Central European countries like Croatia, Hungary, and also recently Austria too are beginning to emerge as voices of reason in the West after their de facto New Cold War bloc’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine over the past year failed to defeat that Great Power. They rightly realize how counterproductive this NATO-led campaign has been for their collective interests, ergo why they’re urging restraint and even an outright reversal of policy at this point in time.
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic is unexpectedly giving Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a run for his money when it comes to being the voice of Western pragmatism towards the Ukrainian Conflict. This Balkan leader’s recent press conference in Petrinja saw him lambast his NATO allies for provoking Russia and China. He condemned their proxy war plots against both multipolar Great Powers and argued that Croatia must do its utmost to remain neutral amidst these tensions lest it inevitably suffer.
His pragmatic stance also extends to regional affairs after he condemned the West’s amputation of Serbia’s Autonomous Province of Kosovo & Metohija. It was surprising to hear such words from a Croatian representative considering these two countries’ well-known tensions, but that simply reinforces the observation that President Milanovic is truly among the most balanced Western leaders. For that reason, some other points from his latest press conference deserve to be highlighted too.
On the topic of regional animosity, he outright declared that those sentiments that previously existed between Croats and Serbs pale in comparison to the Baltic countries’ hatred of Russia, which he described as pathological. Similarly, he condemned the European Parliament for talking about “tearing Russia apart”, warning that their target won’t accept the failure of its ongoing special operation and might thus ultimately resort to nuclear weapons as a last resort if need be.
Germany and other NATO countries’ dispatch of tanks to Ukraine won’t make a meaningful difference on the ground, President Milanovic predicted, but might actually push Russia and China closer together. That outcome would be strategically disadvantageous for the Collective West, or what can also be described as the US-led West’s Golden Billion, and should thus be avoided since it could reshape the balance of influence in the New Cold War between his side and the Global South.
Crimea will never be Ukrainian again, President Milanovic assessed, which adds to his argument against continuing to arm that former Soviet Republic against Russia. Humanitarian aid and continuing to condemn Russia at multilateral fora will therefore be the maximum extent to which Croatia will participate in NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine. All told, his views are extremely refreshing since no Western leader apart from Prime Minister Orban ever spoke in such a way thus far.
Nobody can credibly accuse President Milanovic of being a so-called “Russian agent” either since it wasn’t under his administration that Russia acquired a major stake in Croatia’s food group Agrokor, which is estimated to account for a whopping 15% of his country’s economy. He actually brought that point up during his press conference to preemptively deflect from predictable ad hominem attacks such as those that followed his similarly pragmatic comments a year ago in early February 2022.
What this goes to show is that some Central European countries like Croatia, Hungary, and also recently Austria too are beginning to emerge as voices of reason in the West after their de facto New Cold War bloc’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine over the past year failed to defeat that Great Power. They rightly realize how counterproductive this NATO-led campaign has been for their collective interests, ergo why they’re urging restraint and even an outright reversal of policy at this point in time.
Europe is paying the price for all this, not America, as President Milanovic wisely remarked during his press conference. It can therefore be intuited that he’s implying that the indefinite perpetuation of this proxy war is indeed part and parcel of the US’ plot to reassert its previously declining unipolar hegemony over the continent. Under such newfound conditions, it’s little wonder that Washington is now exploiting NATO to saber-rattle against China, which the Croatian leader also said that he’s against.
What’s happened over the past year is remarkable in the grand strategic sense for several reasons. First, the US provoked a major conflict in Europe by miscalculation, with the second point being that it rhetorically raised the stakes in this resultant proxy war to an absurd extent by fearmongering that Russia is a modern-day manifestation of Nazi Germany. Third, this artificially manufactured information warfare narrative makes it practically impossible for the US to de-escalate, hence its “mission creep”.
The fourth point is that the aforesaid fake news narrative is also being applied towards China too, albeit modified for the regional political-security conditions of the Asia-Pacific, in order for the US to obtain European cannon fodder for “containing” that multipolar Great Power on a similarly false basis. And finally, the last reason why the past year is so remarkable in the grand strategic sense is because it clearly outlined the contours not just of the New Cold War, but also a potential Third World War too.
To briefly elaborate though without any intent of sounding alarmist like most in the Alt-Media Community deliberately do whenever they discuss this sensitive subject, it’s obvious that the Golden Billion is aggressively trying to “contain” the multipolar engines of Russia and China. The purpose behind doing so is to indefinitely delay the global systemic transition to multipolarity so as to uphold the US’ unipolar hegemony as long as possible.
Instead of being forthright about this with their public, which would admittedly risk a lot of backlash since the average member of their society isn’t expected to support this literal plot for world domination, the West’s perception managers falsely frame everything in terms of “values”. The so-called “rules-based order” is presented as the concept that must be protected at all costs despite being just a euphemism for the selective implementation of double standards aimed at advancing the US’ interests.
Nevertheless, by twisting the facts (even sometimes going as far as manufacturing “convenient” ones) and related perceptions thereof, the West is trying to cultivate support for this inevitable series of proxy wars that are expected to define the New Cold War but which might accidentally turn into a World War. President Milanovic is keenly aware of these dangerous military-strategic dynamics, which is why he was so outspoken in condemning the West in his latest press conference and should thus be applauded.
By Andrew Korybko