‘We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’
Did you think the quote above was made by Vladimir Putin? Actually, dial back twenty years to the summer of 2002 to a time of hubris, invincibility and unipolarity.
Karl Rove, a high-ranking adviser to US President Bush, was responsible for that gem. That was the era in which the US could unashamedly come up with a rolling plan to invade and regime change seven Muslim states.
The events of this week in the Eurasian heartland signal a geo-political earthquake and a monumental shift in global power.
Today, from a geo-political (not moral) perspective, a quarter of a century of unassailable military might has been challenged.
The equations that have long determined “who creates reality” have just been reconfigured.
Feeling outraged today?
Ukraine is today, but remember the reprehensible invasions of Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011?
While some may have “moved on” from those conflicts, much of the Global South (sans elites) have not.
The practical real-life consequences reverberate today. ISIS is a direct result of US bombing and utter mismanagement of Iraq, opening the “gates of Hell” -- as Iraqi Ayatollah Jawal al-Khalisi warned in 2005, when it all seemed like neo-colonial child's play.
A million people lost their lives. Countless millions more were wounded or displaced from their homes. Their families, societies, and economies have not “moved on.”
Africa looks at Libya and sees slave markets, Islamic terror, and the utter destruction and fragmentation by US airplanes of what was once the continent's richest state.
The French army has been roaming across West Africa for years. The US is currently supporting the armed secessionist movement in Tigray against government forces of Ethiopia. Shades of Donbass?
Much of the two billion people in Africa and the Middle East are not going to cheer Putin, but neither are they going to fall in behind the Western narrative.
US soldiers remain in oil-rich northeast Kurdish Syria. This, along with all the armed interventions over a decade, is totally illegal since there is no UN mandate, nor request by Damascus for their presence. Meanwhile, democratic Israel continues to bomb Syria at will, year after year, and Nato does not find that unacceptable.
Do not expect 1.4 billion Chinese to look at Nato as Western Europe does. They are aware of US naval forces sailing close to the mainland, “containment,” ratcheting up of tensions, and the coming clash over Taiwan.
In sum, there are different competing narratives out there.
Context, history, and the realities of geo-politics are absent in much of the current discourse, certainly in Europe. If they are invoked then they are cartoon-like comparisons with 1938 and 1939.
The Kosovo war in Serbia is perhaps apt. Then, a helpless, ruined Russia could only make feeble protests as US forces bombed Belgrade to detach Kosovo for a full 78 days.
Those were the days when Western powers could invade or bomb claiming a "Responsibility to Protect."
Oil-rich Libya later became an infamous example of fabrication. Russia is currently using the concept of R2P on similar grounds in Ukraine. Sometimes it can be justified (e.g. India in Bangladesh 1971). But much if not most of the time they are brute powerplays.
Ukraine and Nato
In 2014, Obama, Biden and Nuland orchestrated the colour-coded coup in Kyiv. Eight years later, Putin partly justified his military intervention in terms of “denazification” in Ukraine, where neo-Nazis form important elements of the military and government.
He referred to the 41 trade unionists burned alive in a building in Odessa and a list of 5,000 "war criminals." Russians are hearing a very different story to that from CNN.
Jack Matlock was the last American ambassador to the USSR from 1987 to 1991. On February 15, 2022, he wrote in the Asia Times: "To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence -- the avowed aim of … [c]olor revolutions was a fool's errand, and a dangerous one."He maintains that Putin 's demand to "an end to Nato expansion and the creation of a security structure in Europe that insures Russia 's security ... Is eminently reasonable."
American politicians Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard sustain the view that there was no need to encourage Ukraine to join Nato. Mexico (next to the US) was offered as an example. The US retains its Monroe Doctrine to this day over the entire Western hemisphere, not dissimilar to a “Putin Doctrine” over Ukraine.
George F Kennan, the famous US diplomat in Moscow and author of "The Long Telegram" in 1946 (the cornerstone of subsequent US Cold War policy) warned about Nato expansion. At the age of 94, on May 1998 he told Thomas Friedman: " I think this is a tragic mistake. There is no reason for this whatsoever … Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia. What bothers me is how superficial and ill-informed the whole Senate debate was."
Following the coup, the Russian-speaking eastern regions attempted to secede. This was not allowed. However, Paris and Berlin fashioned the Minsk II Accords with Kyiv where autonomy would be provided to Luhansk and Donetsk.
This was anathema to far right forces in Kyiv. Washington did nothing to pressure Kyiv to fulfil that peace agreement. Instead, there has been a constant military standoff with competing versions of military activity in the East.
Playing with fire
A few days ago, the Russian navy chased away a US submarine from its territorial waters on the Pacific coast. Next time that happens one can assume subs and ships would be sunk. We are there.
In 1962, Soviet missiles in Cuba were on autonomous control. Had US planes bombed the missile installations local Soviet officers had authority to immediately launch missiles (without asking Moscow for permission).
Miami would have been obliterated and US missiles stationed in Turkey would have flattened Moscow.
What is needed today is calm and collected thinking about rational approaches to spheres of influence and an acceptance that the world is multi-lateral.
These are new realities which selective outrage will not change. Will India and China offer maturity and sanity?
Farid Erkizia Bakht is a political analyst. @liquid_borders
