The Ukraine crisis effectively exposes the absence of a strong pushback against revisionist states by the international community
This brief is a part of The Ukraine Crisis: Cause and Course of the Conflict.
The irrepressible Henry Kissinger once said “it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal”. That may be how the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky feels now, as his relentless pursuit westwards disregarding geography, cultural particularities, and history, has bought the Russians knocking at the door. The developments in the Russo-Ukrainian theatre represent a watershed moment in big power play, and a body-blow to the dominance of the Atlantic Bloc. The impassive reaction in the trans-Atlantic policy corridors to President Zelensky’s desperate pleas to follow through on their security assurances as envisaged in the Budapest Memorandum, lays bare the serious limitations of the bloc to respond to determined actors who upend the play rules. It also brings to focus their waning appetite to put boots on distant grounds, promises notwithstanding beyond token gestures and empty posturing.
The developments in the Russo-Ukrainian theatre represent a watershed moment in big power play, and a body-blow to the dominance of the Atlantic Bloc.
The 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed by the US, UK, and Russia gave the ex-Soviet Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan explicit security assurances in exchange for them eschewing their nuclear stockpiles and acceding to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. By 1996, Ukraine, which had the third largest nuclear stockpile post the Soviet dissolution, transferred its last nuclear weapon to Russia completing its obligations under the Lisbon Protocol. Its formal assurances reinforced the latent promise in Gorbachev administration’s so called ‘Sinatra Doctrine’, which gave erstwhile Soviet states the leeway to pursue their policies and aspirations independent of external pressure. However, realpolitik and energy considerations that informed the wrangling amongst signatories on the legalese of these assurances, and the West’s reluctance for any meaningful precipitate action post the 2014 Crimean annexation should have served as a rude wakeup call to Ukraine. Yet that realisation took eight years to come as President Zelensky observed that Ukrainians were ‘left to our own devices’. Like the proverbial grasshopper from Aesop’s Fables who spent the summer singing only to regret in winter, Zelensky and his envoys’ passionate entreaties do little to conceal their damning complacency and geopolitical naiveté despite the Crimean experience and the eight-year separatist movement in the east, which has come at a humungous human cost.
The implicit recognition of a changed world did not translate into meaningful policymaking in the Cold War-inspired western policy firmament, which got caught up in a victor’s putsch.
Myopic and near-term considerations in trans-Atlantic policymaking has created an arc of troubled global hotspots. Doddering and incoherent western response to provocations by determined and highly competitive actors have left traditional allies wary of promises, and scrambling for collaborative solutions with adversaries, to spread their risk. From renewed trade ties, implicit acceptance of suzerainty, compromising national self-interests to acting out of coercion, these lopsided arrangements not only imperil allies but also compel them to adopt nuanced approaches, diminishing the chance of any coordinated response to global commons. This, in turn, emboldens hegemons as they seek to push their narrow worldview entrapping nations in a vicious cycle of debt, despair, and dependency, and the spectre of retribution if they fall out of line. As America, in particular, and the West, in general, become more insular, new and often belligerent actors will move fast to fill the power vacuum. Fueled by their own unique ideas of grandeur and leadership, their contests for influence play out to the great detriment of the areas of their competition. Western abdication will also have profound and irreversible consequences on the future of contested zones. The shrill, perhaps engineered, rhetoric on Chinese social media since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis calling for a copycat approach on Taiwan should ring alarm bells in western capitals, which have, save perfunctory noises, given China a free pass on a host of troubling issues.
This myopia also divested the international community of the opportunity that the implosion of the Soviet system provided to build genuine consensus around a workable rules-based order. The implicit recognition of a changed world did not translate into meaningful policymaking in the Cold War-inspired western policy firmament, which got caught up in a victor’s putsch. Reeling under the devastating economic and political fallout of the breakup, and even greater, the pain of dismemberment and betrayal, an offer to the Russians should have been an equivalent of the Marshall Plan, to rebuild it, and enable its integration it into the liberal universe. This was a real possibility, considering the pro-western sentiment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The shrill, perhaps engineered, rhetoric on Chinese social media since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis calling for a copycat approach on Taiwan should ring alarm bells in western capitals, which have, save perfunctory noises, given China a free pass on a host of troubling issues.
Instead, drawing from the Leninist maxim ‘the worse, the better’, the West set out to create a pariah out of Russia to further its own strategic space. The boldness of the approach drew from the assessment that a vastly diminished Russia posed little threat to expanding the western sphere of influence on the cheap, saner voices to the contrary notwithstanding. What followed was a relentless pursuit to isolate Russia through a reductive narrative on the one hand, and fanning its insecurities by engineering a coalition of ex-Soviet states at its doorstep fed on western dreams, promises, and political ideals. This elicited asymmetric response and pushback from the Russians who moved to secure themselves and reclaim influence. Ironically, it’s the West’s maximalist stand in the first place that ceded space to Putin at home, who has built his politics on a strident anti-West platform. This machoism resonates well within the domestic echo chamber, expanding his political capital and reducing his motivation to find negotiated middle-ground solutions.
While meandering is part of transnational engagements, the Ukrainian crisis is unlike anything the West has witnessed in recent memory. For one, it brings home the horrors of war, away from distant conflicts involving unfamiliar people, reimagined through nationalistic hyperbole on prime time TV. The erstwhile Soviet Union, and its successor Russia, has long been the West’s principal bugbear dominating political discourse and policy direction. Hostilities on the continent conjure nightmarish scenarios for the trans-Atlantic security architecture. More significant, however, is the cavalier disregard for long-agreed arrangements and conventions by parties to the conflict, the impact of which will transcend the trans-Atlantic realm. It will create a domino effect emboldening actors with might and drive to dispense with their international commitments on narrow pretexts with little fear of any blowback. This will induce chaos into the global body politic, lighting up fires that could consume entire nations in its wake, and precipitate the collapse of the global order as we know now.
The erstwhile Soviet Union, and its successor Russia, has long been the West’s principal bugbear dominating political discourse and policy direction.
As a new breed of self-imagined Tsars, Caliphs, and Wolf Warriors embark on unbridled territory grab to further their particular visions of national glory, they draw sustenance from the lack of sufficient international will and pushback. Their effective salami slicing strategies act as potent counterweights in dividing the international community and diminishing response. Checking their enterprise calls for new ways of thinking and acting that goes beyond specious semantics and Molotov cocktails.
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Jaibal is Vice President and Senior Fellow of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), India’s premier think tank. His research focuses on issues of cross cultural ...
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