The Peninsula Foundation

Tag: USA

  • Xi is Not Mao

    Xi is Not Mao

    The ongoing conflicts and crises across the world, be it in Ukraine or in the South China Sea, reflect a serious flaw in the current international order and in the politics of relations amongst nations. The singular focus on the demonisation of leaders, aided by perception management through devious media control, reflects a significant danger to global safety and stability. The current hyper noise in US-China relations is driven by hyperbole about Xi and other leaders. It is time to take a step back and review the information holocaust.

    Rebecca E Karl’s perceptive article highlights the vagaries of flawed picture portrayals of China and Xi that can be very far from the truth. This article was published earlier in Dissent Magazine.

    – Editorial Team

    Mao and Xi’s historical projects couldn’t be more different, and it is high time to move beyond the bad history that conflates them.

    Commentary on China these days often presents lazy thinking that leads to some ridiculous historical statements. That President Xi Jinping is a would-be Mao Zedong or that China is facing a “new Cultural Revolution” are examples of this laziness. In a charitable light, such assertions stem from a broad misunderstanding of the logics of contemporary China and its role in the world today. In a less charitable light, they are driven by ideological fealty to some of the most outdated and frankly racist aspects of Cold War Western anti-communism. My premise in the following comments: China today is not Maoist, and Xi is not Mao redux. China today is also not communist in any genuine sense of that term, even though the Communist Party presides over the country with an increasingly iron grip.

    The difference between Mao and now could not be starker. Mao’s twentieth-century anti-capitalist and anti-feudal revolution in politics and culture sought to transform China’s domestic social relations by mobilizing masses of people against the systems of domination that constrained their everyday lives. He sought to demonstrate to the non-capitalist world the superiority of socialism as a mode of material and cultural production. Those experiments must be judged a failure on both counts. Xi’s twenty-first-century goal, by contrast, is to release economic forces from the burden of sustaining socialist relations in order to build China’s global wealth and power. To that end, he has pursued domestic stability and has repressed potentially insurgent political, social, and cultural impulses along with challenges from internal peripheries—all while enhancing the power and privileges of the Communist Party itself. To date, his efforts to redefine and defend capitalist logics in China seem to have found success.

    China today is not Maoist, and Xi is not Mao redux. China today is also not communist in any genuine sense of that term, even though the Communist Party presides over the country with an increasingly iron grip.

    Mao and Xi’s historical projects couldn’t be more different, and it is high time to move beyond the bad history that conflates them. We need to grapple with how the past several decades of social and political realignment, not just in China but around the world, are leading to a global future not yet foretold.

    The “new Cold War” rhetoric that permeates public discourse these days is dangerous, to be sure, yet it appeals to a version of the world that is long gone. Socialism has disappeared, and capitalism has prevailed. The fundamental antagonism between these two irreconcilable social and ideological systems—the antagonism that informed a struggle between two different cultural imaginings of the future—has not existed since at least the mid-1990s, when the post-1989 Chinese capitalist order came into full view and took material and ideological root in China and the world. (And, as anyone in Asia or Africa knows, the concept of the “cold” war was always of questionable utility in places that hosted a continuous series of hot wars.)

    Indeed, the huge dissension within the “West,” the United States included, about how to even specify these problems—or whether to specify them at all—gives the lie to the fiction of unified nation-states facing off across elemental ideological divides.

    We live in a capitalist world, but that doesn’t reduce the stakes of current conflicts. Will we blow each other up in militarized one-upmanship? Will we so pollute our environments that we destroy the natural world’s capacity to sustain life? Will we tear each other and ourselves apart in the attempt to come to human solutions to human-made problems? Will the speed of disease and pathology outstrip our ability to lock down and vaccinate, or will we look the other way as the necropolitical selection of those who live and die proceeds apace? These are apocalyptic stakes, but they do not break down analytically on fundamental lines of systemic antagonism. The definition of and solutions to these problems do not depend on such outmoded analytics as the “West” and the “rest,” or the United States and China. Indeed, the huge dissension within the “West,” the United States included, about how to even specify these problems—or whether to specify them at all—gives the lie to the fiction of unified nation-states facing off across elemental ideological divides.

    We need to confront the possibility that our leaders—whoever they may be, whether so-called democrats or so-called authoritarians, so-called liberals, leftists, or rightists—all are leading us into disaster.

    What we need to confront today is that our accustomed systems of analysis based in the imaginary unities of nation-states are exhausted. We need to confront the possibility that our leaders—whoever they may be, whether so-called democrats or so-called authoritarians, so-called liberals, leftists, or rightists—all are leading us into disaster. Those of us outside China must oppose attempts by our governments and ventriloquist media to create ever more unequal and violent capitalist relations that ratchet up tensions between peoples and nations. At the same time, we must try to support those within China who are opposing their own government’s and ventriloquist media’s commitments to suppressing the critical voices and anti-capitalist practices in their midst. The stakes are high, and now is the time to rise to the occasion of critical engagement rather than sink into facile historical analogies. What we face today are not conflicts between civilizations but conflicts over what kind of civilization we wish to inhabit moving forward. Neither the Chinese state nor Western ones have the kinds of answers that we need these days, but there are activist elements in all of our societies striving to find solutions. It is to such activists that we must look for hope.

    Feature Image Credit: Nikkei Asia

  • The New World and the Ukraine-Russia Breadbasket – Book review of “Oceans of Grain”

    The New World and the Ukraine-Russia Breadbasket – Book review of “Oceans of Grain”

    To understand the rise and fall of empires, we must follow the paths travelled by grain—along rivers, between ports, and across seas. In Oceans of Grain, historian Scott Reynolds Nelson reveals how the struggle to dominate these routes transformed the balance of world power. Early in the nineteenth century, imperial Russia fed much of Europe through the booming port of Odessa, on the Black Sea in Ukraine. But following the US Civil War, tons of American wheat began to flood across the Atlantic, and food prices plummeted. This cheap foreign grain spurred the rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, and the European scramble for empire. It was a crucial factor in the outbreak of the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
    A powerful new interpretation, Oceans of Grain shows that amid the great powers’ rivalries, there was no greater power than control of grain.

    Thomas Grennes reviews the book ‘Oceans of Grain’ by Scott Reynolds Nelson. The book is very timely, given the emerging food crisis as a result of the blockade of the Black Sea ports that hampers the export of grain from the major exporters,  Ukraine and Russia.

     

     

     

    Book Title – Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World

    Author – Scott Reynolds Nelson

    Publisher – Basic Books

    Page Count – 368 pages

    Date Published – Feb 22, 2022

     

     

     

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reminded the world that war in Europe isn’t just the stuff of history books. It also demonstrates how war can affect the world’s food supply, as both Ukraine and Russia have long been major global suppliers of wheat and other grains.

    This makes the new book Oceans of Grain, by University of Georgia history professor and Guggenheim fellow Scott Reynolds Nelson, especially timely. Nelson has written five other history-oriented books, including the award-winning Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend and A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of American Financial Disasters.

    Oceans of Grain covers some 14,000 years of human history, beginning with the origin of bread, with an emphasis on the era in which the modern wheat market developed, from the 18th century to the end of World War I.

    New World food / The book focuses on the breadbaskets of the United States, Russia, and Ukraine, though it also gives a little attention to Canada, Argentina, and Australia, and passing mention of South and East Asia. Nelson often writes as if Russia and Ukraine are one land, in part because the border between them has shifted many times throughout history. His use of the word “grain” is nearly synonymous with “wheat,” though he does offer limited discussions of corn (maize), oats, barley, and rice.

    Grain has been crucial to human life for millennia. Expressions such as “Bread is the staff of life” and prayers such as “Give us this day our daily bread” illustrate the historical importance of bread and wheat. Technical change that has raised productivity in grain production has increased the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people, and negative shocks to the grain sector have caused crises and wars.

    Expansion of grain production in the 19th century to the then-newly settled regions of the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Australia greatly benefited grain consumers around the world, but it harmed traditional producers in Russia and elsewhere. The benefits for Europe were previously described in a 1997 Journal of Economic History article by Kevin H. O’Rourke as the “distributional effects of Christopher Columbus.” According to O’Rouke, transport innovations such as steamships and railroads “exported New World land to Europe, embodied in New World food.”

    Geography and transport / Geography has been crucial to the location of grain production and the pattern of world grain trade. The fertile chernozem (Russian for “black soil”) of Ukraine, parts of Russia, and neighboring lands were conducive to early grain production. Ancient “black paths” used by oxcart drivers led from the interior of Ukraine to Black Sea ports. Centuries ago, grain was shipped through the Turkish Straits on both ends of the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean Sea and then onto the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations along the Mediterranean. Control of those straits, the Bosporus and Dardanelles, has long been crucial and has led to many wars involving Russia and Turkey. Even today, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, access to the Turkish Straits by Russian ships is a crucial military issue.

    Transport innovations have had a major effect on the pattern of world trade. Improvements in navigation and sailing ships were followed by the transition to steamships. The development of Odessa on the Black Sea was a major contributor to Ukrainian grain exports. Grain ports have been described as the children of empires, and Nelson points out the Greek term emporion — “marketplace” — is the etymological root of both “emporium” and “empire.”

    Other innovations also played important roles. Improvements in communication, such as the telegraph and undersea cables, aided long-distance trade. Improvements in explosives (nitroglycerin) contributed to the construction of deep-water harbors that can handle bigger ships. Better explosives also helped build the Suez Canal. Completed in 1869, it reduced travel time from London to Calcutta from six months to 30 days. The shortcut from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean permitted the bypassing of the southern tip of Africa.

    Grain policy / Government policies have had an important effect on the pattern of world grain trade.

    Russian Tsarina Catherine II (1762–1796), better known as Catherine the Great, sought to develop a more grandiose Russian empire by making the country a major grain exporter. Russia’s partitioning of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth added territory from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south that included fertile wheat-growing land.

    According to Nelson, Catherine was influenced by the French Physiocrats, led by François Quesnay, who thought that agriculture was the main source of wealth. Catherine believed that Russia’s becoming a large grain producer would free its citizens from having to rely on other countries for their basic food. She also admired the benefits received by Poles from transporting grain down the Vistula River to Gdańsk. By increasing Russian production and exports of grain from Black Sea ports through the Turkish Straits, Catherine expected to convert Constantinople to “Tsargrad.”

    She promoted Russian wheat production in various ways, including increasing the power of landlords over serfs that made the serfs more like slaves. She also followed the anti-Semitism of earlier tsars who restricted Jews from living in old Russia. Jews were underrepresented as grain growers and overrepresented as middlemen in the grain sector. According to Nelson, this made it easy for Catherine to believe they were “leeches” who profited off the work of others. She limited the area where Jews could live to an area called the Pale of Settlement, which mostly came from land recently acquired from the partition of Poland–Lithuania. The Pale included Ukraine, with its rich black soil for growing grain, and Odessa was founded during her reign. Adding the Jewish population of the Pale made Catherine the ruler of the largest Jewish population in the world.

    A grain “invasion” / At the time of Catherine, the United States had not become an important grain exporter. But after 1865, the American Great Plains were settled, the U.S. rail network expanded, and ships and communication improved. Those innovations contributed to the United States becoming a major producer and exporter of grain.

    O’Rourke’s 1997 article described the expansion of U.S. exports as a “grain invasion” of Europe. Train tracks substituted for the ancient black paths, carrying the Plains’ bounty to U.S. ports and then onto Europe. Development of multinational grain companies like Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus (known collectively as ABCD) also contributed to a major change in the pattern of trade. The migration of labor from Europe to the United States and other emerging exporters aided the production of the newly settled farmland.

    This grain invasion increased the world supply of land devoted to wheat. That harmed European landowners, and they sought protection from their governments. German landowners successfully lobbied Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who responded with protectionism in the form of tariffs. He was supported in this by ultranationalist politician and history professor Heinrich von Treitschke, who blamed cheap imports for the fall of the Greek and Roman empires.

    This grain invasion increased the world supply of land devoted to wheat. Russian leaders, including Prime Minister Sergei Witte and Finance Minister Ivan Vyshnegradsky, sought to regain Russia’s export prominence. They promoted a long and costly railroad expansion through Siberia to Port Arthur in Manchuria, believing it would become a major port for Russian grain exports to the Pacific. Japan resented the Russian encroachment in their neighborhood and defeated Russia in the Russo–Japanese War of 1905. The defeat was an embarrassment to the government of Witte and Vyshnegradsky, and the Marxists used it in their calls for revolution. Frequently stated goals of the Bolshevik revolutionaries were “Peace, Land, and Bread.” Nelson suggests that the humiliating military defeat may have contributed to Russia’s participation in World War I and drove Russia into revolution.

    The United Kingdom was a prominent exception to grain protectionism. Parliament did impose the protectionist Corn Laws (“corn” in British English encompasses all grains) in 1815, but the beginning of the Irish Potato Famine (1845–1852) led to the laws’ repeal in 1846. British grain production fell as a result, but the broader economy prospered. Land devoted to grain production decreased and real wages rose. Many British cities, including London and Liverpool, doubled in size between 1845 and 1860. European workers gained from greater access to grain, and European socialist parties generally supported free grain imports.

    Parvus / Nelson illustrates the connection between developments in the grain sector and politics by following the colorful life of Israel Lazarevich Helphand (sometimes spelled “Gelfand”; 1867–1924), who used the pseudonym “Alexander Lvovich Parvus” or just “Parvus.” He was the odd combination of a widely-read journalist with a doctoral degree in political economy from the University of Basel, a Marxist theorist and practitioner, and a wealthy grain trader. According to Nelson, Parvus was the thinker whom Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg most admired. Parvus was born in a shtetl in Belarus and his family moved to Odessa, where his father became a grain trader. Odessa was also the home of David Leontyevich Bronstein, who raised and traded grain. His son, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, would later take the pseudonym “Leon Trotsky.”

    Parvus has been rediscovered recently, and he was the subject of recent television series in both Russia (“Demon of the Revolution,” 2017) and Turkey (“The Last Emperor,” 2017–2020). Nelson claims that both series distorted and glorified Parvus’s true role in the Russian Revolution.

