My piece, “This is not a bluff,” published October 5, 2022, has elicited a lot of comments, on this platform and elsewhere. I try here to do a response, in outline form, with a few rhetorical questions. The multiple issues raised on the writeup, and addressed here, are of course, not taken in any particular order. The hope is that this approach does not undercut the logic of the presentation.
Now, let us admit without conceding, the claim by many pundits in the West, echoed here at home, that Putin is delusional. How does an intelligent person handle a delusional individual that has control over the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world? I would have thought it should be with utmost caution. Why is the West not showing any willingness to handle the bloody struggle with Putin over Ukraine with the caution it demands, if truly it believes the person it is dealing with is actually delusional, and by implication, the very elephant in the proverbial China shop?
The US has since 1948 supported the State of Israel, all the way, and especially in the latter’s forceful annexation of Arab lands – West Bank, Gaza (for some time), East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Why is the same US crying foul when an act similar to what it has always supported in one part of the world is now taking place in another? Did it not occur to us as quite significant that President Joe Biden, in spite of all the anti-Trump braggadocio in Washington DC, has not deemed it necessary to repudiate his predecessor’s support for Israel’s formal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights? What are all these telling us? Why do we seem to be comfortable with Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights, and decry Russian annexation of Crimea?
I am waiting to see Ukraine consolidate its much-trumpeted advances on the war front. But it is intriguing how very comfortable we all are, relying virtually exclusively on Western (media) sources for all the information that we need to have on the war in Ukraine! Many of us do not even make any pretentions on the need to ferret information from other sources other than the popular Western news media, which we often cite with so much gusto! It is doubtful if such a skewed tendency would afford us the complete picture of the situation in Ukraine that we need to have. Why, I have continuously asked, has neither CNN nor BBC, among others, given vent to the fact that there is a considerable anti-war constituency in Ukraine that wants the country out of this unnecessary carnage, imposed on it by the Great Powers that are simply seeking their own narrow strategic advantages, which have nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine? Complementing Russia’s security concerns over the virulently anti-Russian posture of the post-2014-coup Ukraine, is the nostalgia for the majesty of the old USSR in global affairs. Such may not only be misplaced, but also practically places Ukraine as just one element on the pathway to recreating whatever Moscow can, of this old order. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is on record to have indicated in May this year, that US’ intension in Ukraine is ‘to see Russia weakened,’ which elsewhere, I metaphorically recast as having Russia bleed to death! Deputy Treasury Secretary, Wally Adeyemo, had also earlier indicated that his country’s strategic objective in Ukraine was to stop Russia from projecting global power. Which of these has to do with Ukraine?
Russia ‘is not the only nuclear power in the world,’ it’s been said, and so, it should not threaten anyone with the nuke, as if its own territory is out of reach. Of course, it is not. But are we suggesting that we need to have all the nuclear powers in the world assemble and agree before we have a nuclear war? Did the Americans wait for any global consensus before hitting Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? Isn’t it the case that all it takes, is for a nuclear power to be willing to do the unthinkable, of using the bomb? In the event of this happening, the whole world – without much of a choice – gets corralled into such an apocalyptic scenario. Is there anything that suggests that Putin has any illusions that using the bomb is going to leave his own corner untouched? As a matter of fact, Russia’s Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov (RT, Oct. 6, 2022), had underscored the basis of the strategic stability that has guarded the world since the end of WW II, i.e., ‘whoever shoots first, dies second.’ This is an indication that Russia knows, that a nuclear war is not winnable. So, why should anyone treat his threat as a bluff, simply because Russia too may be obliterated in the event of a nuclear conflagration?
We probably wouldn’t have been concerned about all of these if the damages attendant upon usage of tactical nuclear weapons were going to be limited to the users alone. But they are not! Rather, as we noted in the earlier piece referenced here, former US President Jimmy Carter, a most responsible leader, had confirmed what nuclear scientists have continued to warn us all about, that "the survivors, if any (of a nuclear war), would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilisation that had committed suicide." Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had much earlier in the early 1960s, conveyed a similar message when he declared that in the event of a nuclear war, “the living will envy the dead!” So, we need to be concerned when one of the more formidable nuclear powers is talking about the possibility of using this scarry weapon – if he is pushed to the wall.
