Review of World Affairs (RWA)
By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
World’s Largest Democracy & Ukraine
India claims to be the world’s largest democracy, but domestically its ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has clear Fascist tendencies. Some of its leaders have even called for the mass murder of the Muslim minority.
Then in external affairs, the entire world – with few exceptions — has condemned Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but India refuses to do so. In all the votes in the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly criticizing Moscow, condemning the military aggression, or calling for an independent international investigation, India abstained!
India declined to support Ukraine and refused to publicly turn against Moscow as many of its international friends – Western and non-Western, like Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives – have.
India’s voting at the UN has put it at odds with all its new security partners – the U.S., Japan, and Australia which forms the anti-China “Quad” grouping, which again is also part of the U.S. grand strategy, known as the Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS).
India is also at odds with the democratic community of nations around the world, as well as with the non-aligned movement.
A direct repercussion of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the diverse reactions of the South Asian states also means that the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) will remain in limbo. Nepal will, therefore, have to reorient its foreign policy.
But India’s stance is not unlike its great regional antagonist. China is also sitting on the fence, but its interests are completely different. Experts on strategic analysis believe that China won’t risk its long-term plan of emerging mid-century as the dominant force in the world for Putin. At the same time, Xi is not ready to give up Russia as an ally. Mathew Schmidt at the University of New Haven said: “He’s going to try to stay in the middle, and play both sides” (USA Today, March 14).
Because of its misguided arms procurement policy, India is facing major bottlenecks and is unsure of Russian arms to meet its perceived China and Pakistan threats (AP/Associated Press, March 14).
Nepal could take the easy way out and follow in the footsteps of its behemoth neighbours. That is, it could just forget the moral dimension of foreign policy. But this would be going against its own enlightened self-interest in the long-run. It would also be putting the precepts of the Great King Prithvi Narayan Shah’s famous precepts, which have stood the tests of time, on its head.
Putin’s War against Ukraine
The State of the War
The United States and its Western allies have not been able to accept the implications of being at war. Whether they like it or not, they are engaged in a proxy war with Russia.
As the great military strategist, Carl on Clausewitz said, fighting is “a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter.” The U.S. and the West are not doing enough to break the will of Russia and free Ukraine from conquest and subjugation.
They have fallen prey to Putin’s nuclear blackmail [and also ‘weapons of mass destruction’ [WMD].
Considering that this is a war of desperate importance not just to Europe but to international order and freedom everywhere, above all, the U.S. must not be faint-hearted. The scale and urgency of lethal weapons delivery must be recognized.
To quote Clausewitz again: “If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand.”
The Lessons of the Conflict
Make no mistake about it, Putin deliberately started a devastating war against an innocent neighbor, and the world was absolutely correct in condemning it, and Nepal placed itself on the right side of the fence.
According to Stewart M. Patrick, one of America’s leading foreign policy experts, Moscow’s unprovoked and ill-considered war of aggression has already transformed the world order, but in ways that Putin never anticipated or desired.
In one fateful step, the Russian president has managed to accomplish:
- Revive Western solidarity
- Re-energize U.S. global leadership
- Catalyze European integration
- Expose Russia’s inherent weaknesses
- Undermine Moscow’s budding alliance with Beijing
- Cripple & make his authoritarian imitators around the world look extremely foolish [including Donald J. Trump].
(The Internationalist/Council on Foreign Relations, March 2)
Patrick enumerates the seven lessons in international relations learnt so far:
- The political West is again resurgent.
Putin’s aggression against Ukraine [which is neither a member of the European Union (EU) or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has re-vitalized the community of advanced market democracies and reinvigorated a transatlantic alliance that was until recently adrift and divided, and even declared by none other than French President Emanuelle Macron as “brain dead”.
The crisis of the West reached its nadir only recently during the presidency of Donald Trump – close Putin admirer — who questioned longstanding US alliance commitments and dismissed the concept of a rules-based international order itself.
2. The Necessity of U.S. Global Leadership
Biden’s presidency was looking rudderless.