    Conclusion / Oceans of Grain is a good read. It is imaginative and bold in suggesting that shocks to the grain sector may have contributed to wars and revolutions. Relevant data are usually presented to support the hypotheses. Even though they are not always convincing, they do stimulate thought.

    There are inevitable omissions, but all good stories must leave out some details. Nelson’s extensive focus on the emergence of U.S. grain production and exports is appropriate given the resulting negative effects on European grain producers and positive effects on European grain consumers. However, his limited attention to Canada, Argentina, and Australia is disappointing because they contributed to those effects on Europe. Failing to examine the competing producers in some detail could exaggerate the effects of American grain exports to Europe.

    The current Russian invasion of Ukraine certainly gives this book special relevance. Putin aspires to control the territory of the old Russian Empire, and he considers Russia and Ukraine inseparable. Nelson tells the story of how the combined Russia/Ukraine once dominated grain trade with Europe, and how the United States and other newly settled grain exporters successfully challenged that dominance. Russia and Ukraine remain among the world’s largest wheat exporters today. The fertile black soil north of the Black Sea continues to be a major source of wheat and daily bread for millions of people.

     

    This review was published earlier by Cato Institute.

    Feature Image Credit: www.gtreview.com

  • Hegemonic Regionalism (Indo-Pacific concept): As opposed to locally based Regional Cooperation (ASEAN and Bay of Bengal)

    Hegemonic Regionalism (Indo-Pacific concept): As opposed to locally based Regional Cooperation (ASEAN and Bay of Bengal)

    The late embracing of the Indo-Pacific concept by the United States further supports the position that it is being employed as a strategic instrument to counter a rising power and a potential challenger to its global quasi-hegemonic power position.

    Based on a consideration of capabilities, the United States is currently the only country that can be described as a potential global hegemon. Certainly, there are a number of other countries that have the potential, based on their capabilities, of being candidates to become regional hegemons. Notably, China is among them, but Japan, India, and Brazil are also potential candidates, though their individual capacities vary widely and one could argue, based on capacities, that China takes the lead among them. With the implication that China becomes the main target of the de facto global hegemon, the other potential contenders must be kept in sight, as well. While most recent academic and non-academic discussions about global power transfer are focusing on rising countries, on potential challengers to the existing global hegemon, China in particular, a focus on how the existing quasi-global hegemon, the United States, is reacting to challenges to its dominance, to preserve its leading position and influence, seems almost completely missing. This lack of emphasis constitutes a rather critical issue, because when we focus on global or regional power competition, what should be of interest to analysts is not only the behaviour and strategy of a rising county, i.e., a potential challenger to an existing hegemon, but also to analyse the response of the existing hegemon, as well. After all, when it comes to issues of global and regional stability, the actions of both the existing hegemon and the potential challenger must be taken into account.

    There is no doubt that an existing hegemon does not just ‘sit back’ and watch when its influence is challenged by a new contender for power. Even a declining hegemon will try to challenge a rising power contender, consequently, the potential for instability within the international system arises not only from a rising power but also from the actions of the country which possesses a quasi-hegemonic position, trying to defend its power position. In one of his earlier and most influential works, Mearsheimer (2001) points out that great powers always aim to maximise their share of power and are in constant competition with other power contenders, with the aim of maximising their own power. Therefore, the rise of a new competitor occurs in a dynamic context between the established and the rising hegemon. Ikenberry (2014) points out that, as the overwhelmingly global power once concentrated within the United States dispersed with the arrival of new power challengers in different parts of the world, new struggles over global rules and institutions are emerging. At the very least, as emphasised by Mearsheimer (2013), great powers do not trust one another, as they worry about other countries’ capabilities and intentions.

    Not without reason, Mearsheimer (2013) argues that the United States did not and does not tolerate peer competitors, adding that the United States has demonstrated this clearly during the twentieth century.

    For these reasons, we cannot expect that a hegemon will stay inactive when watching the rise of potential challengers. An established great power, holding an almost global hegemonic position as the United States does, has the capacity to respond to the challenges arising from power contenders, and there are clear indications, past and present, that it will act to preserve its dominant power position, even within an international system that has become more multilateral in comparison with the Cold War period. Not without reason, Mearsheimer (2013) argues that the United States did not and does not tolerate peer competitors, adding that the United States has demonstrated this clearly during the twentieth century. One just has to remember that in the late 1980s, when Japan was close to economically overtaking the United States. at the global level, various United States administrations actively worked against it, refusing Japan more decision-making rights within international organisations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, even though Japan had become a major donor to both organisations. Obviously, the previous Japanese challenge to the United States’ dominance was only economic. Neither will the United States allow other challengers to succeed in undermining its dominant position, even in distant regional settings. Mearsheimer (2001) reminds us that the dominant power will act at the regional level to ensure that no challenge to its own global position will take place, since the crucial task is to block potential peer competitors, even within distant regional settings.

    When evaluating the influence of a hegemon it is worth remembering that this goes beyond a focus on military capabilities, even though such capabilities are essential, and include the hegemon’s ability to disguise its ambitions and interests by pretending that it provides global public goods, which in reality satisfy primarily its own interests. More importantly, as pointed out by Griffiths, O’Callaghan and Roach (2002), all hegemonic states enjoy ‘structural power’, which permits the hegemon to occupy a central position within its own system, as well as shape other states’ preferences. As emphasised by Kupchan (2014), a hegemon also strives to generate a normative and ideological dominance, in support of its power dominance. Indeed, Gilpin, in his seminal influential work on war and change, emphasises that a major power aims to create social structures to serve its hegemonic interests, consequently supporting its domineering position with rules, institutions, and organisational principles, supporting, indeed screening and protecting, its power position with normative dominance (Gilpin 1981).

    one can also reasonably assume that when a hegemonic country introduces a new geopolitical or regional concept of space, such as the Indo-Pacific framework, will be of foremost importance to its own strategy of dominance. Indeed, the Indo-Pacific framework signals the re-mapping of geopolitical space, with little, if any, historical relevance.

    By considering these arguments describing the behaviour of a typical hegemonic power, it is rather consistent to assume that a country, such as the United States, which holds a nearly global like hegemonic position, will use its position and capabilities to support its own power position in different regional settings so as to ward off any potential competitor. For this reason, one can also reasonably assume that when a hegemonic country introduces a new geopolitical or regional concept of space, such as the Indo-Pacific framework, will be of foremost importance to its own strategy of dominance. Indeed, the Indo-Pacific framework signals the re-mapping of geopolitical space, with little, if any, historical relevance. From a historical perspective, the Indian and Pacific Oceans have been perceived as separate maritime spaces. What marries them into one geopolitical space is an invented geopolitical strategy facilitating the strategic power interests of the existing hegemon. What is more, a hegemon or hegemon-like state will not introduce or favour a new geopolitical concept if it goes against its own strategic interests.

    Indeed, from a United States perspective, the Indo-Pacific strategy not only re-strengthens, at least from a hegemonic perspective, its role within the older geopolitical concept of Asia-Pacific, but now extends this influence, from a conceptual perspective, to include the Indian Ocean, as well. One can further argue that the adoption of the Indo-Pacific approach by the United States comes at a time when we can observe considerable changes in the power configuration within East Asia (which encompasses Northeast and Southeast Asia) and to a lesser extent within South Asia. Certain changes in the regional power configuration, namely the rise of China – not only as an economic but increasingly as a military and especially as a maritime power – generate considerable challenges from the perspective of hegemonic power competition. While the strategic challenge that China, as a rising power, generates to the United States quasi hegemonic position is so far limited to a regional challenge, instead of a global challenge, still, based on hegemony theory, the existing hegemon cannot allow such a challenge to take place.

    The late embracing of the Indo-Pacific concept by the United States further supports the position that it is being employed as a strategic instrument to counter a rising power and a potential challenger to its global quasi-hegemonic power position. We may remember that the origin of the Indo-Pacific concept is associated with the previous Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ concept. Shinzo Abe mentioned it as early as 2007 when addressing the Indian parliament and began frequently restating it from 2016 onwards. This was part of his intention that Japan should take a more active role in East Asia and beyond. As such, the Indo-Pacific concept was born out of the political-strategic considerations of a regional actor within East Asia. Only later, around 2018, did the United States become considerably interested in the concept, at a time when the potential challenges from rising countries increased – not only from China; one may also consider India’s rise in this context. In 2018, the United States administration even changed the name of its Pacific Command to United States Indo-Pacific Command to highlight its changing geopolitical perspective and to address the increasing regional challenges it faced from a rising China. Not without reason was the replacement of the previous Asia-Pacific concept with the Indo-Pacific concept aimed at integrating India, another rising power in Asia, more firmly with the hegemonic interests of the United States. In academic terms, one could argue that this may represent a strategy of accommodation, in which an existing hegemon accommodates a rising power by offering political and strategic space for that country. It is a strategy the United States followed previously with China until China started to become a too fundamental strategic challenge to the United States hierarchic position. One may wonder if this may also happen to India, once India becomes too powerful to be contained within a United States hegemonic project. However, for the time being, India seems to feel quite comfortable within the geopolitical space it has been offered by the existing quasi-global hegemon. As revealed by Paul T.V (2016) the strategy of accommodation is not only quite a challenging undertaking – as the hegemon has to offer political status, leadership responsibilities, and even a sphere of influence to a rising country – but in the long run the implications are that this will weaken, if not undermine, the hegemon’s own position, thus indicating the limitation of such a strategy. After all, a hegemon is rather unwilling to give up its dominant position voluntarily, though a strategy of accommodation may buy some time and allow it to employ a strategy of divide-and-rule by offering support to a potential weaker power contender when addressing the challenges of a more powerful contender. There can be no less doubt that the ongoing border conflicts between India and China and the emerging regional power competition between them facilitate India’s readiness to become increasingly enveloped in a stronger relationship with the United States which, by the way, contradicts India’s previous entrenched national strategy of non-alignment in global power politics. Consequently, drafting India into its power orbit enhances the United States’ strategic influence in regions where it is not even a resident power, like East, Southeast, or South Asia.

    There can be no less doubt that the ongoing border conflicts between India and China and the emerging regional power competition between them facilitate India’s readiness to become increasingly enveloped in a stronger relationship with the United States which, by the way, contradicts India’s previous entrenched national strategy of non-alignment in global power politics.

    Therefore, a hegemonic state will try to manipulate even distant regional settings in its favour, to arrest the rise of potential challengers to its dominant position, even by facilitating the introduction of a new geopolitical concept, like the Indo-Pacific, which ignores local perceptions of regional cooperation dynamics, the Bay of Bengal approach or ASEAN. While there are some claims that the Indo-Pacific approach does not represent a challenge to ASEAN, a position that is widely disputed, the more specific issue is that the Indo-Pacific approach does not contribute or offer support to those local-based regional cooperation processes from a conceptual perspective. Therefore, while one has to recognise that more recent regional cooperation processes within the Bay of Bengal are less dynamic for the time being, it does not mean that such a regional cooperation process is altogether missing. As stated by Amrith (2013), Asian economic connections led to renewed interest in the Bay of Bengal as a focus for regional cooperation. Indeed, BIMSTEC[1] which was established in 1997, does provide focus on regional cooperation.

    BIMSTEC creates political space for economic cooperation by addressing common challenges like underdevelopment. Consequently, offering a strategic vision for national development to its member countries, a focus fundamentally different from the geopolitical outlook of the Indo-Pacific regional hegemonic project, with its focus on military and especially maritime power distribution. Another crucial difference is that, while the Indo-Pacific strategy is a rather recent invention, regional recognition of the Bay of Bengal as a particular and unique geographic location for regional cooperation, particularly as a centre for trade and cultural migration, goes back centuries, if not millennia. As such, the Bay of Bengal commands a rich history as a historically recognised cultural and trade-inspired region. Yet, with geopolitical concepts based on hegemonic interests, such home-grown sources of regional cooperation are not recognised or supported only if they would fit the interests of the hegemon. It is evident that the Indo-Pacific concept, from a conceptual perspective, also ignores the ASEAN regional cooperation process. As such, the Indo-Pacific approach represents an artificial strategic overlay, not linked with local beads regional cooperation dynamics, even when a regional cooperation process is very well established, as is the case with ASEAN. With regard to the Indo-Pacific concept, ASEAN’s statement on the Indo-Pacific (ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific 2019) clearly indicates that the perception of the Indo-Pacific area is a contiguous geographic space is misleading and not appropriate, even though the two geopolitical spaces are geographically connected. Indeed, while the Bay of Bengal and the ASEAN regional cooperation favour regional cooperation characterised by horizontal relationships, facilitating the cooperation of countries within the region to address common challenges, the Indo-Pacific approach represent a vertical power arrangement, where a dominant power is projecting its influence onto the regional level.

    However, it should not come as too much of a surprise that a hegemon’s regional strategy, which primarily focuses on supporting its own power interests, has little to say about regional cooperation processes initiated by the people living in that region. Indeed, a global acting hegemon has only a limited interest in the empowerment of independent regional cooperation projects, since they could signal the creation of a more independent political sphere. As Mearsheimer (2013) asserts, based on its superior standing and its need to defend this position, a hegemon has always an inclination to interfere in and re-order the political outlook of even distant regions. We may take into consideration what Mearsheimer (2013) made earlier, that the United States will ensure that it will dominate the commanding heights in Asia. For all these reasons, the Indo-Pacific approach should be recognised as the newest geopolitical strategy supporting the United States’ hegemonic position in Asia.

    Bibliography

    Mearsheimer, John J (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), W.W Norton & Company: New York

    Mearsheimer, John J (2013) Structural Realism. In: Dunne T, Kurki M., Smith S (eds) International Relations Theories Discipline and Diversity, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press: Oxford. pp. 77-93

    Ikenberry, G. J. (2014) Introduction: power, order, and change in world politics. In: Ikenberry, G. J. (ed.) Power, order, and change in world politics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.1-16.

