In a sense, this is the last thing that NATO wants to acknowledge, but must: that behind Russia’s viability as a great power lies the rising new super-power, China. In real-life terms (more death ramifications than life), the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation of the Cold War needed a solid reason to continue with its global dominance design after the ‘enemy’ Soviet Bloc or, Warsaw Pact alliance, spectacularly collapsed in 1989. Will NATO have China as its ‘enemy’ soon?
Despite the Muslim bogey and Terrorism bogey being quickly cooked up by the Pentagon’s ideologues - Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama, among others – somehow the threats by these relatively minor actors do not compare with the previous epochal confrontation between the giant political-economic systems of Capitalism versus Communism. That is why, when Russia finally reacted militarily to a decade of NATO’s post-Cold War militarist expansion right up to its borders, the West delightedly began stirring up nostalgia for another “civilised West vs. barbaric East” rivalry so that defence industry production lines kept moving.
But Pentagon and White Hall hawks have failed to think in 21st Century terms and shed nostalgic illusions. There is a whole new world outside Europe and the USA.
Think Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO). Most importantly, think of the Earth’s largest, single, massive landmass – Eurasia. Especially acknowledge that the bigger, more resource-rich, and market-rich and, militarily potent, region that is the ‘Asia’ part of ‘Eurasia’. The global scale and brilliance of Beijing current strategic vision is one that befits China’s civilisational greatness (‘great’ does not necessarily mean ‘good’).
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has now stepped on to the global diplomatic and geopolitical stage with two typical super-power actions and within a single fortnight at that: firstly to engineer a partial peace pact with two major, currently hostile, West Asian powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia and, secondly, to propose a ceasefire formula for the Ukraine War. The King of Saudi Arabia (KSA) (enfeebled) monarch made a rare foreign state visit (his private visits are unknown) to Beijing and even agreed to join the SCO, a major component of which is security, Asian continental security. When did old Cold War superpower, the United States, or NATO, last take even a single such geopolitically influential peace initiative?
Illegal invasion
Rather, the Western powers seem to have been initiating war after destructive war in the past two decades (last week was the 20th anniversary of the West’s wholly illegal invasion of Iraq). The two key political leaders initiating that aggression, George Bush and Tony Blair, have long faced accusations of crimes against humanity for their role in ‘believing’ the allegations of Iraq’s possession of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (WMD). Which states have the biggest armouries of WMDs in the world today? And NATO has certainly wreaked mass destruction across a whole section of the globe, from Libya to Somalia, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Israel-Palestine.
NATO’s revival of Cold War style geopolitical posturing on Ukraine too amateurishly exploited the ambience of warfare that echoed Europe’s biggest hot wars – the trench warfare and tank battles of the two World Wars. The TV news footage of the Ukraine ‘theatre’ is dramatically like the terrain and urban and rural destruction seen in the two World Wars on European soil, although nowhere yet near the World War scale. In fact, the largest ever tank armies and heavy artillery batteries fought it out in Eastern Europe during World War II, especially on the rolling plains of the steppes, including Ukraine.
To the victors of those two wars, in Western Europe and North America, this ambience is a nostalgic one of victorious heroism. But in much of continental Europe, the memories are more of either humiliating defeat or enormous physical destruction and social dislocation. Worse, in continental Europe, it also brings memories of post-war dominance by foreign powers for decades either by victorious NATO forces or by Warsaw Pact-supported regimes.
This difference in Western perspectives of the ongoing East European War has helped bring division among supposed NATO ‘allies’ with many reluctant to sustain the war and its predictable major negative impacts. That is why there is much furore over Germany’s supply of its vaunted Leopard-2 main battle tanks to Ukraine.
While the Germans are very happy to make and sell these tanks to distant lands, they just do not like their tanks furthering savage battles in their own continent, especially in military brinkmanship with their former major ‘enemy’, the Soviet Union, or, at least, the remnants of that enemy, Russia.
It gets even worse for continental European States when, behind the currently marauding Russia, provoked by NATO’s belligerent expansion up to its borders (why - when there is no Communist enemy now?), the Europeans see the world’s largest and most aggressively expanding economic power: China. And China represents, in various ways, much of Asia and even the rest of the world.
UN resolution
Today, after a year of the Ukraine war, the way the rest of the world has responded to the war is clear. When the US engineered a vote in the UN General Assembly last year for a Resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the bulk of the Member States abstained. As many analysts noted, these abstaining member governments represented much more than half of the world’s 8+ billion population! The spirit of Non-Alignment clearly lives on. The geopolitical logic is the same as when the NAM (Sri Lanka was its chairperson in its heyday) was, by far, the largest single geopolitical bloc of states during the Cold War.
Propaganda blitz
The bulk of the world’s population, notwithstanding the unashamedly-biased propaganda blitz (an old, aggressive, Nazi battle metaphor) by the Western-owned mass media, does not see Ukraine as simply the victim of unprovoked aggression. Rather, the aggressive interventionism initiated many times over by the NATO powers all across the world against Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Iraq as well as the sustained support to Israel’s genocidal military occupation of Palestine, are all constant reminders to the world public that geopolitics are not simple romantic scenarios of ‘good guys vs. bad guys’.
In any case, much of the on-looking Third World, including us in Sri Lanka, very quickly began to suffer from the fall-out of NATO’s economic and political/diplomatic hostilities against Russia. China’s new-found global diplomatic activism can be seen as corollary to its emergence as the world’s leading economic power after the United States. Having already become the world’s leading producer, China has revved up its economic investment expansionism successfully reaching deep into impoverished sub-Saharan Africa.
Barely had the Americans and Europeans been rudely awakened to this fact a few years ago, when China’s ‘Silk Route’ projects then reached out across the whole Eurasian landmass, thrusting through to the many import markets in Europe. If the colonising Europeans had to painstakingly find their way around land masses to find the lengthy sea route to the riches of Asia, China of today has simply negotiated and invested its way into Europe through the great Trans-Siberian rail route that goes all the way from the Pacific Ocean to across the English Channel to London.
Many people, mesmerised by the nuclear-brinkmanship antics in East Europe, barely noticed Beijing’s unveiling last month of its Global Security Initiative (GSI). Given China’s consistent non-invasive geopolitics, such a global security outlook has high credibility at a time when the traditional modern global peacemakers (the West) have shattered their reputation for peaceful geopolitics with so many of their questionable military ventures still unfinished or unresolved.
While to the Saudi monarchy China means big oil money, to Iran, China means both fuel sale potentials as well as military and geopolitical proximity and empathy. While Iran had little choice but to go along with Beijing’s overtures, Riyadh did, and still does, have a choice of geopolitical options in the West. Clearly Riyadh thinks there is no harm in having other geopolitical pals.
Thus, China now is speedily building its global peacemaker credentials as well, in addition to its reputation as the ‘world’s factory’ and as a skilled negotiator at world level. The Saudi-Iranian diplomatic developments may or, may not, lead to a fully stable peace, but it certainly is a refreshingly new initiative to which that whole region – except Israel – will respond positively.
Western analysts are already conceding the new, global, credibility build-up achieved by China. China’s greatest advantage is its clean record, throughout the transition to the new millennium, of non-aggression and lavish development lending and investment. We, Sri Lankans, find ourselves in a high interest debt morass mainly because corrupt and unenlightened Governments we have elected (filled with misguided ethno-supremacist pride) were happy to take such expensive loans and crudely splurge. There are other countries which received aid and investment from China but whose Governments were genuinely patriotic enough to be disciplined in their borrowings and to put the country before project kickbacks.