Tag: WORLD

Those who say we should choose sides should tell us which country has chosen sides in the decades old conflicts we have with China and Pakistan. Even our own neighbours have not, despite the power differential between us and them, writes Kanwal Sibal

India has had strong traditional ties with Russia. After the break-up of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Ukraine as an independent country, India has had friendly ties with it. Our relations with Russia have, of course, a historical depth, which is lacking in our ties with Ukraine. This has to condition our thinking and policies in the current Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The issue of a security architecture in Europe based on the West’s strategy of expanding NATO eastwards or one responding to Russia’s concept of “indivisible security” has been of concern to India only to the extent that US/EU-Russia tensions leading to the imposition of a series of sanctions on Russia by the West have presented challenges to our diplomacy. We have had to protect our national interest by steering our way through, on the one hand, expanding ties with the US and strong ties with major European powers, and, on the other, our “time-tested” trustworthy ties with Russia.

Our interests are not served by choosing sides in the current conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. We are not in alliance with either side and therefore have no treaty obligations to honour. Those who say we should choose sides should tell us which country has chosen sides in the decades old conflicts we have with China and Pakistan. Even our own neighbours have not, despite the power differential between us and them.

The US-China economic relationship is the biggest in the world at the bilateral level and remains so despite China designated as an adversary and the current tensions over Taiwan. The US has over many years helped build communist China that neither believes in a free economy nor free people into a major power, in preference to a democratic India. The US-China relationship continues despite the current Chinese aggression against India in Ladakh. The US has not chosen between India and Pakistan despite the latter’s involvement in terrorism against India over decades and periodic triggering of military conflicts. Europe has not chosen between India and Pakistan or India and China. It has ties with our adversaries to the degree they serve individual country or collective interests.

Russia has been more sensitive to our concerns about Pakistan but has lately expanded its options vis-a-vis Islamabad. Russia is well aware of our problems with China but has not only remained neutral on India-China issues, it has under western geopolitical and economic pressure deepened its strategic ties with China, the implications of which we cannot overlook. Ukraine, of course, has not chosen sides in our conflicts with either Pakistan or China.

If in our joint statements with western countries or Russia terrorism is condemned and, in some cases, Pakistan based terror organisations are mentioned by name, it is because both the West and Russia have deep concerns about the threat of terrorism to their own security, independently of India. They are not taking sides with India; they are accepting that a shared threat from terrorism exists. In the case of Ukraine, India and the West have no shared concern over military threats from Russia.

If moral questions are raised by the West in criticising our neutral position on the Ukraine conflict, it can be equally validly argued that moral questions are equally involved in a jihadi militaristic regime in Pakistan exporting terror to India and an expansionist, bullying autocracy in China exercising its sovereignty claims over Indian territory with military tools.

Beyond all this, larger issues exist that would prevent us from aligning ourselves with the West on the Ukraine issue. Having suffered from western sanctions for decades aimed at obstructing our technological progress in strategic areas, we cannot support sanctions as a matter of principle, be it on Russia or other countries, unless approved by the UN Security Council. It is a different matter that we are forced to comply with unilaterally declared US sanctions in order to protect ourselves from secondary consequences. The policy of imposing sanctions has shown that there is scant regard for the interests of the developing world.

The Ukraine conflict has demonstrated the power of the West to control narratives about a situation or a country. Today, it is Russia, tomorrow it can be another country. India has a taste of it through the narratives being propagated by western media, including the social media, and the NGOs as well about the decline of democracy in India, violation of minority rights, Hindu nationalism, and so on. There is open interference in India’s internal affairs. In this, local Indian elements are complicit, and the goal is to shape India’s politics and society. India has to learn a lesson from the demonisation of Putin and Russia being promoted by western circles, including at the governmental level.

India has been backing the reform of the international system that would give more say to developing countries in international governance. The outlook for this is becoming darker. The fracturing of the international system currently happening will make any consensual reform impossible in the foreseeable future. The UN Security Council, already ineffective on matters of peace and security, will become even more so, with the West ranged on one side, Russia and China on the other, and India and developing countries in between. A false narrative of democracies versus autocracies is being constructed to replace the dichotomy between capitalism and communism during the Cold War. The G7 risks replacing the G20 (in which China and Russia are present) as the preferred forum for global financial management. This will be at the cost of the emerging economies and the furthering weakening of globalisation.