    Griffiths, M, O’Callaghan T, Roach S T (2002) International Relations: The Key Concepts 2nd; Martin Griffiths, Routledge

    Kupchan, C. A. (2014) Unpacking hegemony: the social foundations of hierarchical order. In: Ikenberry, G. J. (ed.) Power, order, and change in world politics. Cambridge, University Press Cambridge, pp. 19-60.

    Gilpin, R. (2010) War and Change in World Politics, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

    Paul T.V. (2016) The accommodation of rising powers in world politics. In: Paul, T. V. (ed.) Accommodating rising powers past, present, and future. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 3 32.

    Amrith, S. S. (2013) Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants By Sunil S. Amrith Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific 2019, available at: https://asean.org/asean-outlook-on-the-indo-pacific/

    Notes

    [1] BIMSTEC has seven members: Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

    Feature Image credit: War on the Rocks

  • Roe overturned: What you need to know about the American Supreme Court abortion decision

    Roe overturned: What you need to know about the American Supreme Court abortion decision

    Despite the terminal decline of the American Empire or the Deep State, the American Republic still remains an inspiration for people across the world, for reasons of its vibrant democracy and peoples’ liberty ensured through robust institutions, law and order, and the strong constitutional process. To paraphrase Johan Galtung – ‘the US is a fabulous Republic but a terrible empire’. But even that seems to be changing as society’s democratic values, ethics, and morals are in serious decline.  The rise of right wing politics has led to a decline in the standards and values, and in the independence of institutions most notably the Judiciary. Separation of the Church and the State is a core tenet of the American Constitution and governance. That seems to be compromised as many judges bring their personal and religious beliefs in to their work. This was in demonstration in the American Supreme Court’s judgement that ends one of the most critical fundamental rights of women to their bodies and their choices for abortion. 

    After half a century, Americans’ constitutional right to get an abortion has been overturned by the Supreme Court.The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – handed down on June 24, 2022 – has far-reaching consequences. There is a strong religious influence to this judgement. This could influence many other countries, particularly in an environment where right wing politics, influenced by narrow religious overtones,  is on the upswing in many countries across the world, including the world’s largest Democracy, India. Fortunately, India’s abortion laws are governed by medical advice and womens’ safety (and so it is termed MTP – Medical termination of Pregnancy). The MTP Act of 1971 was further liberalised through an Amendment Act of 2021 wherein the gestation limit for abortions is raised from 20 to 24 weeks. While India’s laws are considerate by supporting abortion decision to rape and incest survivors, the American judgement will deny this freedom or choice to the victim women.

     Nicole Huberfeld and Linda C. McClain, health law and constitutional law experts at Boston University, explain what just happened, and what happens next. This article was published earlier in The Conversation. TPF is happy to republish this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0-International (CC BY-ND 4.0).

    – TPF Editorial Team

    What did the Supreme Court rule?

    The Supreme Court decided by a 6-3 majority to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In doing so, the justices overturned two key decisions protecting access to abortion: 1973’s Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided in 1992.

    The court’s opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, said that the Constitution does not mention abortion. Nor does the Constitution guarantee abortion rights via another right, the right to liberty.

    The opinion rejected Roe’s and Casey’s argument that the constitutional right to liberty included an individual’s right to privacy in choosing to have an abortion, in the same way that it protects other decisions concerning intimate sexual conduct, such as contraception and marriage. According to the opinion, abortion is “fundamentally different” because it destroys fetal life.

    The court’s narrow approach to the concept of constitutional liberty is at odds with the broader position it took in the earlier Casey ruling, as well as in a landmark marriage equality case, 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges. But the majority said that nothing in their opinion should affect the right of same-sex couples to marry.

    Alito’s opinion also rejected the legal principle of “stare decisis,” or adhering to precedent. Supporters of the right to abortion argue that the Casey and Roe rulings should have been left in place as, in the words of the Casey ruling, reproductive rights allow women to “participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.”

    The ruling does not mean that abortion is banned throughout the U.S. Rather, arguments about the legality of abortion will now play out in state legislatures, where, Alito noted, women “are not without electoral or political power.”

    States will be allowed to regulate or prohibit abortion subject only to what is known as “rational basis” review – this is a weaker standard than Casey’s “undue burden” test. Under Casey’s undue burden test, states were prevented from enacting restrictions that placed substantial obstacles in the path of those seeking abortion. Now, abortion bans will be presumed to be legal as long as there is a “rational basis” for the legislature to believe the law serves legitimate state interests.

    In a strenuous dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor faulted the court’s narrow approach to liberty and challenged its disregard both for stare decisis and for the impact of overruling Roe and Casey on the lives of women in the United States. The dissenters said the impact of the decision would be “the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” They also expressed deep concern over the ruling’s effect on poor women’s ability to access abortion services in the U.S.

    Where does this decision fit into the history of reproductive rights in the U.S.?

    This is a huge moment. The court’s ruling has done what reproductive rights advocates feared for decades: It has taken away the constitutional right to privacy that protected access to abortion.

    This decision was decades in the making. Thirty years ago when Casey was being argued, many legal experts thought the court was poised to overrule Roe. Then, the court had eight justices appointed by Republican presidents, several of whom indicated readiness to overrule in dissenting opinions.

    Instead, Republican appointees Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter upheld Roe. They revised its framework to allow more state regulation throughout pregnancy and weakened the test for evaluating those laws. Under Roe’s “strict scrutiny” test, any restriction on the right to privacy to access an abortion had to be “narrowly tailored” to further a “compelling” state interest. But Casey’s “undue burden” test gave states wider latitude to regulate abortion.

    Even before the Casey decision, abortion opponents in Congress had restricted access for poor women and members of the military greatly by limiting the use of federal funds to pay for abortion services.

    In recent years, states have adopted numerous restrictions on abortion that would not have survived Roe’s tougher “strict scrutiny” test. Even so, many state restrictions have been struck down in federal courts under the undue burden test, including bans on abortions prior to fetal viability and so-called “TRAP” – targeted regulation of abortion provider – laws that made it harder to keep clinics open.

    President Donald Trump’s pledge to appoint “pro-life” justices to federal courts – and his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices – finally made possible the goal of opponents of legal abortion: overruling Roe and Casey.

    What happens next?

    Even before Dobbs, the ability to access abortion was limited by a patchwork of laws across the United States. Republican states have more restrictive laws than Democratic ones, with people living in the Midwest and South subject to the strongest limits.

    Thirteen states have so-called “trigger laws,” which greatly restrict access to abortion. These will soon go into effect now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe and Casey, requiring only state attorney general certification or other action by a state official.

    Nine states have pre-Roe laws never taken off the books that significantly restrict or ban access to abortion. Altogether, nearly half of states will restrict access to abortion through a variety of measures like banning abortion from six weeks of pregnancy – before many women know they are pregnant – and limiting the reasons abortions may be obtained, such as forbidding abortion in the case of fetal anomalies.

    Meanwhile, 16 states and the District of Columbia protect access to abortion in a variety of ways, such as state statutes, constitutional amendments or state Supreme Court decisions.

    None of the states that limit abortion access currently criminalize the pregnant person’s action. Rather, they threaten health care providers with civil or criminal actions, including loss of their license to practice medicine.

    Some states are creating “safe havens” where people can travel to access an abortion legally. People have already been traveling to states like Massachusetts from highly restrictive states.

    The court’s decision may drive federal action, too.

    The House of Representatives passed the Women’s Health Protection Act, which protects health care providers and pregnant people seeking abortion, but Senate Republicans have blocked the bill from coming up for a vote. Congress could also reconsider providing limited Medicaid payment for abortion, but such federal legislation also seems unlikely to succeed.

    President Joe Biden could use executive power to instruct federal agencies to review existing regulations to ensure that access to abortion continues to occur in as many places as possible. Congressional Republicans could test the water on nationwide abortion bans. While such efforts are likely to fail, these efforts could cause confusion for people who are already vulnerable.

    The Supreme Court’s rolling back a right that has been recognized for 50 years puts the U.S. in the minority of nations, most of which are moving toward liberalization.

    What does this mean for people in America seeking an abortion?

    Unintended pregnancies and abortions are more common among poor women and women of color, both in the U.S. and around the world.

    Research shows that people have abortions whether lawful or not, but in nations where access to abortion is limited or outlawed, women are more likely to suffer negative health outcomes, such as infection, excessive bleeding and uterine perforation. Those who must carry a pregnancy to full term are more likely to suffer pregnancy-related deaths.

    The state-by-state access to abortion resulting from this decision means many people will have to travel farther to obtain an abortion. And distance will mean fewer people will get abortions, especially lower-income women – a fact the Supreme Court itself recognized in 2016.

    But since 2020, medication abortion – a two-pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol – has been the most common method of ending pregnancy in the U.S. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated this shift, as it drove the Food and Drug Administration to make medication abortions more available by allowing doctors to prescribe the pills through telemedicine and permitting medication to be mailed without in-person consultation.

    Many states that restrict access to abortion also are trying to prevent medication abortion. But stopping telehealth providers from mailing pills will be a challenge. Further, because the FDA approved this regimen, states will be contradicting federal law, setting up conflict that may lead to more litigation.

    The Supreme Court’s rolling back a right that has been recognized for 50 years puts the U.S. in the minority of nations, most of which are moving toward liberalization. Nevertheless, even though abortion is seen by many as essential health care, the cultural fight will surely continue.

    Featured Image Credit: Evening Standard

  • The Geopolitical Consolidation of Artificial Intelligence

    The Geopolitical Consolidation of Artificial Intelligence

    Key Points

    • IT hardware and Semiconductor manufacturing has become strategically important and critical geopolitical tools of dominant powers. Ukraine war related sanctions and Wassenaar Arrangement regulations invoked to ban Russia from importing or acquiring electronic components over 25 Mhz.
    • Semi conductors present a key choke point to constrain or catalyse the development of AI-specific computing machinery.
    • Taiwan, USA, South Korea, and Netherlands dominate the global semiconductor manufacturing and supply chain. Taiwan dominates the global market and had 60% of the global share in 2021. Taiwan’s one single company – TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co), the world’s largest foundry, alone accounted for 54% of total global revenue.
    • China controls two-thirds of all silicon production in the world.
    • Monopolisation of semiconductor supply by a singular geopolitical bloc poses critical challenges for the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI), exacerbating the strategic and innovation bottlenecks for developing countries like India.
    • Developing a competitive advantage over existing leaders would require not just technical breakthroughs but also some radical policy choices and long-term persistence.
    • India should double down over research programs on non-silicon based computing with a national urgency instead of pursuing a catch-up strategy.

    Russia was recently restricted, under category 3 to category 9 of the Wassenaar Arrangement, from purchasing any electronic components over 25MHz from Taiwanese companies. That covers pretty much all modern electronics. Yet, the tangibles of these sanctions must not deceive us into overlooking the wider impact that hardware access and its control have on AI policies and software-based workflows the world over. As Artificial Intelligence technologies reach a more advanced stage, the capacity to fabricate high-performance computing resources i.e. semiconductor production becomes key strategic leverage in international affairs.

    Semiconductors present a key chokepoint to constrain or catalyse the development of AI-specific computing machinery. In fact, most of the supply of semiconductors relies on a single country – Taiwan. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) manufactures Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), Cerebras’s Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), as well as Nvidia’s A100 processor. The following table provides a more detailed1 assessment:

    Hardware Type

    AI Accelerator/Product Name

    Manufacturing Country

    Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs)

    Huawei Ascend 910

    Taiwan

    Cerebras WSE

    Taiwan

    Google TPUs

    Taiwan

    Intel Habana

    Taiwan

    Tesla FSD

    USA

    Qualcomm Cloud AI 100

    Taiwan

    IBM TrueNorth

    South Korea

    AWS Inferentia

    Taiwan

    AWS Trainium

    Taiwan

    Apple A14 Bionic

    Taiwan

    Graphic Processing Units (GPUs)

    AMD Radeon

    Taiwan

    Nvidia A100

    Taiwan

    Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)

    Intel Agilex

    USA

    Xilinx Virtex

    Taiwan

    Xilinx Alveo

    Taiwan

    AWS EC2 FI

    Taiwan

    As can be seen above, the cake of computing hardware is largely divided in such a way that the largest pie holders also happen to form a singular geopolitical bloc vis-a-vis China. This further shapes the evolution of territorial contests in the South China Sea. This monopolisation of semiconductor supply by a singular geopolitical bloc poses critical challenges for the future of Artificial Intelligence, especially exacerbating the strategic and innovation bottlenecks for developing countries like India. Since the invention of the transistor in 1947, and her independence, India has found herself in an unenviable position where there stands zero commercial semiconductor manufacturing capacity after all these years while her office-bearers continually promise of leading in the fourth industrial revolution.

    Bottlenecking Global AI Research

    There are two aspects of developing these AI accelerators – designing the specifications and their fabrication. AI research firms first design chips which optimise hardware performance to execute specific machine learning calculations. Then, semiconductor firms, operating in a range of specialities and specific aspects of fabrication, make those chips and increase the performance of computing hardware by adding more and more transistors to pieces of silicon. This combination of specific design choices and advanced hardware fabrication capability forms the bedrock that will decide the future of AI, not the amount of data a population is generating and localising.

    However, owing to the very high fixed costs of semiconductor manufacturing, AI research has to be focused on data and algorithms. Therefore, innovations in AI’s algorithmic efficiency and model scaling have to compensate for a lack of equivalent situations in the AI’s hardware. The aggressive consolidation and costs of hardware fabrication mean that firms in AI research are forced to outsource their hardware fabrication requirements. In fact, as per DARPA2, because of the high costs of getting their designs fabricated, AI hardware startups do not even receive much private capital and merely 3% of all venture funding between 2017-21 in AI/ML has gone to startups working on AI hardware.