Unfortunately, this is the nature of the reality humanity has imposed on itself; but isn’t it in our enlightened self-interest to ensure the Russian President doesn’t get pushed to the wall?
How valid is the suggestion that Putin’s mobilization ‘has run into troubled waters,’ when the Russian military was reported to have swiftly deployed 200,000 of the men it set out to mobilize, within days of that proclamation? Where else do you have such level of efficiency in the world? Meanwhile, the relatively few people – when the Russian population is taken as a whole – that are uncomfortable with the military mobilization project are presented in Western media as if they epitomize the entire Russian Federation; and as if the world is coming to an end over Russia by reason of the understandable reluctance of the few to be mobilized for war. Doesn’t this smack too much of propaganda?
It is said that ‘Russia is over exaggerated and its invincibility has been shattered,’ and that it has lost several thousands of soldiers since the war started. Isn’t it interesting that some of us find it easier to believe and readily cite Western figures of Russian casualty, rather than the ones given out by Russia itself? Aren’t we inadvertently merely sucking in the propaganda stuffs oozing from the West? Isn’t it also the case that the war in Ukraine is not really between Russia and Ukraine, but to all intents and purposes, between Russia and the Western (NATO) alliance? Which country across the world has such a formidable team to face down the Western alliance as Russia has done these past few months, both in terms of the war itself, and the financial engineering that was deployed to humble Moscow? For effect, please peruse the report of Tom Stevenson (NYT, May 11, 2022), a Western journalist that was on ground, reporting from Ukraine: “… there is no denying that the United States, Britain, Poland and other European NATO members have been parties to the conflict from the outset. It is not just military transports and trucks carrying tens of thousands of antiaircraft and antiarmor weapons to Ukrainian fighters. The United States has also provided real-time intelligence, reportedly including targeting information on the location of Russian forces. … We now know the United States provided the tracking intelligence that led to the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. More striking still, U.S. intelligence agencies provided critical targeting for battlefield assassinations of Russian generals.” Anything more to add? So, even if Ukraine has started to do well on the war theatre, we now know who the Russians are up against, don’t we?
Putin’s adventure in Ukraine, a fiasco? It may be too early to so conclude. Whether or not it would bring about his being shoved aside, from the Kremlin, also lies in the bosom of time. But to assume that any Russian leader would tolerate Ukraine’s ascension to NATO membership is a forlorn hope. On February 25, a day after the war started, I published a piece – ‘A Realist Snapshot on Ukraine’ – where I indicated that from my reading, Putin’s ultimate objective in Ukraine was to disarm and demobilize the country, possibly force a change of government in Kyiv, and above all, annex the Donbas region. Official Western and media sources kept projecting what they thought Putin wanted, as physical occupation of all of Ukraine. Many of our analysts simply latched onto the latter narrative. This reached a crescendo when after doing what it felt it needed to do in Kyiv, Moscow decided to lift the siege on the city, and concentrate attention on eastern and southern Ukraine. This strategic objective, in motion, was trumpeted as indicative of Russian loss of the will and power to occupy Kyiv, and of course, of its losing so quickly, the war it had started. The entire southern and eastern regions of Ukraine have since then been taken and occupied by Russia.
By the way, the extent to which it is valid to project reversal in one war as indicative of ‘the shattering of (a Great Power’s) invincibility’ remains to be demonstrated. Recall in this regard that the US was humiliated in Vietnam, humbled in Korea, and had to scurry out of Afghanistan after 20 years of a war of attrition that many would swear it lost! What does this say of miliary capability? Is any of this failure to deliver on its strategic objective indicative of US loss of military capability, and its status as the world’s most powerful and lethal nation? What is it that may happen to Russia in Ukraine that never happened to the US elsewhere, and, therefore, deserving of the conclusion many are quick to reach, that Russia is down and out in military capability terms?
