On the day World War II began, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “There will be only two winners: The United States and the Soviet Union.” More than eight decades later, as major powers find themselves stuck in a war in Ukraine, there seems to be just one winner this time and that county is not even a direct party to the conflict — People’s Republic of China.
This became evidently clear when the G20 ministerial meetings began in India — the first one led by finance ministers in Bengaluru, followed by a two-day summit of foreign ministers in New Delhi starting 1 March 2023. India’s endeavour to seek consensus came a cropper — both in Bengaluru and in Delhi— as Russia and China refused to sign a joint statement. The stringent Sino-Russian stand, insiders say, has miffed New Delhi, but the West too cannot escape the blame for rigidly drawing battle lines on Ukraine.
Analysts say that throughout the Ukraine War, New Delhi has deftly balanced its ties with Russia and the West, with Narendra Modi successfully positioning himself as a leader who has been courted by all sides. While critics in the West saw India’s geopolitical tightrope walk on the Ukraine war as “strategic ambivalence”, the fact is it was India’s conscious decision, even if a constrained one, to stop Russia from moving closer to China and Pakistan.
India could foresee the geostrategic hazards and dilemmas of the Ukraine war. But the US-led West seemed to be caught in a Cold War time warp, refusing to update its contemporary threat perceptions. Russia still was its Enemy No. 1. Sadly, Biden & Company’s obsession with seeing Russia squeezed inside a box, besides ushering in a regime change in Moscow — little realising the improbability of the outcome and the dangerous repercussions if the same was achieved — has been the best-case scenario for China. In a post-pandemic era when the Xi Jinping dispensation should have faced global condemnation and isolation for its Covid-19 role, the Ukraine war provided China with a much-needed distraction.
With the Ukraine war, the US has not just given China a new lifeline, but also killed — at least in the foreseeable future — the possibility of a larger anti-China axis involving Russia. Richard Lourie recalls in his book, Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash, how American secretary of state James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that if the USSR pulled its troops out of East Germany and permitted the peaceful reunion of the two Germanys, NATO, in return, would not move “one inch east”. In the next 30 years, NATO has expanded more than 1,000 km to the east of Germany. As Rajiv Dogra writes in War Time: The World in Danger, “A bloc (NATO) that once shared only a slender border with Russia in Norway’s northern fringes, now encompasses the Baltic states, former Soviet territories within 200 km of St Petersburg and 600 km of Moscow. Seven of the eight former members of the Warsaw Pact have become part of NATO.”
At the core of the Ukraine issue lies Russia’s fear of being encircled by the US-led NATO. The Western attempt to co-opt Ukraine with NATO was a do-or-die moment for proud and history-conscious Russians. According to George F Kennan, best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War, NATO’s eastward expansion was the “most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”. The consequence, he predicted, would be a Russia that would “likely look elsewhere for guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves”.
The Russophobic West firmly pushed Putin into the Chinese camp. While the West missed no opportunity to insult the Russian President, China on its part showed immense respect to him. Xi and Putin, for instance, have met more than three dozen times since 2013. As Putin himself noted in 2018, the only world leader with whom he had ever celebrated his birthday was Xi Jinping. Xi, on his part, called Putin his “best, most intimate friend”.
Rebuffed repeatedly, Putin was forced to abandon the hope for “some sort of alliance with the West”. It was a case of missed opportunity for the West, especially the US. After all, Putin had, soon after 9/11, helped the US get bases in Central Asia and facilitated the American troops’ transit through that air and land space. He also had reasons to be wary of rising China, especially on the unresolved issue of 600,000 square kilometres of Chinese territory near Vladivostok, occupied by Russia since 1860. Also, Putin had strong reservations about growing Chinese footprints in Central Asia, which the Russians traditionally saw as their strategic backyard.
Interestingly, and ironically, this was not the first time the US had saved communist China. In the 1940s, thanks to American author Edgar Snow, who through his writings projected Mao as an “agrarian reformer” waging a concerted war against the Japanese and wanting “friendship with America” — a claim that duped several contemporary Americans, including the Secretary of State George Marshall, who then convinced President Harry S Truman about the ‘goodness’ of Chinese communists. It resulted in unenthusiastic American support for Chiang Kai-shek against Mao and his Red army. Had the US supported Chiang wholeheartedly, the China story would have been different in 1949.
The same mistake was repeated in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when Mao’s China was facing a growing Soviet ire. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger provided China support at a time when the Americans could have allowed the two communist states to fight among themselves and weaken each other. In his review of Kissinger’s China book in The Guardian, Jasper Becker writes: “If Beijing and Moscow had gone to war, surely it would have been to America’s advantage. America might have emerged victorious from the Vietnam War and saved Cambodia from the horrors of Khmer Rouge rule. The longstanding threat of South Korea and Taiwan might have disappeared.”
Again, the US’ effort to push China into the WTO has backfired badly. Its $1 trillion economy in 2001 has become a $15 trillion economy today, thanks to its WTO entry. The Americans fooled themselves into believing, with obvious Chinese deception, that a market economy would invariably result in free societies, but just the opposite happened. Philip P Pan writes in Out of Mao’s Shadow, “Prosperity allowed the (Chinese) government to reinvent itself, to win friends, and buy allies, and to forestall demands for democratic change.”
In the “post-American world”, a term pompously coined by Fareed Zakaria for his 2008 book, which was “not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else”, the US could have accentuated its superpower status by getting right friends and allies. With the imminent rise of China as the biggest competitor of America and Americanism, Russia’s role could have been a game-changer. But far from winning over Russia, which, along with India, Japan and Australia, would have helped in containing China, the West finds itself stuck with the obsolete Cold War mindset.
In 2014, former ISI chief Hamid Gul, during an interview, pompously said: “When history is written… it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America… Then there will be another sentence.” After a brief pause, he added: “The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.” Amid the Ukraine War, Xi Jinping may be tempted to think on a similar line — “China, with the help of America, defeated America” — and he won’t be overstating a bit. The G20 meetings in Bengaluru and New Delhi show Russia is moving deeper into China’s embrace — and this will only weaken Pax Americana.
The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.
Read all the Latest Opinions here
Comments
0 comment