There will not be a third World War.
But there will be wars, yes, skirmishes and localized affairs. Often they will take the dimensions of a global crisis, as the Russia-Ukraine war has been demonstrating for the past nearly two months.
For all intents and purposes, Vladimir Putin’s objectives have not quite been achieved, if the slow movements of the Russian military is any guide.
Or could it be that Russia’s leader is deliberately engaging in a mischievous game -- the cat catching hold of the mouse, giving it a hard squeeze, and then letting it go until the next squeezing moment comes?
For Volodymyr Zelenskyy, these past many weeks have been a test of leadership in extremely difficult circumstances. His election to the Ukrainian presidency was a surprise and few people believed that, having moved from professional comedy to the rocky ground of national politics, he could provide credible leadership to his people.
The war with Russia has been his education, it has transformed him. Where politicians often grow in office, Zelenskyy has been growing in the crucible of war. His resilience has been remarkable. He has managed to hold back Putin’s forces, has inflicted casualties on them even as he has lost his soldiers and civilians to Russian attacks.
Mariupol and Lviv and so many other places are today painted in the ashes of war. And yet, Ukraine has not capitulated.
Putin perhaps does not know how to call his forces back home from the country they have invaded. And Zelenskyy’s initial despondence slowly translates into confidence. And in all this analysis of what has been going on in Europe -- don’t forget that Europe, for all its great traditions and political renaissance, is where some of the most brutal of human conflicts have emanated, where the holocaust took the lives of millions, where nations have come together as countries before going their separate ways again -- a very large question is etched across the canvas of global politics.
Simply, it is one of the extent to which NATO provoked President Putin into acting the way he has.
Putin’s repeated warnings that Russian security concerns be taken into account, that NATO should not move further east, were deliberately ignored. One is, then, justified in presenting the argument that Jens Stoltenberg and Ursula von der Leyen and their friends in Washington clearly failed to take Putin seriously on his concerns.
That failure has now produced the cataclysm which has come over Ukraine. The failure has now been compounded by the clear sidelining of diplomacy by NATO and the European Union. That certainly goes against the principle of international relations in these post-modern times. The principle is one of leaving the door ajar for diplomats to walk through and engage in negotiations that will do what is not and cannot be done on the battlefield.
One could raise the academic query: Were all those sanctions on Russians necessary? Did the West, led by President Joe Biden, really believe that sanctions would topple Putin? In these strange times, an increasingly unpopular Biden -- watch his poll numbers slide and his gaffes increase -- seeks to reclaim popular support by a supposedly strong demonstration of leadership in the Ukraine crisis. That is not helping him any, for a few reasons.
The first reason is that the unipolar world, of which the US was the epitome following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, does not exist any longer because of the unstoppable rise of China. For all its economic difficulties and issues brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, China has posted economic growth of 4.8% in the first quarter of this year.
The implications are obvious: Beijing is a huge challenge to Washington and, ignoring western concerns over its politics and its human rights situation, is increasingly likely to overtake America in both economic power and diplomatic clout.
The Middle Kingdom of history is at work in China, in that it has carefully stayed away from taking a public stand in support of Russia but has nevertheless been subtle enough to let the West know where it stands on Ukraine. Its abstention on the anti-Russia resolution at the United Nations was a broad hint of its foreign policy perspectives in these current circumstances.
No, it is no more a unipolar world. Besides China -- and that is where the second reason why Biden and his geopolitics are not making any headway happens to be -- there are India, Bangladesh, and 33 other nations which stood aside when the vote on the UN resolution was taken. Pragmatism was the driving force in all those abstentions.
India will not abandon Russia, despite the Modi government’s closeness to Washington. For Bangladesh, a strategic foreign policy has been at work under the Sheikh Hasina government. Diplomacy is functioning well in the country’s ties with Russia, China, and India, and wisdom suggests that Dhaka will not step away from its links with Moscow.
The Rooppur nuclear plant and a vast range of economic ties with Russia are certainly of greater significance for Bangladesh than joining the sanctions bandwagon against Russia.
The war in Ukraine, of course, needs to draw to a close. Despite that door not being ajar, there will be a need for all the adversaries to the conflict to talk to one another.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed global politics for a very long time, perhaps even irreversibly. But President Putin will sooner rather than later need to call it a day. For the West, overtures of peace, of talks on a resolution of the crisis will become necessary.
The demonizing of Putin, which has clearly exacerbated the situation in Ukraine, will need to halt. A cornered Russia does not mean a beaten Russia. A West strident against Russia is no proof of a vanquishing of Putin and his government. If Russia needs to step back from Ukraine, the US and NATO will be required to do a similar act through undoing all the measures they have so far employed against Moscow.
In the end, the future of Ukraine matters. Moscow’s puzzling denunciation of the Kyiv leadership as neo-Nazis does not help the Russians any. Neither does this endless supply of weaponry by the West to the Ukrainians.
And Ukraine must not be treated as a playground in a new Cold War. President Zelenskyy’s government must have every guarantee of being able to exercise its independence in terms of dealing both with Moscow and the West. Within that sphere of independence comes, of course, Ukraine’s need to reconfigure itself as a neutral nation which poses no threat, in terms of geo-politics, to Russia, and to the wider world around and beyond it.
There will be no third World War. But wars such as the one in Ukraine, such as the one which devastated the Balkans in the 1990s, ignite small but worrying fires all the same across the global landscape.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.