The office of the UN Secretary General was not set up to deal only with benign issues. It is a mechanism designed to resolve conflict, of which wars are the apogee. To suggest, therefore, that Antonio Guterres was embarrassed by the action of Moscow when he visited Kyiv, and that this is enough reason for him to assume this ‘siddon look’ posture, would amount to a justification of sheer abdication of duty on his part. The truth is that the obvious paralysis of the UN Security Council by the war in Ukraine, provides the appropriate context for a Secretary General that knows his onion to dive into the fray, and bring to bear on the conflict, his considerable moral force of authority with a view to snatching peace out of the jaws of war. Antonia Guterres is not doing this. To suggest that it is appropriate for the world’s top diplomat to abandon diplomacy because a warring president embarrassed him, is unspeakable?
Prospects of peace. I argue that peace could indeed be obtained even in the face of on-gong efforts by Russia to annex Ukrainian territory, provided the world knows what is good for it in the present circumstances. We must take cognizance of the fact that Russia is not Iraq, which could be easily shoved out of Kuwait. At any event, this peace-upon-annexation of territory model is not new to history. One instance that readily comes to mind is, Alsace-Lorraine, which the Second French Empire (France) lost to the German Empire in 1871, in the Franco-Prussian war that ended with the Treaty of Frankfurt? The territory was only taken back by France in 1918, via the Treaty of Versailles, which followed German defeat at WW I. As well, in spite of the elaborate Israeli annexation of Arab lands, which has become the defining feature of the Middle East, and this, without regard to multiple UN Security Council Resolutions against such, some form of peace is returning to the region, isn’t it? So, getting Ukraine to acknowledge that the ethnic Russian population in the four regions under annexation may have reasons to want to align with the Russian Federation, especially given the refusal of Kyiv to implement Minsk Agreement I and II of 2014 and 2015 respectively, should not come to anyone as a surprise.
How could Russia be said to be on its own in this conflict, when the largest population centres across the world – China, India, Brazil, South Africa, etc. – are all in its corner? Coming nearer home, how many African countries (weak and inconsequential though, all may be) voted for the General Assembly resolutions condemning Russia’s ‘invasion’/’special military operation,’ or expelling Moscow from the UN Human Rights Commission?
The more critical points I have made repeatedly on the war in Ukraine are these. First, that the Western alliance practically pushed Ukraine to cross the strategic red line drawn by Russia in consideration of its own legitimate security claims in eastern Europe. The closest to such wanton violation of the sphere of interest concept, pushed by the US in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, was what propelled the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. NATO members are, therefore, as guilty as Russia in the invasion of Ukraine, and generally, in the manner the conflict has evolved.
Secondly, extant Great Power engagement over, and in Ukraine, has little or nothing to do with the interest of Ukraine. It’s all about securing strategic advantages that may define the shape of the global order we have after the war.
Thirdly, in a clash between the security interests of a nuclear power, and the sovereignty concerns of a lesser, non-nuclear armed state, higher consideration must of necessity be accorded the former, for obvious reasons. This is what Realism, in International Relations, compels, and it is not about to change. Fourthly, the nature of the interests at play in this conflict are such that the latter would not admit of resolution outside of accommodation of Russia’s legitimate security interests in Ukraine.
Fifthly, I endorse the thesis advanced by Stevenson (2022), that the Western alliance is “taking a risk far out of step with any realistic strategic gain” in Ukraine. It, therefore, needs, as we counselled earlier, to put on its thinking cap before things spiral out of control.
Sixthly, while it may be reckless of Putin to consider the nuke option, the same cannot but be said of the Western alliance for treating the associated risks perfunctorily.
My conclusion is that it in the interest of Ukraine in particular, and humanity in general, for a negotiated, win-win outcome to be found to this conflict. Anything short of this makes the possibility of an apocalypse, against which all sensible people have warned, real. It is comforting that President Biden, a Foreign Policy impresario himself, has now stated unequivocally that President Putin may indeed, not be bluffing! Let us hope that the strategic redirection in US engagement on Ukraine, attendant upon this admission, will evolve very quickly, and in a manner consequential for the mission of peace in this highly destructive, yet, unnecessary war.
@ FemiMimiko, mni
