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Frank
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A moment in which our world could all change
TONY ABBOTT
Few things have been more telling than the reaction of key countries to the Russian army poised on Ukraine’s borders. Britain and the US have sent antitank and anti-aircraft missiles but no troops. Germany has been reluctant even to threaten sanctions should Russia invade. In shades of Munich, France has championed a peace deal based on changing the Ukrainian constitution to meet Russia’s demands. The only ones to emerge with much credit are Ukrainians, who’ve manned their defences and insisted on their right to conduct an independent foreign policy, including to join NATO and the EU.
But regardless of how this episode plays out, let’s be under no illusion. Vladimir Putin sees himself as the new tsar, a ruler for life, determined to restore greater Russia. To that end he has invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea, occupied the Donbas, killed without compunction opponents at home and abroad, and restored Russia as a military superpower despite an economy smaller than Italy’s.
Ukraine is but his present target because it persists in looking West, not East; and because the 1994 Anglo-American security assurance, in return for the surrender of Soviet-era nuclear weapons, failed to replicate the one-in, all-in provision of article five of the NATO charter. However the stand-off ends, we can be confident Putin’s campaign will continue, remorseless, relentless, by all means up to and including all-out war, until Ukraine becomes a Russian colony. Then his attention will turn to the Baltic States, then to Poland, then to the other former Soviet satellites, until Russia is again the overlord of eastern Europe.
Of course, Putin is not Hitler and Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia, and these are not the 1930s, but there are plenty of disturbing parallels, including a new axis of great powers ready to disturb the peace to get what they want.
A fortnight ago the Russian dictator and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, issued a declaration on international relations entering a new era. We know the type of new era they have in mind from their preposterous claim that Russia and China enjoy “longstanding traditions of democracy”. The main purpose of this Moscow-Beijing axis is to bury, they say, the “political and military alliances of the Cold War era” – so no more NATO, no US troops in Japan and South Korea, and an end to the Pax Americana – through a dictators’ partnership that has “no limits” and no “forbidden areas of co-operation”.
At heart what they both reject is the US-backed world order, a liberal and humane set of understandings and arrangements that has enabled the best time in human history; with the world’s people freer, safer and more prosperous than ever. Even though they’ve both benefited from it, with a half-billion Chinese moving from the Third World to the middle class in scarcely a generation, after US president Bill Clinton bent the rules to admit China to the World Trade Organisation; and with Russia becoming a petro power that can turn Europe’s energy on and off like a tap.
So, with these latter-day dictators clearly on the march, as Lenin once asked: what is to be done? A response to the dictators starts with appreciating that just because war is unthinkable to us doesn’t make it unthinkable to them. Since the beginning of time the strong have always been tempted to take advantage of the weak; and the tough and the hungry have always sought to usurp the indolent and the soft. Throw in what Scottish philosopher David Hume recognised, that passions drive reason, and what’s unthinkable to most can become entirely reasonable to some, especially those on a quest for national glory.
As their adventurism shows, both countries’ exceptionalism includes the conviction that they should dominate their regions, if not the wider world. And, as the five decades after 1945 show, the only way to keep aggressors at bay is collective security, otherwise the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
Take eastern Europe: if it’s Russia against Ukraine, sooner or later Russia will prevail, as Russia ultimately did against Finland in 1940. Take East Asia: if it’s China against Taiwan, China inevitably will prevail. But if it’s Russia or China versus the democracies, one for all and all for one, that’s an entirely different matter.
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Russia will not invade Ukraine (Read 21492 times)