    But TSMC’s resources are limited and not everyone can afford them. To get TSMC’s services, companies globally have to compete with the likes of Google and Nvidia, therefore prices go further high because of the demand side competition. Consequently, only the best and the biggest work with TSMC, and the rest have to settle for its competitors. This has allowed this single company to turn into a gatekeeper in AI hardware R&D. And as the recent sanctions over Russia demonstrate, it is now effectively playing the pawn which has turned the wazir in a tense geopolitical endgame.

    Taiwan’s AI policy also reflects this dominance in ICT and semiconductors – aiming to develop “world-leading AI-on-Device solutions that create a niche market and… (make Taiwan) an important partner in the value chain of global intelligent systems”.3 The foundation of strong control over the supply of AI hardware and also being #1 in the Global Open Data Index, not just gives Taiwan negotiating leverage in geopolitical competition, but also allows it to focus on hardware and software collaboration based on seminal AI policy unlike most countries where the AI policy and discourse revolve around managing the adoption and effects of AI, and not around shaping the trajectory of its engineering and conceptual development like the countries with hardware advantage.

    Now to be fair, R&D is a time-consuming, long-term activity which has a high chance of failure. Thus, research focus naturally shifts towards low-hanging fruits, projects that can be achieved in the short-term before the commissioning bureaucrats are rotated. That’s why we cannot have a nationalised AGI research group, as nobody will be interested in a 15-20 year-long enterprise when you have promotions and election cycles to worry about. This applies to all high-end bleeding-edge technology research funding everywhere – so, quantum communications will be prioritised over quantum computing, building larger and larger datasets over more intelligent algorithms, and silicon-based electronics over researching newer computing substrates and storage – because those things are more friendly to short-term outcome pressures and bureaucracies aren’t exactly known to be a risk-taking institution.

    Options for India

    While China controls 2/3 of all the silicon production in the world and wants to control the whole of Taiwan too (and TSMC along with its 54% share in logic foundries), the wider semiconductor supply chain is a little spreadout too for any one actor’s comfort. The leaders mostly control a specialised niche of the supply chain, for example, the US maintains a total monopoly on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software solutions, the Netherlands has monopolised Extreme UltraViolet and Argon Flouride scanners, and Japan has been dishing out 300 mm wafers used to manufacture more than 99 percent of the chips today.4 The end-to-end delivery of one chip could have it crossing international borders over 70 times.5 Since this is a matured ecosystem, developing a competitive advantage over existing leaders would require not just proprietary technical breakthroughs but also some radical policy choices and long term persistence.

    It is also needless to say that the leaders are also able to attract and retain the highest quality talent from across the world. On the other hand, we have a situation where regional politicians continue cribbing about incoming talent even from other Indian states. This is therefore the first task for India, to become a technology powerhouse, she has to, at a bare minimum, be able to retain all her top talent and attract more. Perhaps, for companies in certain sectors or of certain size, India must make it mandatory to spend at least X per cent of revenue on R&D and offer incentives to increase this share – it’ll revamp things from recruitment and retention to business processes and industry-academia collaboration – and in the long-run prove to be a lot more socioeconomically useful instrument than the CSR regulation.

    It should also not escape anyone that the human civilisation, with all its genius and promises of man-machine symbiosis, has managed to put all its eggs in a single basket that is also under the constant threat of Chinese invasion. It is thus in the interest of the entire computing industry to build geographical resiliency, diversity and redundancy in the present-day semiconductor manufacturing capacity. We don’t yet have the navy we need, but perhaps in a diplomatic-naval recognition of Taiwan’s independence from China, the Quad could manage to persuade arrangements for an uninterrupted semiconductor supply in case of an invasion.

    Since R&D in AI hardware is essential for future breakthroughs in machine intelligence – but its production happens to be extremely concentrated, mostly by just one small island country, it behoves countries like India to look for ways to undercut the existing paradigm of developing computing hardware (i.e. pivot R&D towards DNA Computing etc) instead of only trying to pursue a catch-up strategy. The current developments are unlikely to solve India’s blues in integrated circuits anytime soon. India could parallelly, and I’d emphatically recommend that she should, take a step back from all the madness and double down on research programs on non-silicon-based computing with a national urgency. A hybrid approach toward computing machinery could also resolve some of the bottlenecks that AI research is facing due to dependencies and limitations of present-day hardware.

    As our neighbouring adversary Mr Xi says, core technologies cannot be acquired by asking, buying, or begging. In the same spirit, even if it might ruffle some feathers, a very discerning reexamination of the present intellectual property regime could also be very useful for the development of such foundational technologies and related infrastructure in India as well as for carving out an Indian niche for future technology leadership.

    References:

    1. The Other AI Hardware Problem: What TSMC means for AI Compute. Available at https://semiliterate.substack.com/p/the-other-ai-hardware-problem

    2. Leef, S. (2019). Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon. In ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (Vol. 3)

    3. AI Taiwan. Available at https://ai.taiwan.gov.tw/

    4. Khan et al. (2021). The Semiconductor Supply Chain: Assessing National Competitiveness. Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
    5. Alam et al. (2020). Globality and Complexity of the Semiconductor Ecosystem. Accenture.

  • America’s Two Cold Wars: Hegemony to Decline?

    America’s Two Cold Wars: Hegemony to Decline?

    Book Name: America’s Two Cold Wars: Hegemony to Decline?

    Author: Alfredo Toro Hardy

    Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

    Year of Publication: March, 2022

    Pages: 305 

     

    The war in Ukraine has necessitated a recalibration of US foreign policy as tensions intensify between America, its allies and Russia. The US’s ‘pivot to Asia’ policy has taken a hit in the face of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. As global attention, once again, shifts to the former Cold War superpower, China appears to be reaping all the benefits in the ensuing power vacuum.

    Alfredo Toro Hardy’s America’s Two Cold Wars: From Hegemony to Decline? is a timely addition, both in terms of what is unfolding presently and the literature that is emerging on the shortfalls of American foreign policy in its dealings with Russia and China. The former Venezuelan diplomat joins the intensifying debate on the emerging reality of a Cold War between the US and China and the broader debate surrounding America’s decline from being a global hegemonic power and its implications for the country’s international engagement with the rest of the world.

    The book offers a comprehensive diagnosis of American foreign policy by way of a comparative analysis of the US’s Cold War with the Soviet Union with the emerging one with China from the American perspective and seeks to answer two questions: one, how different a strategic competitor is China to the erstwhile Soviet Union and two, how different is the US of today compared to its former self when it confronted and won the Cold War with the Soviets.

    Hardy identifies five fundamental issues afflicting US foreign policy in its engagement with China – ideology (or lack thereof), squandered alliances, foreign policy-related inconsistencies, the country’s economic downturn and the containment strategy trap. The author’s key argument recurs throughout the book – that the US is confronting China in the emerging Cold War on a “wrong configuration of factors” (p. 168) and needs to “responsibly explore and analyse the options on the table” (p. 171).

    In acknowledgement of the deficiencies facing America’s foreign policy regarding China, the author sets the context and provides readers with a succinct account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the period of US hegemony and the rise of China in the first two chapters. Hardy rightly emphasises that America is threatened by China’s ascendence – citing research done by the Pew Research Center that showed that 73 per cent of Americans viewed China negatively. In the author’s words, “Washington is aggrievedly and forcefully reacting against what it perceives as an existential contention” (p. 7).

    Hardy also outlines the Chinese perspective and correctly concludes that Beijing is driven by its experience under imperialist powers during the ‘century of humiliation’ and economic mismanagement under Mao Zedong. Indeed, this coupled with the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, controversy over Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi between 1989-1990, the Taiwan strait crisis in 1996, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (p. 23) by American forces and more recently, the independence movements in Hong Kong are insightful examples in understanding why the Party and now, Xi Jinping, are in pursuit of relentless centralisation of power and authority. Despite China’s adroitness in foreign affairs under Xi Jinping, the country’s great power ambitions are driven by domestic considerations and how the international community perceives these ambitions. The US’s belief in China’s disregard for a rules-based order is what the latter takes offence with – believing the former to be constraining it from taking its “rightful place in the world” (p.7). China eschews the American mindset of reverting to the Cold War mentality and instead argues for a more inclusive world where both states are mindful of their responsibilities.

    The author offers a penetrating account of US-China relations – moving from cautious partners with mutual strategic interests to strategic competitors. A pragmatic agreement was drawn up that was mindful of the other’s national interests – the US would recognize the Communist government in China and give it legitimacy and in exchange, China would not seek to limit or challenge the “US’s power projection in Asia” (p.22). China’s gains from this arrangement were enormous and translated into divestment from Mao’s model of productivity and economic self-sufficiency, a foothold in Western markets and a WTO membership. However, 2008 marked the inflexion point in their relations. The diplomat’s insightful analysis of the changing currents in China’s foreign policy and engagement with the US – the global financial crisis and China’s ability in tiding over it, the success of the Beijing Olympics, the US’s failures in the Middle East and disregard for its allies, China’s military build-up, the South China Sea and Xi Jinping’s leadership – is unparalleled and serves as an excellent prelude to why he thinks the two countries are in an “unavoidable collision course” (p. 35). China’s desire to forge a new status quo and challenge the US’s rules and the US’s and China’s “perceived sense of mission and superiority” based on their history and national myths as they look into the future, makes the prospect of a major conflict with spill over effects plausible. Here Hardy goes a step further and claims, based on the plausibility of a war between the two, that they are already in the midst of a Cold War (p. 36). In announcing its ambitions to the world, China may have lost the advantage of its hitherto low profile strategy and believes that American hegemony is on the decline.

    To be sure, the author’s analysis of the five deficiencies in American foreign policy forms the most important section of the book. His commentary on America’s notion of its exceptionalism and “crusader foreign policy” (p. 42) is particularly relevant when we look at its response to the war in Ukraine – the US’s network of financial institutions and media conglomerates have been “able to impose international patterns of credibility or ostracism depending on the acceptance or not of the prevailing liberal ideology” (p. 18).

    Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America described American democracy as a form of Christianity and there is more than a grain of truth to this when they believe they were ordained by God to undertake the responsibility of exporting democracy to the rest of the world, not unlike the colonial powers; as Hardy keenly points out – “the United States never stopped being what its puritan colonists wanted it to become” (p. 42). The ideological calculus worked in America’s favour during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In confronting China, a country uninterested in exporting communism, in relentless pursuit of efficiency and economic development, the US falls considerably short. This section is a succinct account of the erosion of democracy domestically, the political establishment, poor performance in development indicators (specifically, education and infrastructure) and the labour market. As Hardy puts it – “efficiency is the catchword” (p. 53) and the name of the game in the Cold War between America and China.

    In building alliances to counter China, US foreign policy has a long road ahead as it recovers from the wars in the Middle East, the Trump presidency, its recent misstep in leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban and now, its conflict escalations with Russia. America’s inconsistencies in maintaining its alliances have put them on the back foot in confronting China and only served to better the latter’s position in the international community through cooperative multilateralism (p. 82). The author concludes that the worst-case scenario for the US would be a Russia-China alignment. Indeed, in the fourth iteration of the India-US 2+2 dialogue, the Russia-Ukraine war was the elephant in the room as joint statements from the US and India reflected a sentiment of ‘agree to disagree’. These joint remarks were widely acknowledged to be ‘tame’ in comparison to the statements several White House officials made of India’s position on the matter, most notably that of President Biden’s comment of India being “somewhat shaky” on the Quad and that of Deputy NSA Daleep Singh who warned of “consequences” should India continue to increase its imports from Russia.

    The author is critical of the growing divide between the Democrats and Republicans in the foreign policy establishment – referring to them as “inhabiting different foreign policy planets” (p. 105). Even the consensus on the containment strategy for China is shaky as Progressive Democrats call for restraint. China, on the other hand, is a different story. According to Hardy, China has its eggs in order – a sound national objective, well-rounded foreign policy, cooperative multilateral mechanisms and localised geopolitical ambitions for the moment. China exhibits unwavering focus as it marches towards what it believes is its destiny – to become a world power by 2049. The only downside that the author warns of in China’s strategy is Xi’s presence at the helm. The longer Xi stays at the top, the more the country’s policies will mould around his personality. In the event of his absence “China may find itself in big trouble” (p. 109).

    In comparing the Soviet Union and China’s economies, here too the US falls short. During the first Cold War, America had both economic and military advantages and possessed a technological edge that was unmatched. Today, the US might go toe to toe with China and still not emerge victorious. According to Hardy, China will surpass the US’s GDP in absolute terms and has already achieved the same in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). It is very likely that China’s military expenditure will far exceed the US’s down the line. It has militarily caught up to the US through asymmetric “armament development” (p. 121) and other strategies. Its advantage also lies in the fact that its military deployment is closer to home compared to the US’s strategy of maintaining a standing presence around the world. However, the analysis in this section falls short of elaborating upon America’s weaponization of its financial power. A major factor in the US being a superpower has been the dollar hegemony it has enjoyed since the 1970s. This aspect is intrinsic to understanding US foreign policy, especially when global FOREX reserves in dollars have declined to 59 per cent from 72 per cent in the last two decades. Analysts argue that this reflects the decline of the dollar’s dominance in the face of other currencies. Indeed, China, Russia, India and Brazil are working to reduce their dependency on the dollar and shield themselves from Washington’s vagaries.

    Washington is playing catch-up with Beijing; inheriting the Cold War mentality and deploying used strategies against a competitor that almost evenly matches the US in all aspects. From Hardy’s commentary on the containment strategy that the US pursued against the Soviets, it is immediately evident that the same cannot be replicated in its confrontation with China. While appreciative of the consistency that the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations have shown in dealing with China, the author claims the lack of an overarching strategy and general cohesiveness will not deter China’s ambitions. Considerations of “economic preponderance and geopolitical feasibility” (p. 146) appear to be missing in devising a strategy to counter China. But the author astutely points to the viability of containing China in a region that is of significant geostrategic importance and has historically been its sphere of influence and rightly questions the US’s capability to respond when China has “firm control of the operational theatre” (p. 148) in the region.

