One of the reasons for Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow, according to the Washington Post, was to dispel the Kremlin’s belief that the Trump White House was distracted from Ukraine by Iran. Good luck with that. The reporting on the severe depletion of US interceptor stocks from the war on Iran is so extensive it can only have encouraged Vladimir Putin to launch even more deadly missile strikes against Ukraine’s defenseless population.
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In the conclusion to his recent book, The Coming Storm, which traces the parallels between today’s world and the world on the eve of the first world war, the historian Odd Arne Westad writes: “A key lesson of the world before 1914 is that regional conflicts, long left unresolved, can be the powder kegs that set off a global conflagration.” As the Iran and Ukraine conflicts intertwine without an end in sight, the world’s leaders should take such warnings far more seriously. But without real pressure from their citizens, they may not.