Commentary by Tony Kevin, A Socialist In Canada, March 6, 2023 (with related readings further below)
(This commentary was first published in Consortium News on March 3, 2023. It is re-published on March 5 in Pearls And Irritations, a foreign policy journal published in Australia. Tony Kevin is a former Australian ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. He is emeritus fellow at Australian National University and the author of the 2017 book Return to Moscow (332 pages), published by the UWA Public Policy Institute at Western Australia University.)
Introductory note by A Socialist In Canada:
Tony Kevin writes here that China’s peace plan for Ukraine appeals to the countries and peoples of the Global South but is causing consternation in the Western war party camp. He writes, “The Ukraine crisis is a catalyst, accelerating changes that might have otherwise taken decades to work through.” The essay is an assessment of NATO’s aggression against Russia one year after the beginning of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. The related readings enclosed below include the weblink to a similar essay published by economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs one week ago.
The tragic year-long war in Ukraine has already transformed the world’s geopolitical landscape. Historic global power shifts towards the Eurasian heartland, centred on China, are accelerating. China and Russia have drawn together in a strong “no limits” partnership that is attracting other major states in the Global South, especially India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey, Brazil and South Africa.
The common link between such countries is one of building stronger trading, infrastructure and diplomatic ties, consistent with the United Nations-based international security system. More and more, the Western camp led by the U.S. seems peripheral, a powerless spectator to these global changes. The Ukraine crisis is a catalyst, accelerating changes that might have otherwise taken decades to work through.
Mediocre Western leaders like U.S. President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Sholtz, French President Emmanuel Macron and a conga line of weak British prime ministers, allied with the improbable former comedian heading an ultra-nationalist regime in Kiev united only by its fanatical hatred of all things Russian, have led the West into disastrous anti-Russian policies, causing self-inflicted wounds, especially in Europe.
The root cause of the West’s current woes is the Washington elite’s refusal to come to grips with its own disasters at home, in a country increasingly weakened by stark ideological and economic contradictions. At the same time, the Washington elite, obsessed by the great power competition with Russia and China, has repeatedly under-estimated Russian and Chinese diplomatic skills and will to survive. A bipartisan war party drains Washington’s budgets as America’s key infrastructure frays.
Hundreds of billions of dollars go to prop up NATO’s unwinnable proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. This war actually began in February 2014, not in 2022. Influential Americans saw Ukraine as a weapon to destabilise Russian President Vladimir Putin by turning the two most populous ex-Soviet nation-states against each other. They connived with Banderite, extreme nationalists in Ukraine to militarise and indoctrinate the country against Russia.
For the U.S., whichever side won, the U.S. arms industry prospered. Russian diplomatic efforts during the years 2014 to 2021 tried to maintain peace with a sovereign Kiev through the Minsk process. These efforts were negated by Western duplicity.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army was expanded and hardened by NATO weapons and training. A long-running artillery war was waged by Kiev against the dissident, pro-Russian eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, leaving up to 14,000 civilians and combatants dead and more than 100,000 homeless. Hundreds of thousands more fled to Russia for safety.
Testing Putin’s resolve
By December 2021, Washington and Kiev judged themselves strong enough to test Putin’s resolve. He was faced with a lose-lose situation. If he allowed Kiev a genocidal victory over the Donbass rebel provinces, his credibility as Russian leader would slump. But he could only defend the people of Donbass by invading sovereign Ukraine, announcing an effort to demilitarize and denazify the country. He chose this lesser evil, seeing the Donbass crisis as having become an existential threat to Russia.
After an inconclusive first seven months, the war has turned in favour of a determined-to-win Russia. This is certainly how China and the Global South see it, unconvinced by increasingly improbable claims by NATO and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky that Kiev can still win this war.
The China – Russia partnership is built on their mutual adherence to the UN Security Council rules-based order and their support for the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which was drafted by Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai in 1953 and adopted by the 1995 Non-Aligned Conference in Bandung.
Western rules
In recent years, an opportunistic United States together with its Western allies have pressed for another kind of international order – a “rules-based order” in which the West sets the rules and decides when and how to enforce them on others.
Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, the dogma of eternal Sino-Soviet geopolitical rivalry has been holy writ in the West. It took the brilliantly inept Trump and Biden administrations to make enemies of both great powers simultaneously, pushing them together. The Global South looked on appalled as Washington used its own “rules- based order” to bully weaker states.
The Ukraine war has magically clarified this imbroglio. The Global South now respects Russia and China as major status quo powers and as united defenders of the UN Security Council-based Global security order. The U.S. has been exposed as a reckless Global bully and rules-breaker. The East-West information war which in February 2022 seemed securely in Western hands has escaped from their control.
Western-supported terrorist actions in and around the Ukraine war in have sullied the West’s good name, notably the terrorist trifecta of the he brutal murder near Moscow of Maria Dugina in August 2022, the U.S.-Norwegian sabotage of the Russian-German ‘Nord Stream’ gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea in September, and the UK-Ukraine sabotage attack on the Kerch Bridge in October 2022,
Large majorities in the Global South now trust Russia and China more than they trust the West. Notwithstanding some recent UN General Assembly votes – the result of heavy U.S. arm-twisting of vulnerable smaller states — the reality is there to be seen in shifting trade statistics and in the diplomatic dance.
Western power elites
In the G20, the Global South is no longer listening to the West. At Davos, Western power elites now speak only to themselves. As of the Ukraine crisis, the Global South now sees that China and Russia offer more attractive global trading and reserve currency alternatives or supplements to the American-dominated dollar system, which Western sanctions have shown to be insecure. They are quietly spreading their risks, politically and economically.
With the discreet help of China, India, Iran and the Middle East entrepot city-states, Russia has sailed with ease through Western trade and banking sanctions. These have boomeranged to harm the U.S.-led bloc, especially through increasing energy costs and declining European trade competitiveness from blocking cheap Russian gas imports. Once proud European states Germany and France have reverted to full lackey status, heavily dependent on U.S. energy and weaponry.
Meanwhile, since 2014, Chinese-Russian diplomatic, trade and infrastructure links have grown robustly. Their equal-partner military cooperation is now entrenched. China exports many dual-use, high technology products to Russia. China does not need to supply Russia with weapons, but if it ever thought it needed to, it would. Because China knows that if Russia collapses under Western sanctions, China would be next.
The importance of the Ukraine crisis has been to crystallize Chinese leadership perceptions of the U.S. as an untrustworthy partner, and the existential enemy of both China and Russia.
Even under President Donald Trump, the U.S. tried to provoke destabilization and regime change in China: in and around Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan, and in the South China Sea. In trying so clumsily to portray China as an aggressor, the U.S. has finally convinced China’s leadership that the U.S. has, at least since 2014, pursued aggressive strategies towards Russia and China.
In the past month, the pace of Chinese global diplomacy has quickened. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was received last week by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Nikolai
Patrushev (head of national security) and Putin himself when he visited Moscow as a precursor to a March-April visit by Chairman Xi Jinping. That visit is expected to announce new, far-reaching economic cooperation.
China has recently launched an activist peace diplomacy, setting out its ‘Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis‘. This impressive general document, based on the UN Charter and the Five Principles, indicates China’s support for an immediate ceasefire without preconditions; no more Western arms supplies; and offering massive reconstruction aid to a post-settlement new government in Ukraine.
Russia has welcomed it. It will be attractive to the Global South. It will cause consternation in the Western war party camp. We will see the Chinese peace plan talked about in coming weeks. It may offer the breakthrough for peace for which many Ukrainians pray.
Related readings:
* Ukraine: A war to end all wars in Europe, by M. K. Bhadrakumar (former Indian diplomat), published on his website Indian Punchline, Mar 5, 2023
* The ninth anniversary of the Ukraine war, by Jeffrey Sachs, published on his website, Feb 28, 2023 We are not at the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine, as Western governments and media claim. This is the nine-year anniversary, and that makes a big difference. The war began with the violent overthrow of Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014…
Watch: Democrats deflect Nord Stream explosion inquiries as questions mount, story broadcast on ‘Rising’, a program on The Hill TV, with hosts Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave, Feb 23, 2023 (18′)