    Hardy’s sections that delve into the US’s economy, while useful in the context of its military expenditure, do not adequately explain the sheer influence and entitlement that the country enjoys in international organizations like the IMF, World Bank, OECD, WHO etc. and its impacts in its engagement with China. Similarly, the US has historically turned to sanctions as punitive measures against their enemies – indicative of confidence borne out of the dollar hegemony. Insights into how effective sanctions are and why and how the US weaponizes this power would more forcefully drive home the well-rounded strategy that America has pursued as a hegemon. The Ukraine war is just one example in a long line wherein the US has exercised its power and unilaterally imposed severe sanctions on Russia – encouraging even its allies and partners to take the same measures against Russia. Increasingly, it is becoming evident that the US’s unilateral sanctions are having a negative impact on its credibility as a responsible superpower. Nevertheless, the book offers the general reader a comprehensive assessment of the US in the world order presently and more specifically, a comparison of its foreign policy strategies with the erstwhile Soviet Union and China.

    Overall, America’s Two Cold Wars: From Hegemony to Decline? is a thorough exposition of US foreign policy and draws from experts like Kishore Mahbubani, Mathew Kroenig, Francis Fukuyama, Henry Kissinger and John Mearsheimer and, unlike most literature on the topic, Hardy does not assume a fatalistic narrative that supports the US’s decline of power. Simply put, with the first Cold War, America had all the right configuration of factors in place. This seems to have changed in the second; if the US is facing China on the wrong configuration of factors (p. 168), then the results are only a product of successive administrations lacking coherency in putting together a sound strategy. The author, in a reflection of his experience and expertise, incisively concludes that the US must pursue alternatives to a Cold War with China for three important reasons: first, sharing global governance responsibilities would aid in building US credibility as a responsible superpower as well provide cooperative solutions to global problems like climate change; second, US strategy towards China needs to be a choice between adopting a China-centred policy or alliance centred policy geared towards building multilateral cooperation (p. 169) and third, the interconnectedness of the global economic system will ensure that everyone pays the price for an expensive war between the US and China. The US’s only recourse is to focus on building back its credibility, alliances and partnerships. At the same time, it must be realistic and reflect a deeper understanding of China’s national interests and strategic objectives. These two intentions must work in tandem if the US hopes to successfully counter China.

    About the Author:

    ALFREDO TORO HARDY is a Venezuelan retired diplomat, scholar and author. He has a PhD in International Relations from the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Affairs, two master’s degrees in international law and international economics from the University of Pennsylvania and the Central University of Venezuela, a post-graduate diploma in diplomatic studies by the Ecole Nationale D’Administration (ENA) and a Bachelor of Law degree by the Central University of Venezuela. Before resigning from the Venezuelan Foreign Service in protest of events taking place in his country, he was one of its most senior career diplomats. As such, he served as Ambassador to the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, Singapore, Chile and Ireland.

    Hardy directed the Diplomatic Academy of the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as other Venezuelan academic institutions in the field of international affairs. He is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations and has been a Visiting Professor at the universities of Princeton and Brasilia and an online Professor at the University of Barcelona. He has also been a Fulbright Scholar, a two-time Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Resident Scholar and an academic advisor on diplomatic studies at the University of Westminster. He has authored twenty-one books and co-authored fifteen more on international affairs and history while publishing thirty peer-reviewed papers on the same subjects.

  • IAF’s Force Structure: Strategy for Overcoming the Crisis

    IAF’s Force Structure: Strategy for Overcoming the Crisis

    Aligned with its national security interests, India’s strong geostrategic role-play, amidst the changing world order as a rising military power, aerospace power in particular must be rooted in the Indian industry.

    The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has many cautions for India. War at anytime and anywhere is a human catastrophe and therefore, all efforts to prevent or stop war should not be spared. While the American-led side wants India to take a stand in favour of their position, the Russian side is appreciative of India’s neutral stand. Recent visits by leaders from the USA, UK, EU, and Japan have emphasised the need for India to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

    What is of concern, however, is the fact that the USA and others stressing their view that India’s excessive dependence on Russia for its military equipment is the reason for its refusal to support their sanctions on Russia. Various officials from the US State Department and the DOD have openly advocated their objective of weaning India’s defence imports from Russia. There lies the real issue.

    India’s defence market is too huge and attractive for Western defence industries, and hence, it is the focus of strategic dialogues of many of these countries with India.

    India’s defence market is too huge and attractive for Western defence industries, and hence, it is the focus of strategic dialogues of many of these countries with India. India has diversified its military procurements in the last three decades to ensure it does not become vulnerable to a single source supply. As a result, India’s defence supplies from Russia, which was as high as 70-75% in the early 2000s came down to a current level of 50-55%. The US has been the biggest gainer in this diversification, garnering nearly $ 22 billion in sales to India in the last 15 years to emerge as its number 1 supplier. The Ukraine conflict and the resultant sanctions are being used by the USA to pressurise India to reduce its imports from Russia. The real objective is to ensure the US and its European allies replace Russia as India’s major if not exclusive supplier of defence equipment. The threat of CAATSA on India’s S-400 air defence missile deal with Russia is a prime example. The crux of the India-USA strategic partnership is really about capturing India’s defence market for the Military-Industrial Complex of the USA.

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  • TPF Analysis Series on Russia – Ukraine Conflict #2

    TPF Analysis Series on Russia – Ukraine Conflict #2

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    The First Paper of the Series – TPF Analysis Series on Russia – Ukraine Conflict #1
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    What’s in Ukraine for Russia? 

    In a press conference marking his first year in office, President Biden, on the question of Russia invading Ukraine, remarked that such an event would, “be the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world, in terms of war and peace, since World War Two”. [1] It has now been two months since Russia officially launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine, which the US and its allies consider an unjustified invasion of a sovereign state. The conflict in the Eurasian continent has drawn global attention to Europe and US-Russia tensions have ratcheted to levels that were prevalent during the Cold War. The conflict has also raised pertinent questions on understanding what exactly are Russian stakes in Ukraine and the latter’s role in the evolving security architecture of Europe. The second paper in this series will delve into these questions.

    The current Russian position stems from the experience that Russia, and Putin, gained while dealing with the West on a host of issues, not least of which was NATO expansion.

    The Ties that Bind

    An examination of post-Soviet history reveals that Russian preoccupation with security threats from NATO is not embedded in Russian geopolitics; instead, it has been reported that, early on, Russia was even agreeable to joining the military alliance. The current Russian position stems from the experience that Russia, and Putin, gained while dealing with the West on a host of issues, not least of which was NATO expansion. A line of argument sympathetic to Russia is President Putin’s contention that terms dictated to Russia during the post-Cold War settlements were unfair. The claim is a reference to Secretary of State James Baker’s statement on the expansion of NATO, “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction”, in 1990 in a candid conversation with Mikhael Gorbachev on the matter of reunification of Germany. [2] It could be argued that it is this commitment and subsequent violation through expansions of NATO is one of the main causes of the current conflict. 

    At the root of the problem was Russia’s security concerns – regarding both traditional and hybrid security – that ultimately led to the centralisation of power after a democratic stint under Yeltsin. Accordingly, Putin had put it in late 1999, “A strong state for Russia is not an anomaly, or something that should be combated, but, on the contrary, the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any changes”. [3]

    Historically being a land power, Russia has viewed Ukraine as a strategically critical region in its security matrix. However, as the central control of Moscow weakened in the former USSR, the nationalist aspirations of the Ukrainian people began to materialise and Ukraine played a crucial role, along with the Russian Federation and Belarus, in dissolving the former Soviet Union. The two countries found themselves on opposite sides on extremely fundamental issues, such as security, economic partnership, post-Soviet order, and, not least, sovereignty. In Belovezh, in early December of 1991, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich met to dissolve the USSR, major disagreements regarding the transitional phase and future of the republics erupted. Yeltsin expressed his desire for some sort of central control of the republics, whereas Kravchuk was vehemently opposed to any arrangement that might compromise his country’s sovereignty. Later, at the foundational ceremony of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), he stressed a common military, the most potent rejection of which came from Kravchuk. [4]

    Source: Wikimedia Commons

    The elephant in the room, however, was the status of Sevastopol, which housed the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet. Yeltsin was quoted saying that “The Black Sea Fleet was, is and will be Russia’s. No one, not even Kravchuk will take it away from Russia”. [5] Though the issue was soon temporarily resolved –with the two countries dividing the fleet equally amongst themselves, it continued to dominate and sour their relationship. Russia, as the successor state of the USSR, wanted the base and the entire fleet in its navy. Yeltsin even offered gas at concessional rates to Ukraine if it handed over the city and nuclear weapons to Russia. The issue remained unresolved until the 1997 Friendship Treaty under which Ukraine granted Moscow the entire fleet and leased Sevastopol to Russia until 2017 (later extended).

    Ukraine, under Kravchuk and, later, Leonid Kuchma, struggled to tread a tightrope between Russia and the European Union. On one hand, it was economically knit with former Soviet Republics, and on the other, it was actively looking to get economic benefits from the EU. However, soon a slide towards the west was conspicuous. In 1994, it preferred a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with the EU over CIS Customs Union, which was a Russian initiative. Later, in 1996, it declined to join a new group consisting of former Soviet Republics ‘On Deepening Integration’, scuttling the initiative, since its purpose was to bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold. [6] By 1998, the Kuchma government had formulated a ‘Strategy of Integration into the European Union’. [7]

    Nuclear weapons were another point of contention between the two. Ukraine was extremely reluctant to give up its arsenal, citing security threats from Russia. Kravchuk received a verbal ‘security guarantee’ from the US which forced Russia to “respect the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of each nation” [8] in exchange for surrendering Ukraine’s nuclear weapons. 

    Notwithstanding the disputes, there was a great deal of cooperation between the two, especially after Kuchma’s re-election in 1999. Kuchma’s hook-up with authoritarianism distanced Kyiv from Brussels and brought it closer to Moscow. Ukraine agreed to join Russian initiatives of the Eurasian Economic Community as an observer and Common Economic Space as a full member. At home as well, his support in the eastern parts of the country, where ethnic Russians dwelled, increased dramatically, as evident in the 2002 Parliamentary Elections. [9] However, the bonhomie was soon disrupted by a single event.

    The Orange Revolution was Russia’s 9/11. [10] It dramatically altered Russian thinking on democracy and its ties with the West. It raised the prospect in Russia that Ukraine might be lost completely. It further made them believe the colour revolutions in former Soviet republics were CIA toolkits for regime change. More importantly, it made the Russians apprehensive of a similar revolution within their borders. As a result, the distrust between Russia and the West, and Russia and Ukraine grew considerably. As a nationalist, Victor Yushchenko formulated policies that directly hurt Russian interests. The two countries fought ‘Gas Wars’ in 2006 and 2009, which made both the EU and Russia uncomfortable with Ukraine as a gas transit country. Furthermore, Yushchenko bestowed the title of ‘Hero of Ukraine’ upon Stepan Bandera, a Nazi collaborator and perpetrator of the Holocaust, a decision that surely did not go well with Moscow.

    Geoeconomics: Ukraine as a Gas Transit Country

    The current war is the worst in Europe since the Second World War. Still, Ukraine continues to transit Russian gas through its land, Russia continues to pay for it, and Western Europe continues to receive the crucial resource. The war has shattered all the big bets on Russian dependence on Ukraine for delivering gas to Western Europe and has renewed the discourse on reducing European energy dependence on Russia. Since the EU imports 40% of its gas from Russia, almost a quarter of which flows through Ukraine, Kyiv has had leverage in dealing with Russians in the past. It has been able to extract favourable terms by either stopping or diverting gas for its own domestic use at a time of heightened tensions between Ukraine and Russia. As a result, the EU was directly drawn into the conflict between them, infructuating Moscow’s pressure tactics for a long.

    Moscow has made numerous attempts in the past to bypass Ukraine by constructing alternate pipelines. Nord Stream, the most popular of them, was conceived in 1997, as an attempt to decrease the leverage of the transit states. The pipeline was described as the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pipeline” by Polish Defence Minister Radoslaw Sirkosi for the geoeconomic influence it gave to Russia. [11] Another project – the South Stream – was aimed at providing gas to the Balkans, and through it to Austria and Italy. The pipeline was conceived in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution and its construction was motivated by geoeconomics, rather than economic viability. It would have led to Russia bypassing Ukraine in delivering gas to the Balkans and Central Europe, thus seizing its significant leverage, and relegating it to vulnerable positions in which Moscow could have eliminated the gas subsidies Ukraine was being provided. [12]As a result of economic unviability, the project was abandoned in 2014.

    To a certain extent, the European Union has been complicit in making matters worse for Russia. For instance, during the 2009 ‘Gas War’ – that began due to Ukraine’s non-payment of gas debt to Russia – instead of holding Ukraine accountable, the EU countries blamed Russia for the gas crisis in Europe and asked Russia to resume gas supply to Ukraine. Later, realising the importance of Ukraine as a transit country, it reached an agreement with Kyiv that “recognized the importance of the further expansion and modernization of Ukraine’s gas transit system as an indispensable pillar of the common European energy infrastructure, and the fact that Ukraine is a strategic partner for the EU gas sector”. The agreement excluded Russia as a party, which saw it as undermining the collaboration between itself and Ukraine, and injuring its influence on the country. [13] The Russian grievance becomes even more palpable when we view the significant gas subsidies it has provided to Ukraine for more than two decades. 

    Similarly, the EU countries viewed Nord Stream 2 from a geostrategic and geo-economic perspective. In December last year, German Economic Affairs Minister Robert Habeck warned Russia of halting Nord Stream 2 if it attacks Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was quoted saying that he would do ‘anything’ to ensure that Ukraine remains a transit country for Russian gas. [14] In fact, the pipeline – that is set to double the capacity of gas delivered to the EU – has faced opposition from almost all Western European countries, the US, the EU as well as Ukraine, which has described it as ‘A dangerous Geopolitical Weapon’. [15] The pipeline had raised concerns amongst Ukrainians of losing a restraining factor on Moscow’s behaviour. [16] However, with the pipeline still inoperable, the Kremlin has already made the restraining factor ineffective.