Wrong precedents have been set by confiscating Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, the private properties of Russian businessmen without due process of law and Russia’s expulsion from Swift. Others are closing the western airspace and ports to Russian planes and ships, calls for a blanket ban on visas for Russians to travel to the West, the capping the price of Russian oil etc.

If a call can be made for a regime change in Moscow or trying Putin as a war criminal and collection of evidence for that (egregiously even at the Heathrow airport), or seeking a military defeat of Russia through a proxy war disregarding the nuclear risks involved in confronting the world’s foremost nuclear power along with the US, the non-western world has to take cognisance of the consequences for global peace and cooperation of such excesses.

If India bats for multipolarity, the reasons are many and valid for our own global interests and role as we rise.

(Kanwal Sibal is India’s former Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to Russia. Views expressed are personal and exclusive to India Narrative)

(The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com)

ALSO READ: UNGA Prez meets VP, thanks India for support

Over the last two decades, the US-led order has been facing diverse challenges security, political, economic so that commentators began to believe that a new global order was emerging that was “increasingly multipolar” and defined by several players that are “neo-authoritarian states seeking to expand their influence”…writes Talmiz Ahmad

As Russian troops commenced military operations in Ukraine on 24 February, the reverberations of this event are being felt in different parts of the world and hold out the promise of major changes in international politics.

Fareed Zakaria has described the war as a “seismic event”, perhaps the most significant event in world affairs since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; it marks, in his view, the “end of an age”, though there is no clarity as yet about the new age that will now emerge.

The war marks the culmination of Russia’s resistance to the eastward expansion of the US-led security order in Europe after the end of the Cold War. This was in the shape of NATO membership being provided to countries on Russia’s western frontiers, and even to nations that had once been part of the Soviet Union. This NATO expansion had affirmed the US continued perception of Russia as a security threat to Western interests and the need to perpetuate the world order that, after the Cold War, had the US as the sole global power.

In 1990, the Soviet Union and NATO had reached an agreement that a reunified Germany would join NATO under West Germany’s pre-existing membership, although restrictions were placed on the deployment of NATO troops on former East German territory. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, a number of former Warsaw Pact and post-Soviet states joined NATO — Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic became NATO members in 1999. NATO then facilitated the accession of seven Central and Eastern European countries Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, while two more countries — Albania and Croatiajoined on April 1, 2009.

ALSO READ:F-35 fighters arrive in South Korea

This steady encroachment into Russia’s security space was supplemented by the “Colour Revolutions” the replacement of existing pro-Moscow governments in Russia’s neighbourhood with pro-West leaders, following widespread street protests that, Russia believed, had been organised by western powers. These included: the “Rose” revolution in Georgia (2003); the “Orange” revolution in Ukraine (2004), and the “Tulip” revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005). After this, there were other attempts at regime change, though without the “colour” label: the April revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in 2014, and the agitations in Armenia in 2018.

Towards war in Ukraine

Russia under President Vladimir Putin viewed these initiatives as western attempts to encircle it and place it at a disadvantage vis-a-vis Western powers by depriving it of strategic depth in the West, something Russia had deemed crucial for its interests through much of Czarist Russian and Soviet history. Putin finally drew the line to limit western encroachment in Georgia and Ukraine.

In March 2007, Putin, addressing the annual Munich security conference, said that “NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders.” He added that NATO expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?” In 2008, Russia launched a military offensive against Georgia that brought its troops to the outskirts of the capital. Thereafter, Russia permanently detached two secessionist regions and put them under effective Russian control.

This scenario was repeated in Ukraine. The Obama administration’s involvement in Ukraine’s internal politics in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected president led Russia to seize and annex Crimea. The conflict ended with the Minsk Accords of 2015 that placed restrictions on arms supplies to Ukraine and provided limited self-rule to Ukraine’s Russian-majority eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, the region being referred to as Donbas.

There were violations of both provisions: arms continued to enter Ukraine from western sources (with Russian weaponry coming into Donbas), while elections in the Donbas were thwarted as Ukraine refused to cede full autonomy to the region as its local leaders insisted on, amidst reports that Russian troops were actually involved in backing militants in the Donbas.

In June-November last year, there were apparently positive interactions between Putin and President Joe Biden on the Ukraine issue and larger matters affecting bilateral relations and European security in general, followed by several high-level meetings between US and Russian officials; these gave the impression that the US understood Russian “red-lines” relating to Ukraine.

