, he reports in his article, “Time for Diplomacy,” posted on the RIAC site on May 13. Yet, “by all accounts, the world is already at war. Call it what you want: psychological warfare, information warfare, ideological warfare, hybrid warfare, or any other name you care to come up with. The label itself is not important, while the increasingly real risk of military confrontation is.”

Unlike previous times, “today, there is no single country in the world that is capable of winning a regional confrontation, let alone a global war... Today, any serious international crisis, even in a most isolated corner of the planet, could any time emerge as a global catastrophe, much in the same way that a dangerous infectious disease, no matter where it originated, can end up posing a real threat to human existence.”

Add to that what most people do not know, that “practically all the ‘safety’ mechanisms set up over the course of decades to prevent isolated crises from escalating into direct military conflicts have in recent years been destroyed. The number of such mechanisms is shrinking, while the number of conflict situations is growing.”

Ivanov suggests that the best mechanism to head off calamity is President Putin’s P-5 summit proposal. The precondition for such a meeting to serve its purpose, he specifies, is for those leaders “to acknowledge that the world is approaching the proverbial ‘point of no return,’ conceding that a global war knows no winners.”

When that “self-evident conclusion” is reached, then a working group under the auspices of the UN Security Council could get underway “to organize and hold negotiations on the most pressing international relations issues.”