    The Security Objective

    The Russian Federation is a country which spreads from the European Continent to Asia. In this giant nation, the hospitable region where people live is mainly on the European side, which also comprises main cities like St. Petersburg, Volgograd and the Capital City Moscow. Throughout history, Russia has seen invasions by Napoleon as well as Hitler, and the main area through which these invasions and wars happened was through Ukrainian land which gave them direct access to Russia – due to the lack of any geographical barriers. It was certainly a contributing factor towards the initial success of these invasions. Today, we might understand these events as Russia’s sense of vulnerability and insecurity if history is any indicator. 

    The Russian Federation also follows a similar approach to ensuring its security, survival and territorial integrity. Russia’s interest in Ukraine is as much geopolitical as cultural. Since Russians and Ukrainians were intrinsically linked through their culture and language, Ukraine quickly came to be seen as Russian land, with Ukrainians being recognized as ‘Little Russians’ (Kubicek, 2008), as compared to the “Great Russians”. They were consequently denied the formation of a distinct Ukrainian identity. Putin gave substance to this sentiment as, according to a US diplomatic cable leak, he had “implicitly challenged the territorial integrity of Ukraine, suggesting that Ukraine was an artificial creation sewn together from the territory of Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and especially Russia in the aftermath of the Second World War” during a Russia-NATO Council meeting. [17]

    Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine are ethnically Russian and desire closer ties with Russia. But moving further west, the people become increasingly cosmopolitan and it is mostly this population that seeks greater linkage with the Western European countries and membership into the EU and NATO. This in addition to the Euro Maidan protests is what Putin has used to justify the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The other security consideration was the threat it faced from the likelihood of NATO establishing a base in Crimea given its own presence in Sevastopol in the Black Sea. 

    In the current scenario, the second phase of Russian Military operation in the East and South has shown us the larger vulnerabilities Moscow has which are being countered through control of certain points in the region. By liberating the Donbass region in the east, Russia plans to create a buffer zone between itself and the west to stop future aggression and keep enemies at bay. But the extension of this buffer zone all the way to Odessa is indicative of other strategic considerations. Mariupol in the south of Ukraine is one of the many extended strategic points Russia now controls leading us to ask just why Mariupol is a game-changer in this conflict?

    The port city of Mariupol is a small area geographically, but it provides the land bridge for the Russian forces in the Crimean Peninsula to join the Military operation in the Donbas region. Moreover, it gives Russia a land bridge to Crimea from the Russian Mainland. According to General Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander of UK Joint Forces Command, Mariupol is crucial to Russia’s offensive movement, – “When the Russians feel they have successfully concluded that battle, they will have completed a land bridge from Russia to Crimea and they will see this a major strategic success.” [18]

    Source: ISW (Assessment on 09 May, 2022)

    If the port city of Mariupol is important for the creation of a land corridor, then the Sea of Azov which is adjacent to it is even more important due to its strategic position. [19] The three geopolitical reasons why this sea is important are as follows:

    1. The Sea of Azov is a major point for the economic and military well-being of Ukraine. Proximity to the frontlines of the Donbass region where the fighting between Ukrainian forces and Pro-Russian separatists is taking place makes the control of this sea vital to the Russian military as it helps weaken Ukrainian defence in the region via control of the Kerch Strait.
    2. Controlling the Sea of Azov is strategically important for Russia, to maintain its control in the Crimean Peninsula, which allows Moscow to resupply its forces through the Strait of Kerch.
    3. Finally, it also involves Eurasian politics into why Russia needs to control this region and here the discussion of the Volga-Don canal which links the Caspian Sea with the Sea of Azov comes to the fore. Russia has always used this canal to move warships between the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea and project its power in both regions. Moreover, Russia sees this connection as a significant strategic advantage in any future crisis.

    If Mariupol and the Sea of Azov are considered the most important strategically valuable features by Russia, there also exists the crucial points of Kherson and Odessa which will give Russia complete dominance of the Ukrainian coast line, thus giving larger access and control in the Black Sea region that has the potential to be militarised in the future in conflicts with the West. Moreover, it gives Russia a land corridor to Transnistria which is a Pro-Russian separatist area in Moldova and an opening into the Romanian border through Odessa, thus balancing the build-up of NATO forces in the region. 

    Conclusion

    The Ukrainian crisis is as much the West’s doing as Russia’s and an ear sympathetic to the Russian narrative might even say that the West took advantage of Russia when it was vulnerable immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in negotiations regarding the German state reunification and NATO enlargement.

    The bottom line is that, presently, Putin views NATO as an existential security threat to the Russian state and sees the US and its allies’ support of Ukraine as a challenge. Ukraine’s membership in the EU and NATO is a non-starter for Russia and pitting a Ukraine, that has a symbiotic relationship with Russia at all levels, against a slightly diminished but still formidable great power will have consequences for the security architecture and geopolitics of the region.  The Ukrainian crisis is as much the West’s doing as Russia’s and an ear sympathetic to the Russian narrative might even say that the West took advantage of Russia when it was vulnerable immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in negotiations regarding the German state reunification and NATO enlargement. On some level, NATO countries recognize the fact that Ukraine and Georgia can never be allowed membership into the North Atlantic alliance because the alternative of wilfully ignoring Russia’s security and national interests is just a recipe for disaster and might just launch the region into the single biggest armed conflict since World War 2. 

    References:

    [1] The White House. (2022, January 20). Remarks by president Biden in the press conference. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/01/19/remarks-by-president-biden-in-press-conference-6/

    [2] Savranskaya, S., Blanton, T. S., & Zubok, V. (2010). Masterpieces of history: The peaceful end of the Cold War in Europe, 1989. Central European University Press.

    [3] Putin, Vladimir. “Rossiya na Rubezhe Tysyacheletii,” Nesavisimaya Gazeta, December 30, 1999, quoted in D’Anieri, Paul (2019). Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War. Cambridge University Press.

    [4] Ibid

    [5] Rettie, J. and James Meek, “Battle for Soviet Navy,” The Guardian, January 10, 1992

    [6] Ibid, no. iii

    [7] Solchanyk, R., Ukraine and Russia: The Post-Soviet Transition. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. 2000.

    [8] Goldgeier, J. and Michael McFaul. “Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia after the Cold War”, Brookings Institution Press, 2003

    [9] Ibid, no. iii

    [10]  The comment was made by Gleb Pavlovskii, a Russian Political Scientist. quoted in Ben Judah (2013), Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 85.

    [11] Ibid, no. iii

    [12] Wigell, M. and  A. Vihma, Geopolitics versus geoeconomics: the case of Russia’s geostrategy and its effects on the EU. International Affairs, 92: 605-627. May 6, 2016

    [13] Ibid, no. iii

    [14] Harper, J. (2021, December 23). Nord stream 2: Who wins, who loses? Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-who-wins-who-loses/a-60223801

    [15] Ukraine: Nord stream 2 a ‘dangerous geopolitical weapon’. (2021, August 22). DW.COM. https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-nord-stream-2-a-dangerous-geopolitical-weapon/a-58950076

    [16] Pifer, S. “Nord Stream 2: Background, Objectives and Possible Outcomes”, Brookings, April 2021 https://www.brookings.edu/research/nord-stream-2-background-objections-and-possible-outcomes/

    [17] WikiLeaks. (2008, August 14). UKRAINE, MAP, AND THE GEORGIA-RUSSIA CONFLICT, Canonical ID:08USNATO290_a. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08USNATO290_a.html

    [18] Gardner, F. (2022, March 21). Mariupol: Why Mariupol is so important to Russia’s plan. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60825226

    [19] Blank, S. (2018, November 6). Why is the Sea of Azov so important? Atlantic Council. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/why-is-the-sea-of-azov-so-important/

    Featured Image Credits: Financial Times

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    TPF Analysis Series on Russia – Ukraine Conflict #1
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  • Towards a New Movement of Non-Alignment: Politics of John Mearsheimer and Alexander Dugin

    Towards a New Movement of Non-Alignment: Politics of John Mearsheimer and Alexander Dugin

    Only last August, the U.S. had to leave Afghanistan in disgrace, leaving behind a destroyed country – and now they suddenly appear as the guardians of freedom, human rights and as the leading power of the West?

    Without equating Russia and the USA, they are very similar in their foreign policy behaviour. Despite all the problems under Trump, the U.S. is and remains a democracy in which human rights can be litigated. Russia is only formally an (electoral) democracy, as Putin himself once put it, a managed democracy in which human rights can hardly be claimed. Despite this fundamental difference, it is quite astonishing how the past 20 years have been forgotten in the West. Were the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya always and in every respect legitimate? Weren’t hundreds of thousands of people killed in them and by no means always only the soldiers? Only last August, the U.S. had to leave Afghanistan in disgrace, leaving behind a destroyed country – and now they suddenly appear as the guardians of freedom, human rights and as the leading power of the West? Conversely, we need to realize that while the U.S. would advocate regime change in Russia as well, does this legitimize all the actions of the Russian leadership and the Russian army?

    It is not only questionable whether Mearsheimer had the ear of the U.S. government – much more decisive is that he not only presents an analysis but in a sense naturalizes the struggle for spheres of influence and large areas. 

    And in essence, Mearsheimer can hardly hide the fact that neo-realism has models in the large-area policy of the Nazis and at least that of Carl Schmitt.

    To find an explanation for the conflict over Ukraine, two theorists are very often referred to, John Mearsheimer from the U.S. and Alexander Dugin from Russia. The defenders of Russia resort to the line of thought of the neo-realists, which was significantly influenced by Mearsheimer. And Mearsheimer argues that Ukraine is not the issue at all, but rather a global political showdown between the United States and Russia over spheres of influence. He attests that the Russian side under Putin is only reacting to a covert war of the USA – with the means at their disposal. And with countries like Sweden, Finland and even Switzerland soon to join NATO, the U.S. strategy – if the government in Washington had stuck to Mearsheimer’s indirect script – would have been extremely successful. The unity of the West under U.S. leadership has also been restored overnight. Mearsheimer is always used in this context as evidence of the true intentions of the U.S. and the real culprit in this war. However, it is not only questionable whether Mearsheimer had the ear of the U.S. government – much more decisive is that he not only presents an analysis but in a sense naturalizes the struggle for spheres of influence and large areas. For the next step, if one were to share his views, one would have to concede such a policy to the US as well? And in essence, Mearsheimer can hardly hide the fact that neo-realism has models in the large-area policy of the Nazis and at least that of Carl Schmitt.

    Dugin’s vision of Eurasia, on the other hand, is ideologically determined. But from his writings can be read the will to reconquer the Baltic states and large parts of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty after Ukraine and to achieve at least Russian hegemony in Europe.

    The same applies to the dreams of Alexander Dugin, a neo-fascist ideologue who has at times been said to be particularly close to Vladimir Putin. Just as with Mearsheimer, the government action of Russia cannot be traced to his ideologue, but there are similarities here as well. Dugin, too, starts from large spaces and, like Putin, includes in his considerations the great Eurasian project, the political-ideological linking of Asia and Europe under Russian leadership. And indeed, this perspective already exists in the Chinese New Silk Road and is being built up economically by President Xi and the Chinese leadership with billions of Yuan. Dugin’s vision of Eurasia, on the other hand, is ideologically determined. But from his writings can be read the will to reconquer the Baltic states and large parts of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty after Ukraine and to achieve at least Russian hegemony in Europe.

    What seems progressive here at first glance is the rejection of human equality – at its core, Dugin is concerned with a strictly hierarchical, estates-based society in which “white, male Europeans” are at the top.

    In this way, Dugin positioned himself as an outstanding representative of geopolitical thought as well as a mastermind of a “Eurasian” – as opposed to “Atlantic” – cultural space. This corresponds to the “fourth political theory” he postulates, which, after liberalism, fascism and communism, is most likely to ensure the survival of mankind in the age of globalization in his view. Dugin’s theoretical advisers, besides Heidegger, is the French founder of the “Nouvelle Droite,” Alain de Benoist.  All political systems of modernity are accordingly the results of three ideologies: The first and oldest, he says, is liberal democracy, the second is Marxism, and the third is fascism. The latter has long since failed, banished from history; the first no longer functions as an ideology, but as something taken for granted. The world today is on the brink of a post-political reality in which the values of liberalism are so deeply ingrained that the average person is not even aware of the effect of an ideology in his environment. Thus, liberalism threatens to monopolize political discourse, to flood the world with a universalistic sameness, and to destroy everything that makes different cultures and peoples unique. What seems progressive here at first glance is the rejection of human equality – at its core, Dugin is concerned with a strictly hierarchical, estates-based society in which “white, male Europeans” are at the top.

    a new policy of the Non-Aligned Movement is necessary, because as understandable as partisanship may be due to the suffering in Ukraine, we should not allow ourselves to be instrumentalized by either side.

    At their core, Mearsheimer and equally Dugin are representatives of a neo-colonial policy, in that they want to divide the whole world into their spheres of influence. This is what the U.S. has been trying to do since 2001 and now Russia as well. Still unclear is the role of China, which has not yet made a final decision and sees itself equally threatened by both visions. Instead of taking sides for one of the two positions, a new policy of the Non-Aligned Movement is necessary, because as understandable as partisanship may be due to the suffering in Ukraine, we should not allow ourselves to be instrumentalized by either side. Foreign Minister Lavrov had spoken of the need for a balanced world order during his visit to New Delhi. It would be of fundamental importance if Russia were to adhere to this itself. The real actors in such a balanced world order, however, would be the middle powers in a new movement of non-aligned states.

    Feature Image Credit: ipis.ir

  • The Military Situation in Ukraine

    The Military Situation in Ukraine

    Understanding the war in Ukraine is a challenge as all the available information is mired in Western Propaganda. However, there are sane voices of scholars like John Mearsheimer and a small group of excellent professionals and military veterans who provide extremely accurate analysis to ensure we get the true picture of this geopolitical contest between Russia and the US and NATO. Jacques Baud is a former Colonel of the General Staff, intelligence expert in NATO, and ex-member of the Swiss intelligence, and specialist on Eastern countries.