The utterly chaotic US/NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fumbled rollout of the Australian nuclear-submarine deal [greatly irritating France, a key continental European power] had left many holes in the Western armour.
Biden’s adept handling of the Ukraine crisis and the steady hand of the administration has restored Western credibility and its ability to act in a united manner.
3. Europe has come into its own.
The European Union which has long been dismissed as an economic powerhouse has acted with rare decisiveness.
Putin has goaded the Europeans to ramp up their defence spending.
This is especially the case with Germany, when Chancellor Olaf Schulz dramatically announced a massive national defence budget increase.
All this adds momentum to EU defence integration and the pursuit of EU strategic autonomy.
4. Russia Exposed as a Paper Tiger. Neither its multitudinous armoured divisions nor its vast energy supplies can now hide Russia’s fundamental weaknesses.
“Russia’s failure to rapidly vanquish an outgunned Ukraine and its exposure to devastating economic sanctions laid bare major military and the hollowness of its great power pretensions” (Patrick).
5. The Russia-China Axis is Shaky.
Putin also managed to rattle what seemed to be “a beautiful friendship between a revanchist, money-strapped Moscow and a rising Beijing with lots of cash.
Only last month, at the inauguration of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping touted their bilateral bromance as a partnership “with no limits”, capable of challenging the Western-led liberal international order.
Xi’s ardour has since cooled markedly. Putin’s brazen invasion has put Beijing in an extremely awkward spot [as also Modi’s India], having violated the principles of state sovereignty and non-interference in another state’s internal affairs – which China purports to hold sacrosanct.
Senior Chinese officials have denied any prior knowledge of Russian invasion plans, and China pointedly abstained instead of joining Russia’s veto of the February 24 UN Security Council resolution calling on Russia to immediately suspend military operations.
China has massive financial resources to stop the collapse of the Russian economy, and it could also use this leverage to moderate the policies of its now degraded junior partner.
At the time of writing, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was to meet China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Rome and stress the economic penalties Beijing would face – especially the global isolation – if it helps Russia militarily/economically in its war in Ukraine.
6. Putin’s Admirers Have Been Scorched
In recent years, a parade of wannabe strongmen and iron-ladies, including Trump and right-wing Frenchwoman Marine Le Pen, have “held up the authoritarian Russian president as a paragon of vigorous leadership” (Patrick).
However, the widespread global revulsion at Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine has sent many of his admirers/supporters, like right-wing Italian politician Matteo Salvani or his French counterpart Eric Zemmour scrambling and floundering.
Putin has also personally and unaided elevated democratically elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into an international hero.
7. The Reality of “Soft Power”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not only generated global outrage and stimulated hefty resistance from the democratic world, it has also reaffirmed the importance of shared principles, norms and rules in international relations.
Thus, it is not necessary that the Thucydides dictum from the “Melian Dialogue” guides action in world affairs:
“The strong do what they can
And the weak suffer what they must”.
If nothing else, the Ukraine conflict has demonstrated that an overwhelming majority of the world’s states and citizens are motivated by a sense of global purpose and are willing to defend international rules in their own enlightened interest.
Forces of History Influence Ukraine’s Fate
There is, of course, no neat cycle of history that enables us to prophesy the future and the biggest disasters – pandemics and wars – belong in the realm of uncertainty, like tsunamis.
The eminent historian Niall Ferguson [former professor at Oxford] has argued that disasters don’t come in any predictable sequence, although we tend not to get the same disaster twice in succession. In the early 20th Century, it was from war [WW I ] to plague [ Spanish Flu ]; in the 21st Century, we’ve gone from plague to war – the opening hot conflict of Cold War II (Bloomberg Opinion/March 9).
Ferguson postulates that currently there are seven distinct processes at work – applying history, since the disciplines of economics and political science cannot supply any model(s).
- Ferguson is of the opinion that Russia’s war in Ukraine will be decided quite swiftly.
Based on a respected military analyst, the Russian invasion force has around two weeks left before serious logistical and supply problems force Putin to the negotiating table.
The war has not proved to be the Blitzkrieg that Putin had expected.
