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What the Russian military action in Ukraine and the Palestinian military action in Gaza have in common is the application of raw power.
Russia has been able to impose its will on the Ukrainian battlefield in pursuit of what it believes to be its legitimate security interests in Eastern Europe.
Israel acts similarly in Gaza in pursuit of what it claims to be its right to self-defence, and possibly extra land.
For each, the intended outcome has become more important than the cost in terms of blood, material, diplomatic standing, and international law as it stands.
In both cases, there have been initiatives to resolve the conflicts by using the various mechanisms provided by international law; Israel’s actions were challenged in the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and as has ever been the case, in the United Nations Security Council.
Russia was likewise hauled before international bodies. In addition, various rounds of Western sanctions were placed upon it.
None of this worked in either case. The Palestinians in Gaza have seen their camps flattened, nearly one fifth of their population killed and their public infrastructure destroyed. The Ukrainians have suffered an enormous number of killed or wounded, and are reduced to press-ganging unwilling male civilians into the army.
For three years, the world has stood by and watched, effectively powerless to stop this carnage.
Make no mistake, we are now in a completely different epoch of international relations. Only those with the physical ability to hold on to what is theirs will survive. And that ability will rest on political, cultural, and social resources to produce and sustain it.
The lesson is clear: in today’s world, the weak will be dominated by the strong, and at high cost to themselves should they try to resist.
The brief Russia-USA summit in Alaska in August this year marks the starting point to this.
The nearly four-decade gambit by the Western-based global elites to surround Russia while it was still reeling from the fallout from its 1989 collapse as a superpower – a gambit based on a fatal triumphalist Western underestimation of Russian military, industrial, and diplomatic capabilities – has now come to an end. And with that, comes the rebirth of the naked “Might is Right” older world order. The difference is the change in roles.
The United States and Western Europe will no longer be the dominant powers as was the case over the previous century and before. And with the exception of the Shia leadership of Yemen and Iran, and of Hezbollah, the idea of Muslim solidarity has been exposed to be a complete sham in these times, certainly for Sunni Islam, which had previously managed to build up an important global voice.
The key deciding factor in how centres of power and states will behave is naked self-interest and self-preservation. No players will be barred, and no methods will be off-limits. Blackmail, assassinations, funding ethnic-cleansing warlords, and slavery will become completely “normal”. The carnage and mayhem along Africa’s Sahel line, driven by the interests of the wealthy elites of the Arab Gulf states, is just early evidence of this.
The big question for us Africans, therefore, is how do we define our own interests in this new world? Whom do we appoint as custodians of those interests? And from where will we build up the raw power to protect them?
Russian leader Vladimir Putin could provide a good example to learn from. Taking power first in 1999 amidst already over a decade of chaotic and humiliating Western bullying and plunder, he knew he had to act fast and decisively and so was very focused and intentional: Putin suppressed foreign-driven domestic economic looting and corruption, quelled regional armed disturbances, built up the industrial base and then used that to rebuild the capacity of the Russian armed forces.
Western intelligence analysts simply failed to keep up with the progress made, and remained wedded to their old mindset of viewing Russia as a weak country with a ramshackle military whose territory they could eventually break into smaller, more digestible pieces.
So, the West ignored the two decades of repeated warnings from Russia to stop bringing NATO forces closer and closer to Russia proper through the steady enrolling of former Soviet bloc countries into this American-led military alliance.
The destruction of Ukraine today, and the decimation of its armed forces, is the physical evidence of the scale of that miscalculation. Ukraine was the real and final red line for Russia. It is the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, and once the West built up Ukraine’s armed forces into the largest military force in Europe, and then installed a regime that declared its intention to bring Ukraine into the NATO alliance, Putin knew he had to act. The Russian armed forces therefore, simply entered Ukraine, set up strongly defendable positions, and then allowed the Ukrainian armed forces to expend the best of their manpower and equipment, bashing themselves against the Russian lines. Having thus reduced itself to a shell of what it once was, the Ukrainian army is now being forced into one long retreat as the Russians move against them, while absorbing, and intending to further absorb, vast areas of Ukrainian territory permanently into the Russian Federation.
Much as it does not like what Russia has done in respect to Ukraine, the United States – or at least President Donald Trump – knows nothing more can be done to oppose it, except at an unacceptably great cost. The problem now is that due to America’s own longstanding abuse of the system of international law to suit its own interests, such institutions will not be of much use to it as an alternative method of maintaining what global influence it has had up to now.
The Americans are now therefore abandoning Ukraine to the doctrine of Russia’s security concerns and trying their imperialist luck elsewhere (like Venezuela).
Through the Alaska Summit, President Trump has effectively signalled that the US has accepted the new reality that his country is no longer the single most dominant force on the planet.
But Trump may be the only person in his own administration who understands this. Certainly, America’s allies organized under NATO do not. Trump’s conduct at the summit suggests that he does secretly recognize it to have been very much an act of Russian generosity, in that it allows him the chance of a dignified exit from the conflict. It also allows him – if he is wise – the opportunity to devote the best of his attention to getting on top of the mounting domestic problems that are really squeezing the American people.
As an attempt at peace, whatever was agreed at the Alaska summit faces a number of risks. Right or wrong, the Ukrainians demonstrated exceptional toughness in how they have fought against Russia. However, they are now about to discover that they were on the wrong side of history, and were in fact just a tool in somebody else’s workshop. But given all the sacrifices they have made, it will be a challenge to talk them down from their war footing without also provoking a serious reaction from both those angry at the losses and those angry at the coming defeat. Ukraine could become very unstable; President Zelensky’s regime is certainly looking a lot shakier than it has ever been. Such instability could reanimate the historical claims to Ukrainian territory held by some of her other neighbours. These claims could then be pursued in the spirit of the new militarist culture.
So, as, on the one hand, the world’s conflicts potentially multiply, on the other, the historical mechanisms and conventions used to try and solve them have been broken.
In the middle of this huge shift in global realities, Africans lightly populate the second-largest continent on earth, with possibly the largest reserve of untapped mineral resources, fresh water, and arable land, all the while generally burdened with an overwhelmed, often timid and conflicted political leadership.
Again, what will Africa do?
