Jeffrey Henderson
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South Asia has been dominated by two military conflicts in past months: Pakistan pounding of the Taliban in the Swat Valley, and the obliteration of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Disturbing as these conflicts are, both may be dwarfed by a wider and more significant trend in the region—the rise of a newly assertive China.
At Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chinese companies are building a new port that could serve as a refuelling and docking facility for the Chinese navy as it extends its presence (presently confined to helping police pirate activities off the Horn of Africa) across the Indian Ocean. China has also provided much of the military hardware that underpinned the Sri Lankan victory.
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Philip Bobbitt
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A piece related to this article, in which whistleblower Michael Soussan reflects on the UN’s failings, can be read here.
YES
Phillip Bobbitt
NO
David Hannay
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Thomas de Waal
If all politics is local, then we need to know what happened in the Georgian villages of Avnevi, Tamarasheni and Kurta on the evening of 7th August, just before Georgia and Russia plunged the world into crisis.
Georgian officials say that these three villages of ethnic Georgians around the South Ossetian city of Tskhinvali came under sustained attack just after President Mikheil Saakashvili had announced a unilateral ceasefire in the local skirmishes between the two sides in South Ossetia. The Ossetian side says that the evening of 7th August was relatively quiet before Saakashvili launched a major assault, which then triggered the brutal Russian response.
In the Caucasus, local politics matter, but few outsiders understand it. Instead, the region is seen through the wrong end of a geopolitical telescope, written into large-scale strategic scenarios which overlook the inhabitants of places like Avnevi or Tskhinvali.
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Arkady Ostrovsky
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“Dear friends! The textbook you are holding in your hands is dedicated to the history of our Motherland… from the end of the Great Patriotic War to our days. We will trace the journey of the Soviet Union from its greatest historical triumph to its tragic disintegration.”
This greeting is addressed to hundreds of thousands of Russian schoolchildren who will in September receive a new history textbook printed by the publishing house Enlightenment and approved by the ministry of education. “The Soviet Union,” the new textbook explains, “was not a democracy, but it was an example for millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.” Furthermore, over the past 70 years, the USSR, “a gigantic superpower which managed a social revolution and won the most cruel of wars,” effectively put pressure on western countries to give due regard to human rights. In the early part of the 21st century, continues the textbook, the west has been hostile to Russia and pursued a policy of double standards.
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Marko Attila Hoare
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“Georgia has lost South Ossetia and Abkhazia for good”—one can almost taste the relish in the Guardian’s editorial of 15th August, as it argued against even peaceful, diplomatic measures to punish Russia for attacking Georgia. For a significant strand of left-liberal opinion in the UK, the default position on the Russia-Georgia conflict is that it is payback for earlier western sins in Iraq and Kosovo; that US, not Russian, warmongering is the problem. Yet none of this is true. Russia’s intervention in Georgia and recognition of Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s “independence” are not equivalent to western action over Kosovo or Iraq, and we allow them to go unpunished at our peril.
Moscow’s apologists frequently refer to the alleged “Kosovo precedent.” They argue that if Nato can carry out military intervention without UN authorisation against a sovereign state (Serbia), to protect a persecuted ethnic minority (the Kosovar Albanians), then unilaterally recognise the independence of an autonomous entity (Kosovo) which had until then been internationally recognised as belonging to Serbia, then Moscow is justified in acting likewise vis-a-vis Georgia and South Ossetia.
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Edward Luttwak
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That George W Bush’s foreign policy has been a total failure is now taken for granted by so many people that one usually hears it stated as a simple truth that need not be argued at all.
It has happened before. When President Harry S Truman said in March 1952 that he would not seek re-election, most Americans could agree on one thing: that his foreign policy had been a catastrophic failure. In Korea his indecision had invited aggression, and then his incompetence had cost the lives of some 54,000 Americans and millions of Korean civilians in just two years of fighting—on both counts more than ten times the number of casualties in Iraq. Right-wingers reviled Truman for having lost China to communism and for his dismissal of the great General Douglas MacArthur, who had wanted to win it back, with nukes if necessary. Liberals despised Truman because he was the failed shopkeeper who had usurped the patrician Franklin Roosevelt’s White House—liberals always were the snobs of US politics.
Abroad, Truman was widely hated too. The communist accusation that he had waged “bacteriological warfare” to kill Korean children and destroy Chinese crops was believed by many, and was fully endorsed by a 669-page report issued by a commission chaired by the eminent British biochemist Joseph Needham. Even more people believed that Truman was guilty of having started the cold war by trying to intimidate our brave Soviet ally, or at least that he and Stalin were equally to blame.