However, if cities continue to fall to the Russians, we may look back and say that Western arms shipments to Zelenskiy’s government were too little, too late.
2. Sanctions cannot precipitate such a severe contraction in Russia that Putin cannot achieve victory.
Ferguson disagrees with the claim that the breadth and depth of the sanctions imposed on Russia make them unprecedented.
These do not quite match the sanctions that Britain and its allies imposed on Germany at the outbreak of World War I.
Those measures did not defeat Germany, because – like Russia today – it had the resources to be self-sufficient, though the sanctions may have made a German victory less likely by increasing the hardships of the war at home.
Russia’s economy now faces as severe a blow as it suffered when the Soviet Union imploded and the planned economy collapsed.
But even a 35 percent quarterly decline in GDP does not condemn a country to military defeat if its planes can still fly and its tanks still fire rounds.
3. It is quite possible that the combination of military and economic crises precipitates a palace coup against Putin.
There have been popular revolutions, palace coups and assassinations in modern Russia, but most Russian rulers have died of natural causes.
Putin could fall from power, a victim of his own hubris in underestimating Ukrainian courage and Western economic might.
Ferguson deduces that “More plausible than a popular revolt or an oligarch’s mutiny is a palace coup led by one or more of Russia’s security chiefs,” the very people he counts on to execute his orders:
- Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council and long-serving KGB officer [like Putin himself]
- Sergei Naryshkin, head of foreign intelligence
- Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB.
4. The risk of downfall will not necessarily lead Putin to undertake desperate measures, like his nuclear threat.
There is no comparable analogy in modern history.
Putin is probably bluffing, but has successfully ruffled the feathers of the Western Powers.
However, the U.S. has signaled weakness by not answering a threat to use nuclear weapons.
And nuclear missiles cease to be a deterrent if the U.S. is not willing to use them.
A key lesson of the entire crisis has been that indications of weakness on the U.S. side have emboldened Putin.
5. An emerging scenario could be that the Chinese keep Putin afloat, but on the condition that he agrees to a compromise peace that they offer to broker.
This would be a great diplomatic victory for Chinese President Xi.
Chinese peace-making is a definite possibility. The messiness of the war is not pleasing the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who have their hands full with the pandemic, a slowing economy and, above all, their upcoming party congress, in which Xi is to be confirmed for an unprecedented third term as state president and party secretary.
Ferguson’s conjecture is that the Chinese will make no serious move until they are convinced Putin’s war machine is thoroughly bogged down in Ukraine’s spring mud.
6. The West’s infamous “Attention Deficit Disorder Syndrome” (ADDS) could kick in before a final resolution of the conflict in Ukraine.
Currently, the U.S. public’s response [and those of other Western countries] to the Ukraine invasion seems bigger and more likely to endure.
A significant part of the explanation is surely the skillful way in which Zelenskiy has used television and social media to win the world’s sympathies.
But how long will demonstrators still chant:
“Sanctions don’t stop bombs!” and
“Slava Ukraine!” [ Glory to Ukraine ] ?
However, spasms of moral outrage tend to contribute little of practical use to those intent on building nation-states.
As the great German statesman and chancellor of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck declared in 1862:
“Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of
the day be decided – but by iron and blood.”
7. There will be considerable collateral damage – for the entire world.
The economic damage for the U.S. and Europe is already apparent.
Inflation expectations have already shifted upward sharply.
History has illustrated that wars much more than pandemics are the most common cause for a spike in inflation.
The prospect of this year’s Ukrainian grain harvest being damaged means a significant surge in food prices, with all kinds of consequences, especially in developing countries.
There are also risks that may be lurking within the international financial system.
These seven imponderables taken together indicate the profound importance of the next few weeks.
According to Ferguson, it can be termed the first big crisis of Cold War II and its outcome will have profound consequences for the Sino-American superpower contest.
The erudite historian goes even further: “A tsunami of war has struck Ukraine. Whether the Russian tide flows or ebbs in the coming weeks will do much to determine the course of world history for the rest of our lives.”
The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com
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