    In this excellent analysis, Jacques Baud brings out how the US and NATO have created conditions for the war and are using Ukraine as the sacrificial pawn in their proxy war against Russia. Jacques Baud demolishes the West’s propaganda about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb 24th and traces the start of the war to Feb 16th by the US and NATO.  Contrary to the American propaganda, he sees Putin as the master strategist. The end of this conflict will usher in a new multi-polar world order, in which the West may cease to be the rule maker.

    TPF is immensely happy to republish this article through the gracious courtesy of Centre Francaise de Recherche sure le Renseignement. 

    Capitulation – 1946 painting by Soviet Artist Pyotr Aleksandrovich Krivonogov, a veteran of The Great Patriotic War

     

    PART ONE: ON THE ROAD TO WAR

    For years, from Mali to Afghanistan, I worked for peace and risked my life for it. It is therefore not a question of justifying the war, but of understanding what led us to it. I note that the “experts” who take turns on the television sets analyze the situation based on dubious information, most often hypotheses turned into facts, and therefore we no longer manage to understand what is happening. That’s how you create panic.

    The problem is not so much who is right in this conflict, but how our leaders make their decisions.

    Let’s try to examine the roots of the conflict. It starts with those who for the past eight years have been talking to us about “separatists” or “independence” from the Donbas. It’s wrong. The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in May 2014 were not ”  independence ” (независимость) referendums, as some unscrupulous journalists claimed, but ”  self-determination  ” or ”  autonomy (самостоятельность). The term “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case, and the term “Russian speakers” would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.

    In fact, these republics did not seek to separate from Ukraine, but to have a statute of autonomy guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language. Because the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the overthrow of President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 which made Russian an official language. A bit as if putschists decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages ​​in Switzerland.

    This decision causes a storm in the Russian-speaking population. This resulted in fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odesa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which began in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and a few massacres (in Odesa and Mariupol, for the most important). At the end of summer 2014, only the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk remained.

    At this stage, too rigid and stuck in a doctrinaire approach to the operational art, the Ukrainian staff suffered the enemy without succeeding in imposing themselves. Examination of the course of the fighting in 2014-2016 in the Donbas shows that the Ukrainian general staff systematically and mechanically applied the same operational plans. However, the war waged by the autonomists was then very close to what we observed in the Sahel: very mobile operations carried out with light means. With a more flexible and less doctrinaire approach, the rebels were able to exploit the inertia of the Ukrainian forces to “trap” them repeatedly.

    In 2014, I am at NATO, responsible for the fight against the proliferation of small arms, and we are trying to detect Russian arms deliveries to the rebels in order to see if Moscow is involved. The information that we receive then comes practically all from the Polish intelligence services and does not “match” with the information from the OSCE: in spite of rather crude allegations, we do not observe any delivery of arms and materials Russian military.

    The rebels are armed thanks to the defections of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units which cross over to the rebel side. As the Ukrainian failures progressed, the entire tank, artillery or anti-aircraft battalions swelled the ranks of the autonomists. This is what drives the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Accords.

    But, just after signing the Minsk 1 Accords, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a vast anti-terrorist operation (ATO/Антитерористична операція) against Donbas. Bis repetita placent: poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat at Debaltsevo which forced them to commit to the Minsk 2 Agreements…

    It is essential to recall here that the Minsk 1 (September 2014) and Minsk 2 (February 2015) Agreements provided for neither the separation nor the independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine. Those who have read the Accords (they are very, very, very few) will find that it is written in full that the status of the republics was to be negotiated between Kyiv and the representatives of the republics, for an internal solution in Ukraine.

    This is why since 2014, Russia has systematically demanded their application while refusing to be a party to the negotiations, because it was an internal matter for Ukraine. On the other side, the Westerners – led by France – have systematically tried to replace the Minsk Accords with the “Normandy format”, which put Russians and Ukrainians face to face. However, let us remember, there were never any Russian troops in the Donbas before February 23-24, 2022. Moreover, OSCE observers have never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbas. Thus, the US intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021, does not show Russian troops in Donbas.

    In October 2015, Vasyl Hrytsak, director of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), confessed that only 56 Russian fighters had been observed in the Donbas. It was even comparable to that of the Swiss going to fight in Bosnia during the weekends, in the 1990s, or the French who are going to fight in Ukraine today.

    The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor Anatoly Matios said that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbas: 891 from disease, 318 from traffic accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisoning (alcohol, drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from breaches of safety rules, 228 from murder and 615 from suicide.

    In fact, the army is undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoys the support of the population. According to a UK Home Office report, when reservists were called up in March-April 2014, 70% did not show up for the first session, 80% for the second, 90% for the third and 95% for the fourth. In October/November 2017, 70% of callers did not show up during the “  Autumn 2017  ” callback campaign. This does not include suicides and desertions(often for the benefit of the autonomists) which reach up to 30% of the workforce in the ATO zone. Young Ukrainians refuse to go and fight in the Donbas and prefer emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the country’s demographic deficit.

    The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense then turned to NATO to help it make its armed forces more “attractive”. Having already worked on similar projects within the framework of the United Nations, I was asked by NATO to participate in a program intended to restore the image of the Ukrainian armed forces. But it’s a long process and the Ukrainians want to go quickly.

    Thus, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. They are essentially made up of foreign mercenaries, often far-right activists. As of 2020, they constitute around 40% of Ukraine’s forces and number around 102,000 men according to Reuters. They are armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There are more than 19 nationalities – including Swiss.

    Western countries have therefore clearly created and supported Ukrainian far-right militias. In October 2021, the Jerusalem Post sounded the alarm by denouncing the Centuria project. These militias have been operating in the Donbas since 2014, with Western support. Even if we can discuss the term “Nazi”, the fact remains that these militias are violent, convey a nauseating ideology and are virulently anti-Semitic. Their anti-Semitism is more cultural than political, which is why the adjective “Nazi” is not really appropriate. Their hatred of the Jew comes from the great famines of the years 1920-1930 in Ukraine, resulting from the confiscation of crops by Stalin in order to finance the modernization of the Red Army. However, this genocide – known in Ukraine as the Holodomor – was perpetrated by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) whose upper echelons of leadership were mainly made up of Jews. That is why, today, Ukrainian extremists are asking Israel to apologize for the crimes of communism, as the Jerusalem Post reports. We are therefore a long way from a “  rewriting of history  ” by Vladimir Putin.

    These militias, stemming from the far-right groups that led the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, are made up of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of that of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division, which is the object of real veneration in Ukraine, for having liberated Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943, before perpetrating the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944, in France.

    Among the famous figures of the Azov regiment was the opponent Roman Protassevich, arrested in 2021 by the Belarusian authorities following the case of RyanAir flight FR4978. On May 23, 2021, there is talk of the deliberate hijacking of an airliner by a MiG-29 – with Putin’s agreement, of course – to arrest Protassevich, although the information then available does not confirm this scenario in any way.

    But it must then be shown that President Lukashenko is a thug and Protassevich a “journalist” in love with democracy. However, a rather edifying investigation produced by an American NGO in 2020, highlighted Protassevich’s far-right militant activities. Western conspiracy then sets in motion and unscrupulous media “groom” his biography. Finally, in January 2022, the ICAO report is published and shows that despite some procedural errors, Belarus acted in accordance with the rules in force and that the MiG-29 took off 15 minutes after the RyanAir pilot decided to land in Minsk. So no Belarus plot and even less with Putin. Ah!… One more detail: Protassevich,cruelly tortured by Belarusian police, is now free. Those who would like to correspond with him can go to his Twitter account.

    The labelling of “Nazi” or “neo-Nazi” given to Ukrainian paramilitaries is considered Russian propaganda. Perhaps; but that is not the opinion of The Times of Israel, the Simon Wiesenthal Center or the Counterterrorism Center at West Point Academy. But this remains debatable, because, in 2014, Newsweek magazine seemed to associate them with… the Islamic State. A choice!

    So the West supports and continues to arm militias that have been guilty of numerous crimes against civilian populations since 2014: rape, torture and massacres. But while the Swiss government has been very quick to impose sanctions against Russia, it has not adopted any against Ukraine, which has been slaughtering its own population since 2014. In fact, those who defend the rights of the men in Ukraine have long condemned the actions of these groups, but have not been followed by our governments. Because, in reality, we are not trying to help Ukraine, but to fight Russia.

    The integration of these paramilitary forces into the National Guard was not at all accompanied by a “denazification”, as some claim. Among the many examples, that of the insignia of the Azov Regiment is edifying:

     

    In 2022, very schematically, the Ukrainian armed forces fighting the Russian offensive are structured as:

    – Army, subordinate to the Ministry of Defence: it is articulated in 3 army corps and composed of manoeuvre formations (tanks, heavy artillery, missiles, etc.).

    – National Guard, which depends on the Ministry of the Interior and is articulated in 5 territorial commands.

    The National Guard is therefore a territorial defence force that is not part of the Ukrainian army. It includes paramilitary militias, called ”  volunteer battalions” (добровольчі батальйоні), also known by the evocative name of ”  retaliatory battalions  “, composed of infantry. Mainly trained for urban combat, they now ensure the defence of cities such as Kharkov, Mariupol, Odesa, Kyiv, etc.

    PART II: THE WAR

    The former head of the Warsaw Pact forces in the Swiss strategic intelligence service, I observe with sadness – but not astonishment – ​​that our services are no longer in a position to understand the military situation in Ukraine. The self-proclaimed “experts” who parade across our screens wirelessly relay the same information modulated by the assertion that Russia – and Vladimir Putin – is irrational. Let’s take a step back.

    • THE OUTBREAK OF WAR

    Since November 2021, the Americans have constantly brandished the threat of a Russian invasion against Ukraine. However, the Ukrainians do not seem to agree. Why?

    We have to go back to March 24, 2021. On that day, Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree for the reconquest of Crimea and began to deploy his forces towards the south of the country. Simultaneously, several NATO exercises were conducted between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, accompanied by a significant increase in reconnaissance flights along the Russian border. Russia then conducts a few exercises to test the operational readiness of its troops and show that it is following the evolution of the situation.

    Things calm down until October-November with the end of the ZAPAD 21 exercises, whose troop movements are interpreted as a reinforcement for an offensive against Ukraine. However, even the Ukrainian authorities refute the idea of ​​Russian preparations for a war and Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukrainian Minister of Defense declares that there has been no change on its border since the spring.

    In violation of the Minsk Accords, Ukraine is conducting aerial operations in Donbas using drones, including at least one strike against a fuel depot in Donetsk in October 2021. The American press points this out, but not the Europeans and no one condemns these violations.

    In February 2022, events rush. On February 7, during his visit to Moscow, Emmanuel Macron reaffirms to Vladimir Putin his attachment to the Minsk Accords, a commitment he will repeat after his interview with Volodymyr Zelensky the next day. But on February 11, in Berlin, after 9 hours of work, the meeting of the political advisers of the leaders of the ”  Normandy format  “ ends, without a concrete result: the Ukrainians still and always refuse to apply the Accordsof Minsk, apparently under pressure from the United States. Vladimir Putin then notes that Macron has made empty promises to him and that the West is not ready to enforce the Accords, as they have been doing for eight years.

    Ukrainian preparations in the contact zone continue. The Russian Parliament is alarmed and on February 15 asks Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the Republics, which he refuses.

    On February 17, President Joe Biden announces that Russia will attack Ukraine in the coming days. How does he know? Mystery… But since the 16th, the artillery shelling of the populations of Donbas has increased dramatically, as shown by the daily reports of OSCE observers. Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacts and intervenes. We will say later that this is Russian disinformation. In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries purposely glossed over the massacre of the people of Donbas, knowing that it would provoke Russian intervention.

    At the same time, there are reports of acts of sabotage in the Donbas. On January 18, Donbas fighters intercept saboteurs equipped with Western equipment and speaking Polish seeking to create chemical incidents in Gorlivka. They could be CIA mercenaries, led or “advised” by Americans and made up of Ukrainian or European fighters, to carry out sabotage actions in the Donbas Republics.

    In fact, as early as February 16, Joe Biden knows that the Ukrainians have begun to shell the civilian populations of Donbas, putting Vladimir Putin in front of a difficult choice: to help Donbas militarily and create an international problem or to sit idly by and watch the Russian speakers. from the Donbas being run over.

    If he decides to intervene, Vladimir Putin can invoke the international obligation of “  Responsibility To Protect  ” (R2P). But he knows that whatever its nature or scale, the intervention will trigger a shower of sanctions. Therefore, whether its intervention is limited to the Donbas or whether it goes further to put pressure on the West for the status of Ukraine, the price to be paid will be the same. This is what he explains in his speech on February 21.

    That day, he acceded to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Republics of Donbas and, in the process, he signed treaties of friendship and assistance with them.

    The Ukrainian artillery bombardments on the populations of Donbas continued and, on February 23, the two Republics requested military aid from Russia. On the 24th, Vladimir Putin invokes Article 51 of the United Nations Charter which provides for mutual military assistance within the framework of a defensive alliance.

    In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public, we deliberately obscure the fact that the war actually started on February 16th. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbas as early as 2021, as certain Russian and European intelligence services were well aware… The lawyers will judge.

    In his speech on February 24, Vladimir Putin stated the two objectives of his operation: to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine. It is therefore not a question of seizing Ukraine, nor even, in all likelihood, of occupying it and certainly not of destroying it.

    From there, our visibility on the progress of the operation is limited: the Russians have excellent security of operations (OPSEC) and the detail of their planning is not known. But fairly quickly, the course of operations makes it possible to understand how the strategic objectives were translated into the operational plan.

    – Demilitarization:

    . ground destruction of Ukrainian aviation, air defence systems and reconnaissance assets;

    . neutralization of command and intelligence structures (C3I), as well as the main logistics routes in the depth of the territory;

    . encirclement of the bulk of the Ukrainian army massed in the southeast of the country.