However, from November itself there were indications that the US was adopting a more hardline position towards Russia. It is likely that sections of the US security establishment were uncomfortable with the president’s accommodative approach towards Russian concerns and encouraged a confrontationist approach. This included: increasing supply of lethal military equipment to Ukraine, rejecting the special status for Ukraine’s eastern provinces, and, through the Charter of Strategic Partnership’ concluded with Ukraine in November 2021, affirming the US commitment to “deepening Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions”, an obvious reference to the country’s NATO membership.

The Russian attack on 24 February was due to what Moscow saw as the massing of Ukrainian troops on the border of the eastern Donbas region and military preparations to bring the region under Ukrainian control, in violation of earlier agreements. In the background of increasing mutual distrust and escalating military movements, the assessment in Moscow at this point was that Russia’s crucial interests would be best served through a pre-emptive attack of its own, thus sending out significant challenges to the prevailing global order.

Challenging the existing world order

During the Cold War, the principal US interest was to maintain its global security interests by resisting the ideological and political challenges from the Soviet Union-led Eastern bloc and maintaining control over the political and economic institutions that it had itself helped to set up after the Second World War. These included the US maintaining 500 military bases in different parts of the world, supported by US-led collective security arrangements in Europe and Asia, i.e., NATO, CENTO and SEATO. These arrangements were complemented by global economic, financial and trade institutions represented by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff (GATT), all of which functioned within the framework of US-prescribed norms and principles, collectively referred to as ‘Western values.’

The Cold War ended with the US and its allies as the apparent victors. This was the US’ unipolar moment, the period when the US enjoyed untrammelled global authority and influence. To safeguard its global hegemony, the US shaped the world order based on two mutually-reinforcing principles market capitalism and ‘liberal’ values. The first retained US influence over the globalised economy, buttressed by the replacement of the GATT by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), that became the instrument to enforce neo-liberal market values worldwide, and the retention of the NATO alliance to maintain US hegemony in Europe.

‘Liberal’ values taken together constituted an attempt to reshape national values on American lines, i.e., upholding the US value system of democracy, human rights and free markets. This came to be referred to as a ‘rules-based liberal world order.’ In the political area, the rules-based order meant that international relations would be shaped not by power but, instead, “international laws and norms [would] restrain the action of states” to avoid global disorder. In the economic arena, free markets would prevail, with no barriers on the free transnational flow of goods, finance, technology, information and human resources. Liberal values, upholding universal political, civil and human rights, would constitute the global standard.

Over the last two decades, the US-led order has been facing diverse challenges security, political, economic so that commentators began to believe that a new global order was emerging that was “increasingly multipolar” and defined by several players that are “neo-authoritarian states seeking to expand their influence.” An observer, Scott Lawless, noted that this is largely due to the US “experiencing a crisis of legitimacy on the world stage”; among other reasons, he cited the fact that the US itself “broke the rules” of the security order by undertaking unilateral military interventions outside the UN framework.

Fareed Zakaria, writing in 2019, was even more forthright: he pointed out that the US “mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies”; he referred specifically to unilateral US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq after the events of 9/11. Commenting on the Trump administration, he simply noted that the president “has abandoned the field” and “what is most notable about Trump’s foreign policy is its absence.” Cooley and Nexon affirmed this view a year later when they said: “US global leadership is not simply in retreat; it is unravelling. And the decline is not cyclical but permanent.”

The pandemic appears to have delivered the fatal blow to the unipolar world order: the US had the highest number of infections and deaths globally, while its president and most of his advisers revealed a remarkable ineptitude in handling the challenge. As Francis Fukuyama then noted: “It was the country’s [US’] singular misfortune to have the most incompetent and divisive leader in its modern history at the helm when the crisis hit.”

The Russia-China alignment

The “neo-authoritarian states” viewed as challenging the US-led order were Russia and China. While both were members of the principal global institutions the UN Security Council, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO — they parted company from the US’ allies in crucial areas: as Richard Haass noted in 2020, in his book, The World: A Brief Introduction, they demonstrated “little or no interest in safeguarding human rights or becoming more liberal or democratic”. Russia, he said, had violated several basic principles of the liberal order, such as respect for borders, while China had adopted aggressive policies in the South China Sea and pursued restrictive trade policies that were inconsistent with WTO rules and norms.

