The Western strategy of escalation is threatening mankind

The hope, shared among many, that replacing the Biden government would increase the chances of peace in Europe is rapidly fading. The war obsession among Europe’s power elites is at this point unremitting. The European public is inundated with a relentless wave of propaganda. The new US administration is also sending out contradictory signals and is by no means consistent in its efforts to correct its aggressive course.
  On 29 March 2025, The “New York Times” published a very long article on the involvement of various NATO states in the Ukraine war, chief among these the US.¹ When reading the article, you need to arm yourself, because it not only shows how the war in Ukraine was directed and escalated from the large base the US maintains in Wiesbaden with ever more and ever more destructive weapons. The text, headlined “The Partnership,” is also a militaristic propaganda piece of a special kind. The reporter reveals himself to be an admirer of US support for the war – even as Russia has mourned large numbers of casualties and the US leaders have scored a coup.
  The article suggests that the military situation in Ukraine is now precarious is not the fault of US officers and intelligence operatives but is the consequence, above all, to the Kiev regime’s failure to heed US “recommendations” – this and an insufficient supply of U.S. weapons. The message of the article is clear: The war must go on!²
  The fact that Europe’s new “coalition of the willing,” with its delusion of a “Russian threat,”³ wants to increase its war efforts and invest trillions of euros in arms raises the question: While this coalition’s propaganda formula has it that Europe will be on its own in the future and will have to make enormous efforts to become “war-ready” against the Russian “aggressor,” aren’t Europe’s militaries still reliant on the war machine on the other side of the Atlantic? Isn’t this more about increased burden-sharing? The Europeans are supposed to “deter” (Newspeak for defeat) the “enemies” in Europe and the Americans in other regions of the world: West Asia, Southeast Asia, the Arctic.

Nuclear brinksmanship
during the Cold War

Hardly anyone remembers that the Western strategy of escalation to defeat its purported enemy failed twice during the Cold War. Nor do many of us understand that the West’s narrative of Cold War victory without a fight through a policy of strength is highly questionable – and very dangerous.
  Many people still remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the U.S. provoked the deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, not least by deploying nuclear missiles in Turkey, a neighbour of the Soviet Union. The U.S. government initially opted for escalation. At the time, humanity narrowly escaped nuclear war: “It was luck that prevented nuclear war!” Robert McNamara, the defence secretary at the time, later reflected. The conclusion of the American and Soviet leadership at the time, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, was that in the age of nuclear weapons, the strategy of escalation is a dead end that threatens humanity and that détente and peaceful coexistence, despite different social systems, does not amount to appeasement, a prevalent term among the propagandists at the time and an obvious reference to the Munich Agreement of September 1938. No, it was simply a survival imperative.

Renewed escalation:
The late 1970s
and early 1980s

It is almost unknown that a similar scenario was repeated in the early 1980s, when a nuclear catastrophe was once again very narrowly avoided. This prompted another rethink in the East and the West alike. Out of this came the arms agreements Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed in the second half of the decade.
  What had happened? The lessons of the early 1960s no longer seemed appropriate for US policy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By that time the US – with the significant involvement of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser – had wanted to torpedo European, and above all German, policy of détente towards the East. The Soviet Union was to be lured into a trap (Afghanistan), not only to give the Soviet Union “its version of the Vietnam quagmire,” but also to revive the pre-détente Cold War atmosphere in the West.
  This was no longer simply a matter of securing the status quo the balance of power: Washington’s aim was to become the world’s sole superpower. This was because it was now believed – primarily thanks to America’s superiority in economic development and in weapons and information technology – that the U.S. could win the Cold War despite the Soviets’ nuclear-weapons inventory. Dirk Pohlmann’s television documentary “Täuschung: Die Methode Reagan” (Deception: The Reagan Method), broadcast in 2013, gives impressive evidence of this.⁴

1983 and “Able Archer”

