Ibne Siraj :
The May 25 presidential elections in Ukraine mark the end of a violent beginning, but not a story that may give Ukraine more of a chance at avoiding a full-scale civil war and sticking together, even as it deals with current and future hardships. The Ukraine crisis has ended the era of post-Cold War engagement, which failed to culminate in integration between the West and Russia. In a stunning reversal, the crisis has opened up a period of intense geopolitical competition, rivalry, and even confrontation between Moscow and Washington, but also between Moscow and Brussels. The area of competition is again Eastern Europe; only this time, further to the east of its Cold War namesake. In a region, which includes Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and also the unrecognized Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh, fault lines have developed both within and between countries.
Some of these countries, like Georgia, are leaning towards the European Union while others like Belarus towards Russia; some are battleground states; and there is only one outlier that is Azerbaijan. The “gray” buffer zone between Europe and Russia, which has existed ever since the breakup of the Soviet Union, is unraveling. Russia is pivoting away from Europe and the West and as a unique civilization diverting itself to its former empire in Eurasia, redesigned as a Russia-led economic and security union. Lastly, Russia is eying on China, a new center of global economic and political power. All these changes are happening in a state of intensifying competition. The revolutionary coup in Kiev, supported by Washington, was interpreted in Moscow as a prelude to Ukraine’s eventual accession to NATO. Putin responded in his own way in Crimea, resulting in the peninsula’s incorporation into Russia. The US-Russian tussle over Ukraine has become the first case of open, great power clash since the end of the Cold War.
In this new rivalry, Europe is both a player, as America’s ally in NATO, and an area of competition in its own right. Europeans are divided in their attitudes toward Russia. Those geographically closer and still reeling from the Soviet era are more wary than those farther afield, who are more relaxed; political elites with little interest in Russia are more critical than the business circles, who have something to lose; and anti-European Union, anti-United States elements see Putin as their ally. Although the new rivalry is confined to a relatively small region and is peripheral to the United States’ and even Europe’s core interests, it has implications for the wider world. Russia’s shift to the east, which strengthens its alignment with China, is gaining more strategic depth. The Sino-Russian Gas Deal signed in Shanghai on May 21, embodies and symbolizes a new quality to the relationship between Moscow and Beijing.
Four decades after Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China, the strategic triangle between the United States, China and Russia looks very different, with China, rather than America, having better relations with the two other powers. This puts Japan in a more difficult situation: Tokyo is Washington’s ally; it fears Beijing and hopes to improve relations with Moscow. Yet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe perseveres in his strategy of rapprochement with Russia, and looks forward to hosting Putin in this year’s fall. Across the Middle East, Russia and the United States continue to share some interests, with respect to fighting terrorism or preventing further nuclear proliferation. But in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, Moscow has become more active in its support for Syria’s Assad, strengthening ties to Tehran, and reaching out to Egypt and Saudi Arabia-even as it has managed to protect its special relationship with Israel. US-Russian competition in the Middle-East, albeit at a lower level that during the Cold War, is again a reality.
This new competition is essentially being fought on the terrain of economics and information flows and will eventually be decided by economic factors and popular attitudes. This relates to Ukraine facing a dire economic situation, to Russia and its ability to use Western economic sanctions to reinvent itself, and to Moscow’s Eurasian Union project, which will rise or fall on economic, not geopolitical grounds. And of course, this new competition relates to the European Union, which faces a conflict between the need for further integration and many people’s reluctance to go for it, as evidenced in the elections to the European Parliament, also held on May 25. Despite a chorus of condemnation and economic sanctions against Russia by the United States and all the NATO members after Crimea’s option to federate with Russia, Putin is seen quite steady to stave off any challenge.
However, the same countries that dropped 23,000 bombs and missiles on Yugoslavia in 1999 demanding Kosovo’s separation from Serbia and Yugoslavia, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and bombed Libya in 2011, are crying about Russia’s flagrant “violation” of Ukraine’s sovereignty by virtue of encouraging and supporting the Crimean referendum.
The same militarists who criminally invaded and bombed sovereign Iraq or cheered while Iraq was divided and left bleeding from the assault, are now crying very big shedding crocodile tears for sovereignty in Ukraine. Provocateur neo-con militarists like John McCain and his feckless counterpart who holds the position of Secretary of State have overplayed their hand by facilitating and congratulating a fascist-led anti-Russian coup d’etat against the corrupt but elected government of Ukraine. They thought that they were on the road of absorbing the second largest former Soviet Republic into NATO-lock, stock and barrel. They did not anticipate that the Crimea would hold a popular referendum and declare its independence.
Russia was weakened greatly-its prime allies were picked away by NATO, its economy went into a giant tailspin. The living conditions for a broad part of the population dropped dramatically. There had never been such a precipitous drop recorded in peacetime. Gangsters looted big parts of the nationalized economy with connections to international financing. Russia was on its knees but 10 years later Russia started to come back. The United States wanted Russia to be a puppet or so weak that it could never be an obstacle again to imperialism’s desires and designs including in the vast resource-rich and geo-strategically important territories within the former boundaries of the Soviet Union. But Russia is too big to be a puppet. Its military is too large, its land mass and resources too vast, and its level of development too high for Russia to be a doormat for western imperialism.
So even though the Soviet Union is no more, there remains a continuing struggle between Russia and the club of imperialist countries led since 1945 by the United States. The ideological struggle against communism is no longer a feature of the new rivalry. But the inherently expansionist nature of modern day imperialism puts it on a continual collision course with Russia, China or any national entity or mass movement that serves as a brake or an obstacle to its desire for unfettered domination over the planets’ land and resources.
This historical pattern is observable because it is the dominant characteristic of modern imperialism. It is also the reason that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not bring about a peace dividend, disarmament and the diminution of militarism. On the contrary, the last 20 years have witnessed one imperialist war after another as the primary power center in the global economic system marches on in pursuit of its predatory agenda. In that sense, there is not a new Cold War but rather a continuation of an ongoing effort by the most powerful elites in the largest capitalist countries to maintain their stranglehold over the world.