But Hass also admitted that the “liberal world order is now fraying”; this was due to: decline in the US’ relative power, its increasing reluctance to be the global gendarmerie, the rise and increasing assertiveness of Russia and China, and, in general, the rising tide of authoritarianism worldwide. Writing two years later, Fareed Zakaria described the new era as “post-American” and said that “Pax Americana of the past three decades was over”. Other commentators have disagreed: Michael Beckley and Hal Brands asserted in Foreign Affairs immediately after the beginning of the Russian attack on Ukraine that “Putin’s war is fortifying the Democratic alliance” and saw in the war an opportunity for the US and its allies “to get serious about defending the world order that has served them so well.”

To go back a few years, there is little doubt that US hostility to both Russia and China has pushed the latter closer to each other, a trend that was accelerated during the pandemic. From 2014, it was Russia, after the Ukraine attacks, that had evoked western hostility at a time when China was attempting to maintain its economic ties with the US.

However, as the Trump administration shaped US differences with China into an ideological divide and imparted to this confrontation the trappings of a ‘new Cold War,’ Russia and China expanded their relations in economic, energy, military and logistical connectivity areas. Thus, the share of China in Russia’s trade went from 10.5 per cent ($88.8 billion) in 2013, to 15.7 per cent ($108.3 billion) in 2019; in the first quarter of 2020, it became 17.3 per cent ($31.8 billion) of total Russian trade.

Energy became a significant part of the expanding relationship. In April 2020, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as the top oil supplier to China, providing 18 per cent more oil (7.2 million tonnes) than in 2019; in May, Russia sold 19.2 per cent more than the previous year. Russian energy companies and Chinese financiers have developed a mutually beneficial relationship: in 2009, the Russian company, Rosneft, took a loan of $15 billion from the China Development Bank to complete the Eastern Siberian Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline that brings oil to China.

This pattern has continued: in 2013, Rosneft took multibillion-dollar loans from three Chinese oil companies to fund domestic projects; it paid for these loans through sales of oil to China over a 25-year period. In a gas-related transaction in May 2020, the Russian company, Gazprom, revived the $55 billion Power-of-Siberia-2 (POS-2) gas pipeline project to provide 50 billion cubic metres of gas to China. This pipeline will transit through Mongolia and will transport gas from operating fields in eastern Siberia and Yamal.

Railway is the other flourishing area in their expanding bilateral ties: Russia is investing heavily in upgrading the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal-Amur railways that are important transport corridors linking Russian and Chinese markets.

Defence ties between them are also witnessing an upswing since 2014. Russia has provided China with its latest Su-35 multipurpose fighter and the S-400 anti-aircraft missile system. Joint military exercises are a regular occurrence: Chinese troops joined the Russians in the Vostok-2018 exercise, the largest ever post-Cold War exercise. There are annual naval exercises as also joint air patrols.

A new area for cooperation is technology: even as the US and Europe are placing restrictions on Chinese hi-tech products, Russia is increasing its links with China. Huawei is now an important presence in the Russian telecommunications sector, with Russia sharing none of the security concerns that agitate western countries.

Both Russia and China, concerned about possible US sanctions that could deny them access to US-controlled global financial transactions, have begun to reduce their dependence on the dollar in bilateral transactions. In 2015, about 90 per cent of their transactions were designated in US dollars; this became 51 per cent in 2019, and was only 46 per cent in the first quarter of 2020. Russia, on its part, is increasing its reserves of Chinese currency: in 2019, the Bank of Russia reduced its dollar holdings by $101 billion and increased the share of the renminbi in its foreign reserves from 5 renminbi to 15 renminbi , valued at about $44 billion.

There is a substantial strategic aspect to this burgeoning cooperation: given sustained western hostility to the two countries, they know “they need to play as one team,” as Russian commentator Alexander Gabuev has noted. Chinese commentator, Zhao Huirong, has said that Russia and China were working together to build “a platform to find solutions to new crises and challenges through the author is the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE, and Ram Sathe Chair for International Studies, Symbiosis International University, Puneh negotiations.”

Towards this end, the two countries are shaping ‘Eurasia’ as the centre-piece of their bilateral alignment and, over time, as the centre of a new global order.

(Talmiz Ahmad is India’s former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE, and Ram Sathe Chair for International Studies, Symbiosis International University, Pune)

(The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com)