    – Denazification:

    . destruction or neutralization of volunteer battalions operating in the cities of Odesa, Kharkov and Mariupol, as well as in various facilities on the territory.

    • THE “DEMILITARIZATION”

    The Russian offensive proceeds in a very “classic” manner. At first – as the Israelis had done in 1967 – with the destruction on the ground of the air forces in the very first hours. Then, we witness a simultaneous progression on several axes according to the principle of “flowing water”: we advance wherever resistance is weak and we leave the cities (very voracious in troops) for later. To the north, the Chernobyl plant is occupied immediately to prevent acts of sabotage. The images of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers jointly guarding the plant are naturally not shown…

    The idea that Russia is trying to take over Kyiv, the capital, to eliminate Zelensky, typically comes from the West: this is what they did in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and what they wanted to do in Syria with the help of the Islamic State. But Vladimir Putin never intended to take down or overthrow Zelensky. On the contrary, Russia seeks to keep him in power by pushing him to negotiate by encircling Kyiv. He had refused to do so far to apply the Minsk Accords, but now the Russians want to obtain Ukraine’s neutrality.

    Many Western commentators marvelled that the Russians continued to seek a negotiated solution while conducting military operations. The explanation is in the Russian strategic conception, since Soviet times. For Westerners, war begins when politics ceases. However, the Russian approach follows a Clausewitzian inspiration: war is the continuity of politics and one can pass fluidly from one to the other, even during combat. This creates pressure on the opponent and pushes him to negotiate.

    From an operational point of view, the Russian offensive was an example of its kind: in six days, the Russians seized a territory as vast as the United Kingdom, with a speed of advance greater than what the Wehrmacht made in 1940.

    The bulk of the Ukrainian army was deployed in the south of the country for a major operation against Donbas. This is why the Russian forces were able to encircle it from the beginning of March in the “cauldron” between Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, by a thrust coming from the east via Kharkov and another coming from the south from the Crimea. The troops of the Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (RPL) complete the action of the Russian forces with a push from the East.

    At this stage, the Russian forces are slowly tightening the noose, but are no longer under time pressure. Their objective of demilitarization is practically achieved and the residual Ukrainian forces no longer have an operational and strategic command structure.

    The “slowdown” that our “experts” attribute to poor logistics is only the consequence of having achieved the objectives set. Russia does not seem to want to engage in an occupation of the whole Ukrainian territory. In fact, it seems rather that Russia is trying to limit its advance to the country’s linguistic border.

    Our media speak of indiscriminate bombardments against civilian populations, particularly in Kharkov, and Dantesque images are broadcast on a loop. However, Gonzalo Lira, a Latin American who lives there, presents us with a calm city on March 10, and on March 11. Admittedly, it’s a big city and you can’t see everything, but that seems to indicate that we are not in the total war that we are being served continuously on our screens.

    As for the Republics of Donbas, they have “liberated” their own territories and are fighting in the city of Mariupol.

    • “DENAZIFICATION”

    In cities like Kharkov, Mariupol and Odesa, defence is provided by paramilitary militias. They know that the objective of “denazification” is aimed primarily at them.

    For an attacker in an urbanized area, civilians are a problem. This is why Russia seeks to create humanitarian corridors to empty the cities of civilians and leave only the militias in order to fight them more easily.

    Conversely, these militias seek to keep civilians in the cities in order to dissuade the Russian army from coming to fight there. This is why they are reluctant to implement these corridors and do everything so that Russian efforts are in vain: they can thus use the civilian population as “human shields”. Videos showing civilians trying to leave Mariupol and being beaten up by fighters from the Azov regiment are naturally carefully censored here.

    On Facebook, the Azov group was considered in the same category as the Islamic State and subject to the platform’s ”  dangerous individuals and organizations policy  “. It was therefore forbidden to glorify him, and the “posts” that were favourable to him were systematically banned. But on February 24, Facebook changed its policy and allowed posts favourable to the militia. In the same spirit, in March, the platform authorizes, in the former Eastern European countries, calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders. So much for the values ​​that inspire our leaders, as we will see.

    Our media propagate a romantic image of popular resistance. It is this image that has led the European Union to finance the distribution of arms to the civilian population. It is a criminal act. In my role as chief of doctrine for peacekeeping operations at the UN, I worked on the issue of the protection of civilians. We then saw that violence against civilians took place in very specific contexts. Especially when weapons abound and there are no command structures.

    Now, these command structures are the essence of armies: their function is to channel the use of force according to an objective. By arming citizens in a haphazard fashion as is currently the case, the EU turns them into combatants, with the attendant consequences: potential targets. Moreover, without command, without operational goals, the distribution of arms inevitably leads to settling of scores, banditry and actions that are more deadly than effective. War becomes a matter of emotions. Force becomes violence. This is what happened in Tawarga (Libya) from August 11 to 13, 2011, where 30,000 black Africans were massacred with weapons parachuted (illegally) by France. Moreover, the British Royal Institute for Strategic Studies(RUSI) sees no added value in these arms deliveries.

    Moreover, by delivering arms to a country at war, one exposes oneself to being considered as a belligerent. The Russian strikes on March 13, 2022, against the Mykolaiv airbase follow Russian warnings that weapons transports would be treated as hostile targets.

    The EU repeats the disastrous experience of the Third Reich in the last hours of the Battle of Berlin. War should be left to the military and when one side has lost, it should be admitted. And if there is to be resistance, it must imperatively be led and structured. However, we are doing exactly the opposite: we are pushing citizens to go and fight and at the same time, Facebook is allowing calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders. So much for the values ​​that inspire us.

    In some intelligence services, this irresponsible decision is seen as a way of using the Ukrainian population as cannon fodder to fight Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This kind of murderous decision had to be left to the colleagues of Ursula von der Leyen’s grandfather. It would have been wiser to engage in negotiations and thus obtain guarantees for the civilian populations than to add fuel to the fire. It’s easy to be combative with other people’s blood…

    • MARIUPOL MATERNITY

    It is important to understand beforehand that it is not the Ukrainian army that ensures the defence of Mariupol, but the Azov militia, composed of foreign mercenaries.

    In its summary of the situation on March 7, 2022, the Russian UN mission in New York states that ”  Residents report that the Ukrainian armed forces have expelled the personnel of the Natal Hospital No. 1 from the city of Mariupol and have installed a shooting station inside the establishment. »

    On March 8, the independent Russian media Lenta.ru published the testimony of civilians from Mariupol who said that the maternity hospital was taken over by the militias of the Azov regiment, and chased out the civilian occupants, threatening them with their weapons. They thus confirm the statements of the Russian ambassador a few hours earlier.

    The Mariupol hospital occupies a dominant position, perfectly adequate for installing anti-tank weapons and for observation. On March 9, Russian forces hit the building. According to CNN, there are 17 injured, but the footage shows no casualties on the premises and there is no evidence that the reported casualties are related to this strike. We talk about children, but in reality, we see nothing. It may be true, but it may be false… Which does not prevent EU leaders from seeing it as a war crime … Which allows Zelensky, just afterwards, to claim a no-fly zone over Ukraine…

    In reality, we don’t know exactly what happened. But the sequence of events tends to confirm that the Russian forces struck a position of the Azov regiment and that the maternity ward was then free of all civilians.

    The problem is that the paramilitary militias that ensure the defence of cities are encouraged by the international community not to respect the customs of war. It seems that the Ukrainians have re-enacted the scenario of the maternity hospital in Kuwait City in 1990, which had been completely staged by the firm Hill & Knowlton for the amount of 10.7 million dollars in order to convince the United Nations Security Council to intervene in Iraq for Operation Desert Shield/Storm.

    Western politicians have also accepted strikes against civilians in Donbas for eight years, without adopting any sanctions against the Ukrainian government. We have long since entered into a dynamic where Western politicians have agreed to sacrifice international law to their objective of weakening Russia .

    PART THREE: CONCLUSIONS

     As a former intelligence professional, the first thing that strikes me is the total absence of Western intelligence services in representing the situation for a year. In Switzerland, the services have been criticized for not having provided a correct picture of the situation. In fact, it seems that all over the Western world, the services have been overwhelmed by the politicians. The problem is that it is the politicians who decide: the best intelligence service in the world is useless if the decision-maker does not listen to it. This is what happened during this crisis.

    That said, while some intelligence services had a very precise and rational image of the situation, others clearly had the same image as that propagated by our media. In this crisis, the services of the countries of the “new Europe” played an important role. The problem is that, by experience, I found that they were extremely bad on the analytical level: doctrinaire, they do not have the intellectual and political independence necessary to appreciate a situation with a military “quality”. It is better to have them as enemies than as friends.

    Then, it seems that in some European countries, politicians have deliberately ignored their services to respond ideologically to the situation. This is why this crisis has been irrational from the start. It will be observed that all the documents that have been presented to the public during this crisis have been presented by politicians on the basis of commercial sources…

    Some Western politicians obviously wanted there to be a conflict. In the United States, the attack scenarios presented by Anthony Blinken to the Security Council were only the fruit of the imagination of a Tiger Team working for him  : he did exactly like Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, who thus “bypassed” the CIA and other intelligence services that were far less assertive about Iraqi chemical weapons.

    The dramatic developments we are witnessing today have causes we knew about, but refused to see:

    – on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here);

    – on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;

    – and on the operational level, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian populations of Donbass for years and the dramatic increase at the end of February 2022.

    In other words, we can naturally deplore and condemn the Russian attack. But WE (that is to say: the United States, France and the European Union in the lead) have created the conditions for a conflict to break out. We show compassion for the Ukrainian people and the two million refugees . It’s good. But if we had had a modicum of compassion for the same number of refugees from the Ukrainian populations of Donbass massacred by their own government and who have been accumulating in Russia for eight years, none of this would probably have happened.

     

    Whether the term “genocide” applies to the abuses suffered by the populations of Donbass is an open question. This term is generally reserved for larger cases (Holocaust, etc.), however, the definition given by the Genocide Convention is probably broad enough to apply. Lawyers will appreciate.

    Clearly, this conflict has led us into hysteria. Sanctions seem to have become the preferred tool of our foreign policies. If we had insisted that Ukraine respect the Minsk Accords, which we negotiated and endorsed, none of this would have happened. The condemnation of Vladimir Putin is also ours. There is no point in whining after the fact, we had to act before. However, neither Emmanuel Macron (as guarantor and as a member of the UN Security Council), nor Olaf Scholz, nor Volodymyr Zelensky have respected their commitments. Ultimately, the real defeat is that of those who have no voice.

    The European Union was unable to promote the implementation of the Minsk agreements, on the contrary, it did not react when Ukraine bombarded its own population in the Donbass. Had she done so, Vladimir Putin would not have needed to react. Absent from the diplomatic phase, the EU distinguished itself by fueling the conflict. On February 27, the Ukrainian government agrees to start negotiations with Russia. But a few hours later, the European Union voted a budget of 450 million euros to supply arms to Ukraine, adding fuel to the fire. From there, the Ukrainians feel that they will not need to come to an agreement. The resistance of the Azov militias in Mariupol will even causea raise of 500 million euros for weapons .

    In Ukraine, with the blessing of Western countries, those who are in favor of a negotiation are eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) because he is too favorable to Russia and is considered a traitor. The same fate is reserved for Dmitry Demyanenko, former deputy head of the main directorate of the SBU for Kiev and its region, assassinated on March 10 , because too favorable to an agreement with Russia: he is killed by the Mirotvorets militia (”  Peacemaker  “). This militia is associated with the Mirotvorets website which lists the ”  enemies of Ukraine”, with their personal data, address and telephone numbers, so that they can be harassed or even eliminated  ; a punishable practice in many countries, but not in Ukraine . The UN and some European countries have demanded its closure… refused by the Rada.

    Eventually, the price will be high, but Vladimir Putin will likely achieve the goals he set for himself. Its ties with Beijing have solidified. China emerges as a mediator of the conflict, while Switzerland enters the list of enemies of Russia. The Americans must ask Venezuela and Iran for oil to get out of the energy impasse in which they have gotten themselves: Juan Guaido leaves the scene definitively and the United States must pitifully reverse the sanctions imposed on their enemies.

    Western ministers who seek to collapse the Russian economy and make the Russian people suffer , even calling for the assassination of Putin, show (even if they partially reversed the form of their remarks, but not on bottom!) that our leaders are no better than those we hate. Because, sanctioning Russian athletes from the Para-Olympic Games or Russian artists has absolutely nothing to do with a fight against Putin.

    So, therefore, we recognize that Russia is a democracy since we consider that the Russian people are responsible for the war. If not, then why are we trying to punish an entire population for the fault of one? Remember that collective punishment is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions…

    The lesson to be drawn from this conflict is our sense of variable geometry humanity. If we were so attached to peace and to Ukraine, why didn’t we encourage her more to respect the agreements that she had signed and that the members of the Security Council had approved?

    Media integrity is measured by their willingness to work under the terms of the Munich Charter. They had succeeded in propagating hatred of the Chinese during the Covid crisis and their polarized message leads to the same effects against the Russians . Journalism is stripping itself more and more of professionalism to become militant…

    As Goethe said: “  The greater the light, the darker the shadow  ”. The more the sanctions against Russia are excessive, the more the cases where we have done nothing highlight our racism and our servility. Why has no Western politician reacted to the strikes against the civilian populations of Donbass for eight years?

    After all, what makes the conflict in Ukraine more blameworthy than the war in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya? What sanctions have we adopted against those who have deliberately lied before the international community to wage unjust, unjustified, unjustifiable and murderous wars? Did we try to “make suffer” the American people who had lied to us (because it is a democracy!) before the war in Iraq? Have we even adopted a single sanction against the countries, companies or politicians who are fueling the conflict in Yemen, considered the ”  worst humanitarian disaster in the world  “? Have we sanctioned the countries of the European Union who practice the most abject torture on their territory for the benefit of the United States?

    To ask the question is to answer it… and the answer is not glorious.

     

    Feature Image Credit: Raising the Flag over Reichstag – iconic photo in 1945 by Yevegny Khaldei – kosmofoto.com