The high point of escalation was in 1983. The events of that year were, indeed, the historical background for a multi-part television film series in 2015: Deutschland 1983.⁵
  In an instantly famous speech delivered on 8 March 1983, President Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” On 23 March, he announced the start of the Strategic Defence Initiative, the missile defence programme known as S.D.I., which the Soviets saw as an attempt to undermine the established balance of armaments. In June, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, warned the US Ambassador, Avril Harriman, the US and the Soviet Union were ‘moving towards a red line’ – a miscalculation could trigger a nuclear war.
  The Soviet Union had long feared a U.S. nuclear first strike. Reflecting its anxiety, on 1 September, Soviet fighter jets shot down a South Korean passenger plane after KAL 007 deviated from its flight path and entered Soviet airspace. From 19 to 30 September, NATO carried out an annual large-scale manoeuvre, Reforger, which involved 65,000 soldiers. On 26 September, a Soviet control centre 90 kilometres south of Moscow reported the alleged launch of a U.S. nuclear missile towards the Soviet Union. It was thanks to a level-headed officer, Colonel Stanislav Petrov, that an automatic counterattack was prevented. At the end of October, and after failed negotiations with the Soviet Union, NATO decided to station medium-range nuclear weapons in Germany as of December 1983, as the alliance had threatened in the Double-Track Decision of 1979. This considerably reduced the warning time for the Soviet Union.
  On 7 November, NATO secretly began a realistic simulation of a Western nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. This was named Able Archer, a commando exercise that became public only five years later. Even before the exercise, however, agents of the Warsaw Pact, who had been increasingly infiltrating NATO since 1981, had learned about the exercise and triggered an alarm in the Soviet Union with their reports. Moscow assumed that Able Archer was not an exercise but the prelude to the feared Western nuclear first strike. The consequence: Soviet nuclear forces were put on alert and prepared for a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Years later, a former GDR agent at NATO headquarters, Rainer Rupp (with the code name Topas), explained that he had just been able to prevent the catastrophe through decisive communications to his command: Able Archer was in fact an exercise; a nuclear first strike was not planned.

Europe at the crossroads again

None of this was known to the public in 1983. If you search for German-language articles about Able Archer, you will find them mainly in 2013, 30 years later.⁶ But in 2023, 40 years later and with the Ukraine war raging, hardly anyone talks about it. In the English-speaking world, Able Archer had been a topic of discussion earlier, mainly because of the disclosure of previously secret US files. These files were analysed in the greatest detail in the 2016 book by Nate Jones, Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War.
  Europe is once again at a crossroads. The Europeans’ new “coalition of the willing”, which is striving for a “war-ready,” highly armed Europe and is trying to justify this with the earlier-noted threat analysis, wants to “defeat” Russia – “to ruin it” (according to Annalena Baerbock), to cause a permanently debilitating “strategic defeat” (according to U.S. and NATO officials). The New York Times article of 29 March, mentioned above, shows what this has meant in concrete terms and that this is not over – as was the case several times during the Cold War. The years 1962 and 1983 have shown where this can lead.
  Understanding and peace with Russia are not an appeasement policy. Understanding and peace are not only be possible – they are a survival imperative, just as Kennedy and Khrushchev understood their circumstances in the autumn of 1962. In 1983, millions of people in Europe were aware of the danger of nuclear war. The Doomsday Clock stood at 3 minutes to midnight (midnight = nuclear war). It was a great year for the European and German peace movement. Today, the Doomsday Clock stands at 89 seconds to midnight.
  On 1 August 1975, almost 50 years ago and in the middle of the Cold War, after two years of negotiations, all European states (except Albania), the Soviet Union, the U.S., Canada, and Turkey signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Helsinki. Understanding is possible if there is political will on all sides. Incidentally, neutral Switzerland played an important role at the time.⁷ Who and what can humanity hope for today? •

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/29/world/europe/us-ukraine-military-war-wiesbaden.html
² The article in The New York Times ends with the words: “Mr. Austin [US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin] is a solid and stoic block of a man, but as he returned the compliments, his voice caught. ‘Instead of saying farewell, let me say thank you,’ he said, blinking back tears. And then added: ‘I wish you all success, courage and resolve. Ladies and gentlemen, carry on.’”
³ In Germany, a kind of “mobilisation” of the entire population has been under way for weeks. On 5 April, for example, the Südkurier, the Konstanz newspaper, ran the headline: “The country prepares for an emergency.”
⁴ www.youtube.com/watch
⁵ https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/tv-serie-deutschland-83-auf-rtl-100.html of 26 November 2025. The film series can still be viewed online and on DVD.
⁶ For example: “Kalter Krieg – Als die Nato den Atomkrieg übte und es zur Beinahe-Katastrophe kam, ” in: tagblatt.ch of 2 November 2013; “Kalter Krieg: Nato-Manöver führte 1983 beinahe zum Atomkrieg,” in: spiegel.de of 3 November 2013; relativising: “Die Legende von ‹Able Archer›,” in: nzz.ch from 5 November 2013; “Bedrohliche Nato-Übung ‹Able Archer 83›: Entging die Welt im Jahr 1983 nur um Haaresbreite einem Atomkrieg? ” in: welt.de of 24 November 2013.
⁷ cf: Philip Rosin. Die Schweiz im KSZE-Prozess 1972–1983: Einfluss durch Neutralität. Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-486-76731-5; “Als die Schweiz die aktive Aussenpolitik entdeckte, ”in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 30 July 2015.