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Parag Khanna
The term “second world” has fallen out of use. It used to mean countries of the socialist world; today I use the phrase to refer to those countries in eastern Europe and central Asia, Latin America, the middle east and southeast Asia which are both rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, postmodern and pre-modern, cosmopolitan and tribal—all at the same time. This is not a temporary state between third world and first, but a permanent condition in which winners and losers are chosen by collectives like cities and corporations rather than entire states.
I spent most of 2005-07 travelling through over 40 second-world countries, and the message I kept hearing was that each country plans to shape its future its own way, not according to the “Washington consensus” or any other foreign action plan. Kazakh ministers tout the “Kazakh way,” Indian diplomats boast of the “Indian way,” Brazilian officials confidently assert the “Brazilian way.” They all want globalisation, not America, to be their patron. They may all have big internal weaknesses, but they are all players in the new geopolitical marketplace in which Europe and China offer packages of aid, trade and military assistance at least as attractive as the American one. Why align with any one patron when you can play off all sides to get what you want? India’s trade with China is booming, while it gets many of its weapons from Russia and pursues a nuclear deal with the US. Non-alignment is passé; this is the age of multialignment.
There is a vast second world intermediate layer between the first-world core and third-world periphery. In his recent National Interest essay “World Without the West,” Steven Weber pointed to Asian regionalism and new alliance blocs such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. But this is not just about the rise of China and India. It is also a story of oil-producing states around the world, Arab statelets with big sovereign wealth funds and other regional swing states from Brazil to Malaysia. In many ways these “emerging markets” have already emerged; they receive most of the world’s foreign direct investment, hold a majority of its currency reserves, and are rapidly growing consumer markets whose preferences western producers cannot ignore.
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Jonathan Power
Georgi Arbatov, the éminence grise of the Soviet foreign policy apparatus, was waiting for me at the bus stop an hour out of Moscow. A little bowed at 84, he grabbed me by the arm and leant on his homemade walking stick, cut from a nearby birch, and led me through the wood I had arrived in to a clearing in which stood a small, shabby block of flats, paint peeling in the entrance, a year’s dust and leaves on the staircase. Like his mentor, Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief and later head of the Soviet Union, Arbatov has always shunned many of the perks of the apparatchiks, content with a modest flat in the city and this “dacha” in the countryside.
We talked, as we did 30 years ago, over vodka, coffee, cucumber and beetroot. The adviser to every Soviet president from Brezhnev to Gorbachev remains as lucid as he was when he told me in 1978 that if the west pursued a closer relationship with China, turning China “into some sort of military ally to the west”… then there would be “no place for détente.”
My full-page interview with Arbatov—which ran first in the International Herald Tribune and later in many other papers—caused an enormous stir. It was the first time a senior Soviet official had talked at length to a western journalist on the record, without notes and answering every question put to him. Edward Crankshaw, the distinguished Sovietologist, described it in the Observer as “the most interesting thing to come out of official Moscow since the fall of Khruschev 14 years ago.” The Economist made it its cover story.
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Jonathan Power
The stereotype of pre-revolutionary Russia lives on—a despotic tsar, a serf economy that lived long after the abolition of slavery by the Europeans (but not the Americans), and a malign, primitive, Asiatic influence rooted in the savage conquest by the Mongols and the Tartars.
But as the great historian of Europe, Norman Davies, has written, “[Late imperial Russia] was Europe’s chief source of agricultural exports… Russian aristocrats, merchants, artists and professors were thoroughly integrated into every aspect of European life… Politically, Russia was thought be making serious liberal progress after 1905.”
War with Germany threw Russia off the rails. But now it is back on them, where is Europe? When I put this question to Georgi Arbatov in Moscow last year, I could see him wring his hands with despair as he answered. When, in Washington DC a couple of months later, I asked Zbigniew Brzezinski more or less the same question, he answered that he thought that there was a real possibility that Russia would be invited into the EU within 20 years, but he also seemed to imply that in Yeltsin’s time, a blinkered western leadership meant that a great opportunity had been lost to bind Russia closer into the west.
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William Pfaff
Conundrums of Humanity: The Quest for Global Justice by Jonathan Power
(Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, €130)
When Jonathan Power told a friend that the book he was writing was meant to solve 11 of the most formidable contemporary threats to peace and human rights, the friend replied that Power must be bidding for the Nobel peace prize. Now we have the book.
It is not likely to take Power to Stockholm because it doesn’t solve the 11 problems. What it does do is provide well-informed and professional analyses of the issues with which Power has been concerned throughout a 30-year career of working and writing mainly on subjects western audiences would prefer not to hear about.
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